In the spring of 1947, police trying to enter a brownstone at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 128th Street in Harlem could not open the front door. Behind it were the lifetime acquisitions of two brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer, who for decades had carried things in and almost nothing back out. When the house was finally emptied, the city hauled away more than 140 tons: newspapers saved so that Homer, who had gone blind, might one day read the news he had missed; fourteen pianos; the chassis of a Model T; bundles roped into narrow tunnels that Langley crawled through to bring his paralyzed brother food. He was crawling through one of those tunnels when he tripped a booby trap of his own making, and the things he had spent his life collecting came down and killed him. Homer, unable to reach the kitchen, starved a few feet away.
The Collyers’ story is an extreme version of hoarding. We may not have 140 tons left for others to haul away when we’re gone, but unfortunately, thanks to rampant consumerism, most of us will find ourselves somewhere on the stuff-accumulating spectrum.
I’ve written about the hedonic treadmill and voluntary simplicity—the well-documented gap between how happy we expect more to make us and how happy it actually does. What we have to remind ourselves, because it’s easy to forget, is that the things we bring home keep charging us long after the receipt fades. Maybe not in $$$ but in non-renewable resources: time, attention, and floor space.
In 1899, the economist Thorstein Veblen coined the term conspicuous consumption to describe how we buy things well past their usefulness, mostly to signal where we stand. He was writing about the newly minted rich of the industrial age; the term has since expanded to cover the rest of us. A bigger house isn’t just a bigger mortgage. It’s more square footage to heat, cool, clean, and fill. Every object we add to it quietly starts billing us for its upkeep.
And the bill isn’t only metaphorical. Researchers at Princeton’s neuroscience lab found that the objects in our field of view literally compete with one another for our attention — the more there is to look at, the less of the brain is left for the thing we’re actually trying to do. A team at UCLA studying ordinary families measured the cortisol of mothers as they walked through their own homes, and the stress hormone spiked in the ones who described their surroundings as “messy” and “chaotic.” Clutter isn’t just hard on the eyes; it’s a tax on our focus and, ultimately, our mental health.
In 1769, the philosopher Denis Diderot was given a beautiful scarlet dressing gown, and within months he had replaced his desk, his chair, and his prints because, beside the gown, they all suddenly looked shabby. Anthropologists now call this the Diderot Effect: one nice new thing makes the old things look poor, so we buy more to match, and then the new things age, and we’re off again. And soon we find ourselves struggling to keep up with the hedonic treadmill.
Even choosing is a tax. In a now-famous study, the psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set out 24 jams on a table one day and six the next. The big display drew the crowds and almost no buyers; the small one sold ten times as well, and left people happier with whatever they picked. More options didn’t free anyone, which is the whole case for curating what we let in. We have all scrolled through 318 streaming choices and gone to bed having watched none of them.
So less should be easy. It isn’t. I know. I tried the Kon-Mari method and discovered that nearly everything sparked joy, which was not helpful. I tried the reverse-hanger trick, only to remember that no one else in my house has ever once considered the direction of a hanger.
What’s helped me lately is a reframe. Every object I decide not to own is an hour I don’t spend cleaning it, an hour I could read (I mean doomscroll, who am I kidding?), a tax I stop paying. The research agrees: studies on spending consistently find that experiences make us happier than possessions, partly because we never have to dust them, insure them, or wedge them into the garage.
Maybe this is just what middle age teaches, slowly. I’m at the stage where blatant consumerism finally bugs me. I have a long way to go, though. Amazon Prime Day still gets me scrolling through Instapots and blenders I don’t need. I want abs, but I also want carbs.
But I’m getting better at asking the only question that matters, the only one deeper than “Do I need this?”
What will it cost me to keep?
Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like. Robert Quillen, 1928.