Have you ever seen Idiocracy? I first watched this movie only because of the 10 minute intro (How did we get to this point?), which I thought was pretty brillia

Have you ever seen Idiocracy? I first watched this movie only because of the 10 minute intro (How did we get to this point?), which I thought was pretty brilliant. The rest of the movie I felt was pretty gross, and one of the chief problems in the fictional future world was the inability of humankind to dispose of their garbage properly. What about WALL-E? Not exactly the same, but it's still there. As I get older and I observe the world around me, (and also accumulate junk myself), it seems I was wrong. We do have a junk problem, big time, already. My armchair version of the main driver of this phenomenon is very simple: we just acquire too much junk. We produce too much junk, we buy too much junk, we throw away too much junk. Or we throw away not enough junk?! It's in the best interests of most companies and their marketing departments for us to want to do this. One other human psychological effect I've observed: Trying to get people to recycle for the last 50 years or so has left us with a breed of "Garbage-averse" (my term) individuals. These people do completely irrational things like set half-empty bottles of water beside the trash can, because there's no recycling bin nearby. Now it's somebody else's problem. I understand this, because I was brought up this way as well. For now, I mostly overcome the aversion. Hoarding by older people is the same. "I'll just keep this until it becomes someone else's problem." It will always happen eventually.