Monday, February 18, 2008

Accumulation of Wealth

This came up in a previous post. How come we have sooo much crap?

Not only did I already own a lot of crap, but when I moved in with my fiance, we doubled our crap and neither of us is willing to give up much. When I moved here, I brought my clothes, my car, and some pots and pans. I went to Ikea the very next day and bought a mattress, a TV and a chair. That's what I had for 3-4 months, and that worked pretty well! Now we have 2 TV's, 2 DVD players, 2 stereo systems, a futon (we actually sold our two couches - only because they didn't fit), three tables, one desk, one desk chair, three easy chairs, one rocking chair, 6 wooden chairs for the dinner and breakfast tables, 4 huge bookcases and 2 smaller ones, 3 chests of drawers, 3 air conditioners in various conditions, pots and pans galore, one bed and mattress, a huge number of towels, a couple hundred books, countless wall hangings/posters/art, and probably some other furniture and stuff I can't remember. It's crazy!

And now that we're getting married, people keep pushing us to get more stuff - my people, I mean the culture. Not everyone is going to want to give us cash for getting married, so we had to register for all this stuff we don't need and may have to move from apartment to apartment. And going to the store, all the salespeople are pushing us to register for tons and tons of stuff - even things we don't need. And somehow sometimes it works and I feel like we need it. And then they say "well you just throw out the old stuff." I think that's also a load of crap. But we really don't need it and our stuff doesn't have to be the best out there in the market.

I think I'm just saying I don't like this material culture even though I am 100% a part of it and play into it.

1 comment:

elblot said...

Read Love and Garbage by Ivan Klima.