Too Much Stuff

In which I realize the convenience of online shopping may have given me some bad habits.

Due to a mistake in reading our lease, we recently had to move out of our place a month earlier than expected. It was a super fast last minute move – we started packing and moving Friday evening and turned in our keys Sunday night.

We were not at all prepared to move yet. We hadn’t yet started the process of sorting through our stuff and getting rid of anything we didn’t need to take with us. We had planned to do this gradually over the full month, which would have given us plenty of time to gather up anything in good condition to drop off at a local charity shop. However, with the last minute nature of the move, we had to focus on the big things, like getting furniture into a storage unit, and we didn’t really have enough time left to sort through all of our knick-knacks. Unfortunately we could only get a couple of carloads to the dropoff before they closed on Sunday. When we turned in our keys, we had left behind a garage-full of stuff that I imagine was likely hauled off to a landfill by our landlord.

Some of the garage trash was probably unavoidable given the circumstances – there was a bunch of perishable food, halfway used toiletries, etc. that would not have been donateable anyways. (Most of those items would have been finished off by the end of the month had the move gone as intended.) But maybe half of it was random knick-knacks: decorative trinkets, kitchen gadgets, tools for abandoned hobbies, etc. I was honestly pretty amazed at the amount of stuff we had accumulated and didn’t actually use.

This left me thinking about my buying habits and their environmental impact – how many things am I purchasing that I use once and then dispose of within a couple of years? Even when I donate the goods rather than tossing them in the trash, I’m not sure how helpful that actually is; I’m sure some of it helps somebody but I wouldn’t be surprised if charity shops end up tossing a good deal of their donations in the trash as well.

Shortly after the move, I was looking into buying myself an eink tablet for journaling, writing, and sketching. The tablet I wanted to buy, however, was not being sold at the time, so I ended up buying used one from ebay.

It took me a little longer to buy than it would have if I had just bought a new tablet, as I did not win the first auction I bid in. But I was able to eventually get the tablet, and am very happy with the result. It made me wonder – why don’t I buy more things used? Does it really matter if someone else pre-owned a painting or a fake plant or a random kitchen gadget? And even for technology, which I’ve been reluctant to buy used in the past, there’s a lot of people who sell relatively new tech that will still last a good while before it’s obsolete.

Because of all this, I have decided that for the next year or so, I am going to do my best to only buy used stuff. This should obviously help me reduce my environmental impact, but I’m also hoping that the added difficulty of finding used goods will lead to me buying less things in total. Of course it means I’ll be missing out on the near instant gratification of deciding I want something, clicking a few buttons, and then having it show up on my doorstep a couple of days later. But that’s definitely a good thing; practicing patience and self-discipline is always a good thing, and buying less will hopefully make life significantly easier the next time we have to move.