After being in Central and South America for two years, the biggest shock upon retuning to North America was the amount of stuff people have, and how easy it is to buy.
It blows my mind that most houses I drive past every day have two cars, a boat, an RV, a snow machine (or two), a quad, skis & snowboards and that's just what I can see when they have their garage door open in spring.
Not only do people have lots of stuff, they have so much they have to pay people to store it for them (self-storage). I had completely forgotten about those, because they simply don't exist in places where people don't have excess stuff.
I highly recommend getting out of the developed world for a while to get perspective on how much stuff everyone has.
I had some stuff in self-storage when I once went away for several months. Spending some time there made me want to get rid of all my stuff. It's a very strange and sad place. One could write a novel about it. It's a place of transitions, and I got the impression that most of the transitions were not for the better.
Ever watch that show where they get people to bid on abandoned self storage lockers? It's so weird that people pay money to store a bunch of junk. Not that the people are weird, just that humans are wired in such a way that we'd pay $150 a month to store a comparable dollar amount of stuff, because of the way it makes us feel. Maybe it's to avoid the way it makes us feel to get rid of it. That's what people are paying for. So they're basically being held ransom by their stuff I guess.
It blows my mind that most houses I drive past every day have two cars, a boat, an RV, a snow machine (or two), a quad, skis & snowboards and that's just what I can see when they have their garage door open in spring.
Not only do people have lots of stuff, they have so much they have to pay people to store it for them (self-storage). I had completely forgotten about those, because they simply don't exist in places where people don't have excess stuff.
I highly recommend getting out of the developed world for a while to get perspective on how much stuff everyone has.