Stuff is a Burden

The corporate/consumer way of life is predicated on foolishness. In a matter of years, most people acquire enough junk to fill up a large dumpster. Most of the stuff they'd pitch into it was entirely useless since purchase. People accumulate piles of clothes, but generally only wear a handful of outfits that are comfortable, fit well, and look good. They pile up used slave-made clothing as "donations" that just get shipped to Africa where some get used, and the rest pile up in landfills.

The highest cost items people have plague their lives. Houses require constant maintenance and upkeep. In a place like Northeast Ohio, where we have a lot of precipitation and massive variation in temperature through the year, water is constantly wearing away at every part of a house. Vast infrastructure carries people's waste away from their house. Some of the pipes for that stuff in various towns and cities is 50 to 100 years old and too costly to ever replace. Vast infrastructure is required to keep goods flowing to support all this material.

This way of living is based on massive debt. I look at some of the huge homes in my neighborhood and mentally tally up the maintenance costs and I don't see how people do it. Just replacing the shingles on the roof of a huge McMansion with multiple peaks and valleys will be tens of thousands of dollars every 15 to 30 years. Many people will "finance" those repairs with home equity loans. Those loans make sense as long as there's a greater fool to sign up for ownership of a McMansion when it goes on the market. They don't make any sense if the "market" drops, like in 2008.

I've got a small house and it's still a burden, even though I have tools and lots of skills to maintain it. I replaced the roof on my workshop last summer. That was a difficult job and required the rental of a dumpster and it took the better part of a week of brutal labor in the summer heat--that building is only 24 feet by 24 feet! I need to replace the roof on my house, which is approximately 4 times the area, and I'm not looking forward to it. I often think it'd be so much easier to have a disposable house, or something like a yurt or a big tent.

I think people will be looking for different patterns of life in the not too distant future. The exodus from this current system is already underway.