How We're Drowning In Stuff
And buy more than we can afford
Most of us have way too much stuff. I know I do.
We see it every time we wrestle with an overstuffed closet, dig through drawers packed with junk, or step on our children’s Legos.
Our homes are bursting at the seams, and deep down, we know it’s a problem.
But just how bad is it?
Well, let’s look at some crazy numbers.
The average American home contains 300,000 items. It’s an absurdly big number. Western Europe isn’t much better.
That’s hundreds of thousands of things—from shoes to spoons to shampoo bottles—lurking in our living spaces.
And even though the size of the average American house has tripled over the last 50 years, it’s still not enough.
About 10% of us are now renting offsite storage units just to hold the overflow. There are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than Starbucks.
Yes, really.
Meanwhile, our garages, which are supposed to house our cars of which we own too many as well, have turned into clutter caves.
A quarter of homeowners with two-car garages can’t park inside them at all, and another third can only squeeze in one car.
Big toys, small toys
As a father of 5, I can tell many stories about kids’ stuff as well.
The average 10-year-old in Great Britain, for example, owns 238 toys but plays with only 12 on a daily basis. American kids, on the other hand, make up just 3.1% of the world’s children but own 40% of the world’s toys.
I love Lego as much as the next dad, but it’s gotten a bit out of hand.
Adults aren’t exactly minimalists, either. The average American woman owns 30 outfits—one for every day of the month. And I don’t think this number is accurate for many younger men and women. It’s much higher than 30.
Compare that to 1930, the average number of outfits was nine. Our grandmas knew how to keep it simple.
Fast fashion, meet fast trash
Today, we spend about $1,700 a year on clothes, yet somehow still have “nothing to wear.” And what happens to all those impulse buys? We toss about 65 pounds of clothing per person each year.
Yet, despite all our spending, nearly half of American households don’t save any money. Meanwhile, we have more televisions than people in our house, and they’re on and running for an average of eight hours a day.
We’re too busy watching home organization shows to actually organize our own homes.
Unsurprisingly, we buy twice as much stuff today as we did 50 years ago.
Compared globally, the 12% of the world’s population that lives in North America and Western Europe accounts for 60% of private consumption spending. Meanwhile, one-third of the world’s population, living in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, accounts for only 3.2%.
We love shopping. And that’s not inherently bad. I love shopping occasionally.
But Americans spend more annually on shoes, jewelry, and watches than on higher education. And education is expensive in the US. More so than in most other countries in the world.
Shopping malls outnumber high schools, and a 93% of teenage girls say shopping is their favorite pastime.
But it isn’t just about what we buy—it’s also about what we lose
The average person spends 3,680 hours (or 153 days) of their life searching for misplaced items.
Phones, keys, sunglasses, and paperwork seem to have a knack for vanishing into the abyss. By the end of our lives, we’ll have lost nearly 200,000 things.
Maybe we don’t need more stuff; we just need to find the stuff we already own.
Money
Americans donate 1.9% of their income to charity.
Meanwhile, six billion people worldwide live on less than $13,000 per year. That’s a tough pill to swallow when we’re collectively spending $1.2 trillion annually on nonessential goods.
In other words, on things we don’t actually need.
But the home organization industry has our backs…
The bottom line
What’s the solution?
A bigger house, more storage bins, or another trip to The Container Store?
Perhaps it’s a good thing that everything is getting freaking expensive. That way, we can’t afford more.
But a real solution? I don’t know.