Paul Graham on “Stuff”

Machete: a classic example of a hoarder! A still from Machete, one of the fake trailers from the movie Grindhouse.
Click to view the trailer (warning: swearing, topless women).

Paul Graham usually writes about programming and the business of technology, but his most recent essay is one a little more everyday: it’s about stuff. Many people have written on the topic before, but since I’ve been doing a fair bit of decluttering lately, it caught my attention.

Here’s how the article starts:

I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can’t afford a front yard full of old cars.

It wasn’t always this way. Stuff used to be rare and valuable. You can still see evidence of that if you look for it. For example, in my house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the bedrooms don’t have closets. In those days people’s stuff fit in a chest of drawers. Even as recently as a few decades ago there was a lot less stuff. When I look back at photos from the 1970s, I’m surprised how empty houses look. As a kid I had what I thought was a huge fleet of toy cars, but they’d be dwarfed by the number of toys my nephews have. All together my Matchboxes and Corgis took up about a third of the surface of my bed. In my nephews’ rooms the bed is the only clear space.

Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven’t changed correspondingly. We overvalue stuff.

Read the rest…