A Stuffed Generation
I was speaking with my youngest son Tom today and he was discussing the day he spent yesterday helping his mother empty and mostly discard a NYC storage room that had been cluttered with miscellaneous junk accumulated over the years. He described the struggle of getting concurrence from his mother that this stuff was no longer needed in her life. While I have always eschewed storage rooms for the exact reason he was describing. His mother is not alone in this obsession with saving, some might say the nasty H word, hoarding, stuff by finding a convenient spot or storage room for it. In days gone by, this was the express purpose for the attic or basement in most homes. Those that didn’t have either of those two used their garages as best they could accommodate them with rafters and attics sometimes all their own. But somewhere during my lifetime the modern American world invested the storage center. I’m sure that urbanites for more than a century have had need for storage rooms, but the dedicated storage center with garage-sized or bigger rooms with metal garage roll-up doors have sprung up like mushrooms around the country. They can be found in rural areas, suburban areas and especially urban areas. Some people use them as warehouses from which to operate their service businesses. Some people use them to store antiques ranging from furniture to cars. And some people just use them to accumulate junk so that they do not have to go through the process of triaging that junk and deciding what to throw away and what to keep.
Abandoned storage rooms with back rent due on them has grown not only into a business unto itself, but has even spawned reality TV shows where scavengers buy unseen contents in a bidding war and the audience gets to see if they were strewed or screwed in the transaction. I can see he advantage of storage rooms as transitional tools, but if that were all they were used for there would be a mere fraction of them on offer. As it is, it seems hard to even find an available storage room so we can assume that business is good in the storage game. My brief stint in the real estate business taught me that parking lots and storage centers have a lot in common. While they are decent cash flowing businesses if run in a Spartan manner, their real inherent economic value is as a land bank of sorts to allow the owners to earn a modest positive cash flow while benefiting long term from capital appreciation of the land or building underneath. It may be the ultimate intergenerational wealth vehicle of choice to pass on wealth to your heirs with minimal risk and operating burden.
While God may have only made so much land in the world and hence its scarcity, God has equally seen fit to allow stuff or the junk in our lives to proliferate unchecked. Hence, the storage center game is booming. I have written about the Scandinavian death cleanse trend that says we should clean up our own junk of life before we cross the rainbow bridge, and this is what has presumably led to son Tom being enlisted to that end (sort of defeating the self-cleansing aspect of the exercise, but at least getting at it before the moment of truth). This is becoming a more visible part of life around me right now, which is just another thing about aging to look forward to, I suppose.
While Tom is struggling with his mother’s storage rooms (yes, there are more than one, but I dare not guess how many they total), I have also gotten some emails from my older children’s mother indicating that she is going through a similar process. She has sent me several emails now telling me she is cleaning out some storage (she moved from our marital home about fifteen years ago, so she has let that stuff linger, I guess). When I spoke to her, she was at her sister’s house doing the same thing, helping her sort through the massive trove of memorabilia and collectibles saved by their parents in decades gone by. She has sent me pictures of some collectible items I had bought and left with her and that she no longer wants. I have agreed to let those go to our kids. She also sent me a picture of a caricature of me done during my fraternity days at Cornell, an item that must have been lost in the transition of our marriage thirty-four years ago. It is a very personal item but obviously not a precious item since I didn’t even know it was missing…or more accurately didn’t really care what had become of it. Nonetheless, I told her to send that to me since the alternative of tossing it seemed so unsentimental. It is typical of the memorabilia one accumulates over a lifetime and serves no purpose, but which seems hard to dispose of. Unfortunately, there is simply too much of that sort of stuff that hangs around our necks.
The conversation with Tom shifted to Kim’s family and all the efforts her siblings are going through to do the exact same thing, figuring out how to rid themselves of the stuff of life, which has accumulated and stacked itself in every direction around them in their homes. While the risk of hoarding is at one end of this spectrum, there is another end as well. On our travels recently to Egypt and Jordan, our friend Mike showed great restraint from gathering souvenirs of our travels as we went. This provided some good humor among us as it contrasted noticeably with Kim, who didn’t miss a single souvenir stand in either of those two countries. Like we do on most of our travels, we came back with more stuff, like an Egyptian rug, a Jordanian mosaic table, a papyrus illustration we are having framed, and a shelf-full of antiquities and mementos. Make no mistake, we are very happy with our purchases, but there is no way to see this other than as a further accumulation of life junk. Mike, on the other hand, is very vocal that he does not want to add to his personal cache of life junk, and does not want or need any souvenirs. I see his point, but I have a hard time following his path.
Son Tom had an interesting perspective on all of this. He says he thinks its a generational difference between Boomers like us and his Millennial or Gen Z cohort. He feels that we Boomers are far more materialistic than his generation and that this accumulation of life stuff is a generational trait. It was George Carlin, the comedian who was extremely popular with us Baby Boomers, but who was, himself, a member of the Silent Generational, who did a whole riff on “stuff” and how we all needed our own stuff with us wherever we went and whatever we did. That riff spoke volumes to our materialistic tendencies. So, while I wanted to refute Tom’s assertion, I stopped myself and had to admit that we Boomers may be the Golden Age of materialism since the generations before were more frugal and the subsequent generations seem to be more experiential. We Boomers may just be more prone to accumulate junk over our lifetimes than other generations.
As I look around me here in my home (that would be my one and only home now after a lifetime of multi-home ownership), I like our stuff. I am also quite sure that I do not need more stuff in my life. We are already a stuffed generation.