My mother wasn't quite as bad, but she used to have her own mountain of decorations until I got her to agree to let me get rid of about 75% of it. It's still taking up about 12 or so large plastic storage bins, but it's way less than it had been.

Nowadays we do want durable items even if we are more at leisure to replace them. I am very happy that most of the easy to fail components in my MacBook Air are replaceable (I/O board, fan, battery, SSD) and would love it if other parts were too. Working on computers for as long as I have I know people like to get what they can out of a computer; the number who just go buy a new one when it dies isnt as high as you'd think. Same with other items like phones, cars, etc.

Of course, now I realise jus how close the Second World War was. If the war had finished in 1997, with rationing continuing until 2007, I too might be loathe to throw things away.

But I draw a line at normal paper :)

She also used to wash ziploc bags for reuse.

There, it is just not so visible because disk space is ever increasing as well as getting cheaper.

In the days of Napster, people collected gigabytes of music just to have it - at some point this was more minutes than they could ever listen to in a life span.

Few people actually care to collect that stuff in order to make it accessible to more people. For example, the people at archive.org, as well as many libraries, are doing a great job.

But the majority of collectors collect only for their own, usually with an unwieldy directory structures and meaningless file names (track1, track2, ...). They won't ever find anything they search for. It's often faster to search & buy those via Internet. Same with movies.

It is even worse with personal photographs and videos. The same way some people have loads of paper photographs around, other have disks full of digital photographs. 200+ photographs per day of vacation are not uncommon. Who will ever look at those?

Reducing those to the "best" 10-20 items already feels like an imposition to most. Reducing those further to 1 photograph to summarize the vacation is considered extremist by most. And even then, they will just mark the best photos, but won't delete anything except for the most blurred garbage photos.

Even more strangely, some people do feel the urge to clean up their mess, but as with physical items, deleting loads of digital items takes a lot of time for them. This is the next round of absurdity: They would rather spend a weekend (or full week) on finishing their photo/video archive than to go out for another trip.

Maybe we need a "digital item" version of Paul Graham's classic "stuff" article? http://paulgraham.com/stuff.html

I have thousands of albums in my google play account, go through spurts of adding more, and constantly listen to the whole collection on shuffle. It shows how many times each song has been listened to, it's rare for me to ever see a song without at least one play.

(And playing it on a TV screen in the background while doing computer/tablet/smartphone stuff is not what I would consider "healthy" consumption, because then it is more a source of noise than anything else. You can't really enjoy it and miss most of the movie.)

It's small enough that it isn't an issue, and it's nice to look at the refrigerator and remember all the places we've been.

It's very easy for the floor space consumed by an object to exceed its value. Especially if you're renting, in which case you could probably assign an actual monthly monetary cost to keeping every single object in your flat.

Absolutely, it can be a real burden. Especially if it requires any kind of cleaning or maintenance.

Conversely the time cost of acquiring stuff has collapsed. You don't have to buy or hang onto stuff in advance of possibly requiring it if you can have it same-day shipped from Amazon.

Now half the stuff you buy is toxic waste when you go to get rid of it. You have to make special trips to the place that collects paint, for instance, which isn't the same place as electronics. There are all sorts of projects my parents would have done without a second thought that I'll pass on because I don't want to spend all that time getting rid of stuff.

On the flip side, it's kind of interesting that products made in china are now synonymous with "cheap crap", while at one time we held finely made, fragile cups from China on display in our homes.

Low-end auction houses are also great places to pick up whole sets on the cheap. At the very worst these are a lot more interesting than plain white junk.

To me it seems more wasteful to have junk taking up room in your living space. Living with less is desirable.

But note that in particular is a cultural thing where people are cooking at home less, smaller families, less formality, etc.

We only took the silver cutlery and use it as every day.

There is just no need and space to waste for stuff that is kept out of usage, especially with something like silver cutlery which doesn't degrade by usage and even stays shiny if you use it constantly.

I think this trend will actually change with us, my parents have loads of stuff that I'd like, and I've build half my furniture myself, and regularly fix things rather than buy new ones, despite not being handy at all, with YouTube teaching me how. The other half is things I've inherited from my grand parents. Not because I liked it, at first anyway, but because I don't really want to own something with a CO2 footprint leading all over the world or things were build by slave labour.

Besides, the quality and detail in old hand made stuff is so much better than the shitty gluewood you buy in ikea.

Of course that's just my view on things based on myself and my circle of friends, who are strikingly similar to me when I think about it, and we could simply be odd millennials.

As far as your concepts go on C02 and inherited guilt..grow up.

Are you suggesting only children and youth care about the environment? If true, that's terrible!

(Edit: A downvote doesn't explain what I've misunderstood.)

Fashion-driven, low-quality overpriced US cars left the market wide open for cheap, high-quality foreign imports in the 1970s - and forced US manufacturers to significantly increase quality. That's pretty much the opposite of the story you're telling.

Instead I see a society which had a post-WWII manufacturing abundance just binging on material goods to the point that they were buried in stuff in a way that has never really happened before and people don't have good mechanisms for dealing with. At least not until they realise that "stuff" is the problem.

Both my parents and grandparents would claim that they bought stuff that lasted but they just bought the trendy items of the 1950s and 1980s respectively, and 90% of it went in the trash years ago.

On the other hand, my parents put away all leftovers and eventually also eat it. It is pretty similar with many other every-day things.

I just lived with my parents for a few weeks after living abroad for 5 years and noticed how they have kept so many things that I have seen when I was a child. I am not even talking about 1 or 2 things, but many (or most) things.

I find it difficult to appreciate this viewpoint. There's a certain elegance in using your resources efficiently and not wasting things. I find it significantly more satisfying to find a use for things rather than discarding them. This also applies to possessions, and more abstract things like writing code and not wasting lines of code or memory, or writing and not wasting words.

I prefer to buy fresh food because I believe it's healthier and I have the money to do so.

Anything spicy improves with a little time, and I've found the same to be true with tomato sauce and cooked cheese - so curries, chillies, lasagna etc etc all improve. soup is often better the next day too.

Sure, but it's time I enjoy spending. Some people play computer games or watch TV for an hour after work to relax, I cook dinner.

If you enjoy handling food then learning about handling left overs is a big part of that. If you go back and look at weekly food schedules from the past you will see patterns, were people cook one type of food day one to have base or ingredient for the next few days of cooking.

It obviously depends on the circumstances. I am more talking about the pattern of wasting, than accidentally wasting food now and then.

At the end of the gathering, everyone "fights" (politely, but very insistently) not to be the ones to take it home, 'cause they'll be forced to not let it go to waste.

I usually throw these because I don't mind binning unhealthy food I can easily replace rather than further harming my health. The latter is a far more useful and expensive acquisition than a quarter-pound of $25/lb cheese.

A staggering 50% of the food produced is wasted somewhere along the line. If you look at moving towards a sustainable society, food waste is actually a huge sub-problem of that, which has to be solved at some point, instead of cutting down ever more rainforest every year etc. etc. to sustain the current wasteful lifestyle.

Our parent generation didn't waste food, and the next generation will probably not be able to either (simply from rising prices).

In a world that sustainably generated enough food for everyone, it would not be wrong to throw away food. It might be that we can get there. Food production today is not sustainable, so at least let's not waste it.

If you press me, yes, I'm sure there's an element of "it's in bad taste" there too that made me react so strongly (it's similar to how rich kids pour out good champagne on the floor to display their wealth). That's closer to your suggestion.

A few months ago our 11 year old Nilfisk vacuum cleaner broke down. Back then it was about A$450. Instead of buying an equivalent new one for ~A$700 or so, I repaired it for ~A$250. I figured it'd still be better than buying a new $200-300 vacuum every 2-3 years.

Sometimes buying expensive stuff is the cheaper option.

I have Oneida flatware, solid wood furniture, and a Blendtec blender because these things will last. I don't want to buy flatware ever again, and, because I bought quality the first time, I won't have to, and I wish there were more things I could buy for life.

[1] when I was a kid we'd go shopping in Italy or Austria because so many things/brands (clothes, toys, food, everything really) simply weren't available at home or were significantly cheaper across the border. We would also repair eeeverything for as long as we could and take extra care to treat things nicely so they wouldn't wear or break.

At the point that the fountain of artificially cheap consumer goods from China dries up, they are in for a rude awakening. Suddenly quality items made to last by local craftsmen won't seem so old-fashioned!

Unfortunately this is a problem that perpetuates itself. As more people buy the throwaway goods, repairmen see business dry up, and become rarer. The ones left are expensive.

Quality items made to last by local craftsmen sound great! As long as there's any craftsmen left by the time people turn to them for business.

That's what we're sold, it doesn't mean it's what we value. If there was an easy way to tell durability at time of purchase, I think the trend would shift very quickly.