Too Much Stuff

Unless you're extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one's spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there's less room for people in a room full of stuff.

But there's more going on than that.

I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what's around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts.

A cluttered room is literally exhausting.

Paul Graham

We are painfully addicted to buying new stuff. And with each new purchase we consume more non-renewable resources, pollute the planet, and create lots of garbage.

Jeffrey Hollender

We have impoverished our human communities with a form of materialism that leaves us in relative isolation from family, friends, and neighbors. We simply don't have time for them.

Unlike our great-grandparents who passed the time, we spend it.

Jeffrey Kaplan
The Gospel of Consumption

Gopal Ahluwalia, director of research for the National Association of Home Builders, says all this stuff is costing us quite a bit in storage alone.

Since 1970, the size of the average house has increased nearly 40%, from about 1,500 square feet to 2,300 -- and that's despite an overall decline in family size.

MP Dunleavey

We can break that cycle by turning off our machines when they have created enough of what we need. Doing so will give us an opportunity to re-create the kind of healthy communities that where human welfare is the overriding concern rather than subservience to machines and those who own them.

We can create a society where people have time to play together as well as work together, time to act politically in their common interests, and time even to argue over what those common interests might be. That fertile mix of human relationships is necessary for healthy human societies, which in turn are necessary for sustaining a healthy planet.

Jeffrey Kaplan
The Gospel of Consumption

Getting organized often tops the list of New Year's promises.

In a November survey conducted by NAPO (National Association of Professional Organizers), 65 percent of respondents noted that their household was at least moderately disorganized. Ninety-six percent of respondents said they would save time every day if only they were better organized.

Professional organizers say the key is to pick a project, start small and to start today.

Nancy Jones-Bonbrest

Mention of Chinese city kids today often conjures up an image of kids who are over-indulged, materially well off and spoiled for choices in unlimited fun.

There has been little realization of children as victims: their needs as children chronically slighted, their value as consumers overexploited, and their worth solely gauged in terms of their similarity to adults.

The relative ease of satisfying their material needs contrasts sharply with the near-impossibility of ministering to their natural spiritual needs as children.

Wan Lixin

Too Much Stuff? was published by the National Museum Directors' Conference in 2003. The resource is intended as a contribution to the important, but often muted, debate on disposals from museum collections.

The paper, produced by an NMDC working group and approved by NMDC directors as a whole, asks difficult questions. How do museums justify retaining collections which are not well used or even well cared for? Is it really always wrong, as the current Museum Association Code of Ethics suggests, "to undertake disposal principally for financial reasons"?

You can download the PDF File from the National Museum website.