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The Nature of Stuff

You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.

Eric Hoffer

Our enormously productive economy ... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.... We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an everincreasing rate.

Victor Lebow, “Price Competition in 1955”

Our secret plan is this: We’re going to go on consuming the world until there’s no more to consume.

Daniel Quinn, “On Investments”

Since the earth is finite, and we will have to stop expanding sometime, should we do it before or after nature’s diversity is gone?

Donella Meadows, as quoted in Simple Prosperity (2008) by David Wann

Showered, shaved, and ready to take on the day, Joe and Jo College assemble what they need for class, in rooms that are overflowing with stuff: beds and desks, dressers and lamps, futons and lounge chairs, couches and carpets. The closets are crammed and the dressers are packed. Shoes are made for walking, but right now they’re just hiding under the bed. Electrical devices abound—TVs, stereos, computers, game consoles, refrigerators, clocks, phones, and iPods hum around the room—while books line up on shelves and stack in piles on the floor. Easy Mac and ramen noodles are stocked on other shelves, complemented by drinks in the fridge.¹

In college and elsewhere, we’re stuffed. Caught in the haze of our morning routine, however, we don’t think too much about any of it—it all seems natural and necessary.² If we asked a few questions, though, we might notice some interesting things about how we think about the things we own, and “the ways in which consumers [like us] are constructed along with the goods and services [we] are expected to require.” We might note that the first lessons of college take place in dorm rooms, not classrooms, and that dorm rooms teach mainly about American material culture and materialism. We could even go deeper, tracing the environmental pathways of our possessions and exploring different possibilities for conserving the nature that’s inevitably in our stuff.³