Americans are Hoarders
My neighbor can’t park his car in his two-car garage. He has too much junk stowed away. My friend has no room in her double closet for any more clothes or shoes. Americans are hoarders of one thing or another. Our closets, drawers, garages, out buildings and basements are overflowing.
Not necessarily with things of value or even an abundance of useful items. In fact, often we don’t really know what’s hiding in our multiple storage spaces.
We may be parents, teachers, lawyers, republicans, democrats, Christians, or atheists, men , women, even children, but we’re a nation of hoarders.
If you examine an older home, one built in the first half of the last century or before, you’ll soon notice that there weren’t a lot of closets. Even among the wealthy, closets were sparse.
An array of closet space raises the value of a home today. If you have a walk-in closet big enough to serve as a child’s bedroom, you’re golden.
But our great grandmothers didn’t own dozens of shoes, piles of clothes, or a huge amount of useless items. Oh, sure, there was the knickknack shelf where a glass shoe or a pretty cup and saucer might be on display, but personal possessions tended to be of a useful nature.
Furthermore, things were not only used but repaired and reused, over and over again.
When I first got married my in-laws gave us their 20 year old refrigerator because they decided to finally upgrade. We used it for almost another decade before we bought our first brand-new fridge.
My mom and grandmother mended our clothes when needed and once we outgrew them, our younger siblings wore them. My grandmother kept her special occasion clothes for years, one or two outfits that she drug out of the closet for an occasional, well, you know, special occasion.
Consumerism has destroyed common sense and all of our other senses that we’re endowed with. We no longer know when we’re full or when we have enough stuff.
The need to sell more next year than this year created an economy of waste. We are insatiable monsters now. Pop culture, advertisements, propaganda, and an endless array of choices have created a new kind of consumer. We sooth ourselves with mindless shopping sprees.
Sometimes we fill our baskets with dollar store junk because that’s all we can afford, but thankfully, there’s still a place where we can buy stuff just because we need our fix for the day.
I was the oldest of six kids. If you were to examine our bedrooms, you wouldn’t find a lot of toys. We didn’t have a lot of toys. We had a few treasured toys that over the years we’d collected from Xmas or birthdays. That was it. We had those same toys kept in a box after we left home and got married. They were special to us because getting a new toy was rare back in the day. Our children didn’t understand why we were so attached to them. They had twice, three times the toys we’d had as kids.
Obviously some of us are more addicted to collecting and hoarding than others, but it’s only a matter of degree. We’re all products of the consumer culture and feel entitled to buy on a whim if we please.
I’m a minimalist at heart, but even I have one room in the house that sometimes gets out of hand. Even though I’m not very materialistic, I can still get caught up in the moment and buy stuff that I don’t need. Later, I’m like — WTH— you know what I mean? I can’t even remember why I bought a certain item.
The rest of the world stays alive by making stuff for us.
We need the stuff and they need the jobs. Our landfills are overflowing and we can’t park our cars in our garages, but our economy depends on mindless consumerism, so we keep on doing what we’ve been trained to do.
Maybe if we made an appointment with a shrink, we could get control of our spending habits. Ya think? Certainly, many of us could use a little help.
I’ll start with spring cleaning, I guess. Gotta hit the closet in that room where I threw my stuff all winter long.
Teresa Roberts is a retired educator, author, world traveler, and professional myth buster. You can find her books on Amazon.
