I have always seen myself as being very un-materialistic. I pitied people who must have the next car, bigger house, better mobile phone etc etc. But I’ve just come back from a trip to Guyana (S America) and met people with very little, in a country with a real inferiority complex, who were genuinely really happy! And I realised what a mad place the Western world is and how we all are subtly influenced by the preoccupation to accumulate stuff. "If only we have more stuff,” we tell ourselves “then we’ll be happy”. Stop the madness now before its too late!
Intellectually I knew stuff wasn’t all its cracked up to be, but now I’ve seen it with my own eyes and really believe it.
This is a nice message.
Thanks,
M
It’s true. It’s difficult not to want at least some stuff when you live in a relatively affluent western culture–but I must frequently remind at least one of my children that all the cool stuff she sees in The Sharper Image catalog will not improve her life.
It is indeed true. For most of my life I lived without running water or a telephone or paved roads (and much of my family still does), and my family only had decent electricity and enough food sometimes, but I STILL got to go go school and I STILL lived better than most people in the world. It’s really humbling to see how awful some people got it, yet they remain happy and content and faithful. It makes us realise that we don’t got it half as bad as we often think we do.
The only material objects that can make you happy through their accumulation are whistles. 
getting more stuff means you have to spend more money on things to hold the stuff, and you have pick it up, and worry about if it is safe, or unbroken, or clean, or updated or . . . it’s exhausting to have so much stuff!
Caution: clumsy satire ahead…
Oy vey 
Careful, my friend, it isn’t fashionable to be sane.
The capitalists’ll have yer guts for garters, you heretic. Of course you need more stuff. Consume, consume, consume.
Good grief, don’t you realise that this is a RACE? And anyway, if we don’t all grasp and hoard then the very structure of corporate, plastic, greedy, uncaring, bloated, overcomplicated, wasteful society is at risk?
Shame on you for your dangerous, unAmerican, unBritish subversive propagandising.
I think even the strictest ascetic would concede that Man needs four whistles and one mandolin in order to live a full existence.
Thank you, that’s the nicest thing anybody has accused me of in ages!
And yes, of course I was excluding whistles in my earlier observations, as if they could be categorised as mere stuff!
Nice thought perrins. A reality check first thing in the morning (with coffee of course) was exactly the thing I needed to start my day.
I never knew that you never knew that you never really knew the stuff you never knew!
Stuff seems to have it’s own life cycles. My 87 yr old mother has accumulated lots of stuff and has gotten rid of much of it. My siblings and I now complain that she may be tossing things that were icons of our childhood. To her it’s just an old cookie tin. To us it might be an indelible childhood memory. She seems determined to get rid of the remaining stuff before she goes. We’ve suggested that when the time comes, sorting through a parents stuff can be thereputic. She’s not buying it. And of course it’s her stuff, so it’s her choice.
You might notice I’ve been thinking about stuff lately. I think I’ve discovered a few stuff principles.
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At some point in your life you’ll want stuff you can’t afford. At other times, you’ll be able to afford that exact same stuff and you won’t want it.
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The most cherished stuff and the the mosy valuable stuff are rarely the same stuff.
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For those of us genetically predisposed to collect stuff, getting the stuff is often more satisfying than having the stuff.
I think you folks may be leaving out a very large piece of the picture - quality of life. I like my stuff. I like accumulating my stuff. I like to have my stuff to hand when there’s a question or reference I’m looking for. I like to have that obscure tool when that occasional job comes up that no other tool can do so well. I like having my own premises (poor as it may be) to keep my stuff in.
You may point out others who do not have such stuff and who are perfectly happy without it, but are they really happy, or just ignorant of what is available? Would their lives be enriched if they had access to more stuff? Would they think their lives were enriched if they had access to more stuff?
Don’t be so quick to knock stuff. You can live naked in a hole in the ground, but what kind of life would that be? Its easy to bemoan having stuff, but I don’t see anyone here rushing out to get rid of their stuff, either. If you decide to go all holy about your stuff, let me know in advance. I may be interested.
And before anyone else can say it, yes, I have already got stuffed. 
djm
How many times can anyone else use the word ‘stuff’ in a single post?
11 times for djm. 
Only last weekend I was going through my clothes and trying to decide what to give to charity.
The problem is, in the last decade with a reasonably healthy income and nobody to spend it on except myself, I’ve managed to accumulate at least 20 of just about everything (shirts, trousers, jackets etc), and as a result almost nothing wears out. If something does wear out, it’s because I really liked it and wore it a lot, and then sentimentality stops me from chucking it!
Time to bite the bullet and cut my wardrobe down to size!
(not to mention my video games, DVD and Video collection…)
AAAGGGHHHH! Not the DVD and video collection! Never that! Sinner! Sinner! Eeeeevvvviiilll! 
djm
I don’t own a single DVD or video game, but I fear I have entirely too many books.
Books are good. Books are a great start. You never know when you will want to refer to them again. Keep them. Keep them all. More stuff - gotta have it! Bwa-ha-ha-ha! 
djm
I hear ya bro!
We’re in the middle of trying to move into our new house; I have about forty or fifty big boxes of books to move!
I think you are wrong. I don’t think we’re leaving out quality of life at all, it’s just that some of us have tried (or at least seen) terrific quality of life that didn’t depend on ‘stuff’.
My wife and I have spent some of this past summer ditching things we don’t need - and we have a long way to go before we’ll be finished. This all started when we moved back out to the country from the town about three years ago. Stuff is baggage. It’s superficial. How much of your beloved stuff has languished unseen in a cupboard for five years? Yeah, you really needed that so much that you can’t even remember where you put it.
The fact that you just list the joys of stuff merely shows that what you consider important to quality of life is very disposable to me, and that what I consider important to quality of life probably wouldn’t be satisfactory to you.
Apart from a couple of musical instruments, a place to live and somewhere to go for a drink and a song and a laugh with friends, there’s little I’d need, and still less that I’d miss if the baliffs took it tomorrow (as they may well do, judging by my bank statement ).
TVs, computers, cars… pfff. I don’t even really play most of my CDs. Oh, I buy them, then they go in the rack and come out once a year before getting put back in the wrong boxes.
Oh yeah, ask anyone living in a relatively poor, frill-free situation if they want stuff, and if they think life would be improved by it and they’ll likely say yes. Maybe they’d try it and then decide that it added little of real value to their lives. On the other hand, perhaps more of them would just fall into the same crap routine as the rest of us, and end up enjoying the joys of locks, burglar alarms, armed security guards and paranoia. Luxury.
And it’s not about living naked in a hole in the ground, it’s about recognising what we don’t need and wondering what our pursuit of it does to us and to other people. I’d say I need some clothes and a warm, dry domicile myself - I live in England and it’s wet here.
I’ll go along with perrins57’s opening post.