CHAPTER 2
All Stuffed Up
A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.
—GEORGE CARLIN
We’re all stuffed up, literally! In our homes, workplaces, and streets, chronic congestion has settled into our daily lives—cultural clutter that demands constant maintenance, sorting, displaying, and replacement. For example, as affluenza infected the 1970s, the two-car garage became a standard feature of American homes, partly because all the newly acquired stuff wouldn’t fit even into the expanding houses. By the late ’80s many homes were being built with three-car garages—600 to 900 square feet of garage space alone. “That’s almost as much square footage as an entire family lived in, in the early fifties,” says the real estate agent La Nita Wacker. She takes us by a huge home with a four-car garage. Expensive cars and a boat are parked outside. The owner comes out wondering why La Nita is so interested in his place. “I own Dream House Realty,” Wacker replies, “and yours is a dream house.”1
“It was built to the specifications of my charming wife,” the homeowner says with a laugh. “So why four garages?” asks La Nita. “It’s probably because of storage,” the man replies, explaining that the garages are filled with family possessions. “You never have enough storage, so you can never have enough garages,” he adds cheerfully. La Nita asks if he has children. “They’re gone now,” he replies. “It’s just me and the wife.”
When Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast in 2012, it exposed another dark symptom of affluenza. As fire and emergency support workers inspected the damage, they occasionally found households that resembled landfills occupied by hoarders. They found unopened soup cans fifteen and twenty years past their expiration date, and residents who couldn’t remember how many dining room chairs lay hidden under bulging piles on the table. Hoarding, a psychiatric diagnosis in medical manuals, affects an estimated one in twenty Americans. “Compulsive savers often have difficulties in their personal relationships because of their excess stuff,” says recovered hoarder Beth Johnson, who now operates the Clutter Workshop in West Hartford, Connecticut. She adds, “Interestingly, many ‘savers’ are creative, successful people in their exterior lives.”2
Maybe we should feel lucky to have so many “halfway houses” available in a pinch if we just can’t part with that record collection or file cabinet (with who knows what inside). With 2.3 billion square feet of self-storage space in the United States, every American could fit under the metal-roofed canopy of the U-Stuff-It universe. One in ten Americans currently rents space at a self-storage facility. Need affordable office space? Some facilities offer storage units complete with telephone service and Internet access. At other facilities, some low-income people actually live in their storage units—a stark illustration of how affluenza leaves so many behind.3
The question is, Do we have stuff, or does it have us? In a world filled with clutter, we too easily become overwhelmed, lose our way, and get swept along in a current that sweeps us to the mall or dot-com sites for more stuff, or to the car dealership for a new car, “nothing down.”
CAR CLUTTER
Denver resident Alex Piersall, like many other Americans, could take his two midsize SUVs to the jagged peak of the mountain, as in the TV ads, but not into his own garage. Neither vehicle would fit in the fifty-year-old brick garage, so he ripped it down and built one suitable for a new millennium. Some of his neighbors in Denver’s solid Washington Park haven’t gotten around to that yet. Driving past the vintage neighborhood’s homes, you see lots of expensive Escalades and Navigators grazing at curbside, desperate for exercise. But in a clogged-up metropolitan area like Denver, they aren’t likely to get much.
What happened? America used to be a place where both a pizza delivery person and an ambulance driver could arrive before it was too late. In our brave new world of clutter, both are trapped in traffic. (Rule of thumb, circa 2014: The shortest distance between two points is always under construction.) In a South American short story, traffic is so hopeless that drivers abandon their cars and start foraging for food in neighboring villages. Eventually they start growing crops by the roadside. A baby is conceived and born before traffic begins to move again. While congestion hasn’t yet reached quite that level in the United States (or South America), it may not be a bad idea to put a few packages of seeds in the glove compartment, just in case.
Satis-fiction
METRO FOLLIES
The mother of all traffic jams is in Los Angeles, where Interstate 5 crosses highways 10, 60, and 101. More than half a million vehicles logjam through this stretch daily—not a pretty sight. According to the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, Los Angeles residents spend sixty-one hours a year stuck in traffic, compared with a national average of thirty-eight hours for other urban drivers. LA drivers waste twenty-seven gallons of gas per capita annually owing to congestion, and they’re forced to breathe marginal air and listen to fast-talking traffic reports even though they’re moving in slow motion.4
When it comes to traffic jams, we’re all in it together, but some traffic engineers think only they hold the key to getting us back out. Rather than opting to reorganize our communities so less travel is necessary, the engineers are still road crazy after all these years. Having already paved over two-thirds of Los Angeles, their sights are set on places like Saint Louis, Tucson, and Colorado Springs.
With the highways clogged up, drivers increasingly “jump ship” into a neighborhood, cutting down alleyways and across vacant lots like Steve Martin’s character in the movie L.A. Story. However, mechanical engineers think they have a more pragmatic, high-tech solution: “autonomous,” or “self-driving,” vehicles. At a recent conference sponsored by the New York Times, eggheads from Toyota, Google, Cisco, Stanford University, the California legislature, and the National Traffic Safety Administration discussed the imminent potential for cars to drive themselves, with humans as passengers.5 “We used to think of the smartphone as a distraction while driving, but within ten years, the distraction may be an occasional interaction with our car,” said one of them. (Think of the profits that are waiting for these companies and others if they convince us that autonomous cars are safer, more efficient, and mentally healthier.) They reported that in 2013, six million vehicles were already equipped with robotic intelligence for crash avoidance, automatic braking, parallel parking, and advanced navigation. The next step is cars that can drop you off at your destination, refuel, and neatly park themselves in stacked lots. Writes another proponent, “Once traveling in automated mode, the driver could relax until the turnoff. At this point, the system would need to check whether the driver could retake control, and take appropriate action if the driver were asleep, sick, or even dead.” It’s comforting to know that we may reach a destination even if we’re DOA, but really, in a near-future world cluttered with misdirected robots bumping into each other on every street and every sector of our world, what’s left to live for?
STUFF WARS AT THE AIRPORT
If American homes crammed with stuff are the metaphorical equivalent of congestion in the lungs, and highways are the plugged arteries, air travel must be the sneeze that propels affluenza carriers (that’s us) through the air. Despite brief dips after 9/11 and during the early years of the Great Recession, total air travel continues to rise in the United States, from 295 million passengers in 1980 to 730 million in 2012.6 But with increased security, higher baggage fees, and fewer snacks, some of the thrill is gone. The airlines’ strategy is “More people, less stuff”: cram in passengers with as little carry-on luggage as possible to reduce fuel costs. They didn’t count on Americans gaining an average of twenty pounds since 1990, though, which has added an extra half a billion dollars in fuel costs since then. (Some airlines are beginning to charge by weight of both passenger and luggage.) Meanwhile, passengers have a different agenda—to keep their stuff with them so they don’t have to wait for it at the baggage claim and can access laptop, cell phone, cosmetics, and emergency rations.
TRAINED TO BE ROBOTS
Did we Americans choose this consumptive way of life, or were we corralled into it with drumbeats of patriotism, social engineering, and economic fundamentalism? You already know what we think: that overconsumption has become the dominant trait of our culture. We Americans in particular try to meet individual needs like identity, expression, creativity, and belonging by owning and displaying our stuff. To find a mate, get a job, or be included in a certain circle of friends, we are expected to buy or have access to specific consumer goods—clothes, laptop computer, stylish car, magazines …
As Dave noted in the The New Normal, the individual is largely powerless to resist giving gifts during the holiday season. If his kids want to play sports at school, he and his partner need to buy the required equipment and also consume many tanks of gasoline to get the kids to practices and games. To avoid buying batteries, he may prefer to have a durable windup watch and alarm clock, but they aren’t available anymore. Though he is skillful at repairing things, he has trouble getting into the workings of the typical appliance when it gets sick—after all, manufacturers and retailers want to sell new products.
It’s not just advertising and public relations that stimulate consumption; it’s our friends, our workplaces, and our policies. For example, since streets and traffic signals are paid for out of a city’s general funds, residents pay for them (through sales taxes and property taxes) even if they bicycle or take public transit and use only one-tenth as much street space. It’s the same theme with “free” parking. Even if we don’t drive because we are too young, too old, too poor, or disabled, we still foot the bill because employers, property sellers, and businesses build the costs of mandated parking capacity into wages, mortgages, and price tags.
ANALYZING THE AMERICAN DREAM: WHERE THE CLUTTER COMES FROM
America’s 114 million households—the authors’ among them—contain and consume more stuff than all other households throughout history, put together. Behind closed doors, we churn through manufactured goods and piped-in entertainment as if life were a stuff-eating contest. Despite tangible indications of indigestion, we keep consuming, partly because we’re convinced it’s normal. Writes the columnist Ellen Goodman, “Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to the job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.”7
As in a monster movie, more stuff begins to take shape as we sit daydreaming about the perfect living room, the perfect body, or the neighborhood’s sexiest lawn mower. Daydreams like these all require a steady stream of products that need to be hunted and gathered. On the vacation after next, maybe we’ll hit the ski slopes in Colorado or hike in northern Italy, but before then we’ll need to acquire some expensive equipment. In the book High Tech/High Touch, John Naisbitt and his coauthors describe some of the items necessary for “adventure” travel. “High-tech gear is available for every conceivable need, for every conceivable journey: digitally perfect-fit hiking boots, helmets with twenty-seven air vents, hydration packs, portable water purifiers, bike shorts with rubberized back-spray-repelling seats.… ”8