I was stopped at a light the other day and an apparently homeless couple, each with a large wheeled cart - not shopping carts, but more like those big carts that they have at the home improvement stores to move large or heavy objects - overflowing with containers, suitcases and miscellaneous stuff were waiting to cross the street.
It got me thinking about the human impulse to collect, store and haul around physical objects. The tendency affects different individuals to a greater or lesser extent, of course, but few are completely immune. I guess the extreme examples are the sorts of people featured on that Hoarders show. Some of those folks are downright scary. I actually watch a few episodes of that show occasionally just to keep my own collecting impulses in check.
Here's George Carlin's classic take on 'Stuff'.
In an episode of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon takes his girlfriend to his secret storage space, where he has neatly arranged every single thing he has ever owned.
I'm guilty of squirreling away objects, sometimes even whole collections of things, and then forgetting about them. I mentioned elsewhere that I'm going through the thousands of books, most of them boxed up, in my finished basement, trying to get them organized and (hopefully) a lot of them donated and out of the house. I filled a dozen boxes with books to give away in the first couple of days, and that's just scratching the surface. I've also got probably twenty boxes out in the garage, and filled bookcases all over the house. More books than I could read if I lived to be a hundred and twenty. Realistically, I could drop dead of a heart attack or be hit head-on by a truck next week and I certainly don't want to leave it for my family to deal with.
I guess it's like they say about losing weight - you didn't gain it all at once, so it's unrealistic to suppose that you're going to lose it quickly. It has taken me most of my adult life to accumulate all those books, along with the other stuff - the baseball memorabilia, the old police shooting medals that I collected for years, the superhero statues, etc. - so it is bound to take some time getting rid of most of it and getting down to a more reasonable level of "stuff".