Monday, July 16, 2012

A Culture of Clutter

Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors, a new book by UCLA's Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF), is a study of the middle-class American home.
A team of archaeologists, anthropologists and other social scientists studied the home life of 32 two-income, middle-class families in Los Angeles. What they found was a lifestyle struggling with consumerism, and a staggering accumulation of possessions.
"For more than 40,000 years," write the authors, "intellectually modern humans have peopled
the planet, but never before has any society accumulated so many personal possessions."

Disclosure: My household is also struggling with consumer issues.

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2 comments:

  1. Samantha9:32 am

    Thank you for posting this. I am a minimalist these days but a former hoarder. That photo is so interesting as as year or two ago a home like that would have been my dream, now I look at it and think the opposite. It things like this that make me realise how far I have come.
    Love the banner photo too at the top of the page

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  2. The Nag9:44 am

    I can't believe the amount of stuff I have accumulated after 26 years of living in the same house. I've been gathering things up for a garage sale that never seems to happen. Now I have all the useless junk in neat piles.

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