My husband came home from trivia night a few weeks back and asked, “We won the tiebreaker tonight. Guess what the question was?” I had no idea.
It was: “How many storage units are there in the United States?” Apparently, all of the teams vying for the tiebreaker underestimated the answer but his team got the closest. According to the trade association for the self-storage industry (yes, there is one), there are between 44,000 and 52,000 storage facilities in the United States, totaling 2.3 billion square feet of rentable self-storage space. There are more storage facilities in the U.S. than there are McDonald’s restaurants.
I started thinking about what this actually means. That’s a LOT of stuff. Americans own a lot of things and they put some of them into these storage units, which means they aren’t even using them.
As a society, we have a problem with stuff and the constant acquisition of it. Why do we do it? What’s going on that causes this continual need to accumulate more and more stuff?
If you ask Google “Why do people buy stuff they don’t need?” you will turn up about five million results. On the first few pages, you will find some “top-10” lists detailing the reasons we buy stuff and how we might stop. You will find articles that discuss the lure of the capitalist machine and the production of cheap stuff, along with the methods used by marketing experts to convince us to spend our money. And also, alongside these results, you can find links to providers who — for a price — will help you get rid of your stuff or organize it.
Here is some of what I learned about this rise in accumulation. Before the industrial revolution, goods were produced by hand. So, if you wanted a dress, you had to sew it. If you were lucky enough to be wealthy, you could pay someone to sew it for you.
Most people were not that fortunate. In fact, most people were so busy just trying to survive, they probably rarely thought about having items unless they had a use for them. The things people did own were used, taken care of, and mended until they could no longer be used. Sometimes this took generations. Planned obsolescence was not yet invented.
After the industrial revolution, many goods that were once created by hand were now mass-produced in less time and at a lower cost. In the U.S., the mass production of goods coupled with the establishment of a middle class, meant that some people had more income that they could spend on items they may not otherwise have had.
After World War II, the U.S. economy was rebounding as soldiers returned from the war to find jobs and things to buy. In fact, it became an American’s patriotic duty to support the expansion of the economy by buying stuff. Magazines were full of ads for kitchen gadgets that would help housewives save time while making dinner.
Since the 1950s, the technological revolution has only sped up the pace of consumerism. Advertising plays a role in our need to purchase and there is research to prove it. At the same time, I would argue that access to an unprecedented amount of information such as reality/lifestyle television and social media also influence our growing demand for stuff we don’t need.
We’ve experienced a boom in “lifestyle” programs, magazines, and websites that try to encourage us to purchase happiness through our choice of throw pillows and coverlets. Shows like “Love It or List It,” “Fixer Upper” and “House Hunters” suggest that our lives are boring and nudge us to aspire to something bigger and better. Happiness can be bought, if you believe what they are selling.
Related to this, the U.S. is experiencing an epidemic of anxiety. We are constantly surrounded by news and information and it’s overwhelming. We see our friends on social media, showing off their perfect lives, and we feel depressed. We buy stuff to fill a void, to make us feel better and it doesn’t really work.
Not only does it not work, but in the end it makes our world less livable in the long run. This arrangement of producing, using, and then discarding all of this stuff, is not sustainable on a planet with finite resources.
So, what do we do? Should we start with those top-10 lists of stuff to get rid of? Do we hire someone to help us organize and throw away our stuff?
Maybe we just start with resisting the urge to click on that shiny new thing being advertised on our Facebook page. I’m not sure I know the answer, but I know that we have a problem.
Jackie Brousseau-Pereira, of Easthampton, is the academic dean and director of first-year seminars in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.