ADAM OLSEN: His initial response highlights how little meaning there is in stuff that we consume cluttering our lives and living spaces

My 12-year-old nephew plays in Pokemon tournaments. Last weekend Emily and I agreed that we would give him a ride to his next tournament because his parents were busy juggling the rest of life.

On the way back from town, we got talking about his birthday. He will be thirteen this summer and it's an important milestone for him. He's clearly proud to be moving into a new part of life. He will be a teenager and even though it is really just a number, this number is meaningful to him. So, I told him that if means something to him it also means something for me.

"What do you want for your thirteenth birthday?" I asked.

"Don't know... just money," he responded. "I want to get something for myself!"

"Oh ya, what do you want to get for yourself?"

"Don't know, but there must be something," he said with a smile.

There must be something... not sure what it is, but there must be something he wants. His needs are met so he gets to spend his time thinking about what he wants.

Our wants and needs

Our conversation bounced around a little from there, but it captured another area of thought for me recently.

This past week I have been pondering the nature of work and workers. My mind has been churning over the evolution of our thought over the past 200 years –specifically, about how we have been wrestling with an economic system which produces "workers" and "taxpayers.”

It also produces consumers. The human hamster wheel of life: sleep, work and consume. Day in and day out.

His initial response highlights how little meaning there is in stuff that we consume cluttering our lives and living spaces. It actually does not even have to be anything. Just the notion of purchasing something feeds a fire within, it matters little, we can fill in the blanks later. Once we have bought, once we have done our civic duty to consume, we will store the item on a shelf or in a closet.

 

We consume so much that once we fill up our homes with stuff, we rent out special rooms to store the extra stuff that we are no longer using on a daily basis. It's shocking really. We are stockpiling stuff so we can visit it every now and then, and most of it will never be used again. In fact, vast swaths of land are covered with concrete prisons packed with completely forgotten items. If it is lucky, it will be freed by the famous set of bolt cutters on an episode of Storage Wars.

With the storage business booming, whether it's because we have too much stuff or our living spaces are much smaller, there is incredible strain on natural resources to make more stuff. It's an existential threat to the livability of our planet and it's time for us to reconsider our consumption culture.

This doesn't mean that I won't celebrate my incredible nephew's 13th birthday. But his gift to me, whether he knew it or not, was to provide me another opportunity to turn off the cultural autopilot.  It led me to actually think about my personal behaviour as a consumer -- and to ask myself the important question before making another purchase:

“Do I know the difference between the things I want and the things I need”?