Seven tons.

• Author: Prugh, Tom
• Position: ESSAY

I never thought I was very attached to the stuff I own. But it sure is attached to me.

This little epiphany struck while I was standing in the middle of my basement a few weeks ago, paralyzed by exhaustion after the fourth consecutive 15-hour day of lifting, shoving around, carting about, packing, discarding, and looking in despair at the seemingly endless pile of things my family and I had acquired.

Those things, entering our house one or two at a time, had quietly become a multitude. Now we were preparing to move and had to confront them en masse--and what a mass. There were, it seemed, thousands of them. Standing in the basement, an image popped into my mind: Gulliver tethered to the ground by zillions of Lilliputian strings. These objects, most of which I couldn't remember buying and had no present use for, must have served some purpose or scratched some itch at the time. They hadn't felt cumbersome then, but now they were exacting their revenge as I tried to shed them--like a bit of tape stuck to your fingers, which won't come off no matter how hard you shake your hand. Every last one of those thousands of objects demanded a choice: keep it? sell it? donate it? or just throw it away? As our deadline neared and the desperation mounted, I have to admit that a lot of otherwise useful things just got pitched.

Much has been written about humans and their stuff. One illuminating book on the subject is Material World: A Global Family Portrait. It's mostly photographs of families from all over the world, sitting in front of their homes with their possessions spread around them as if they were on a picnic. The contrasts are striking. Some families in Material World throw away more in a year than most people will own in a lifetime, while others lunch every day on potatoes and eat no dinner at all. Globally, for every one of the first category, there are dozens of the second, barely getting by on a few cents a day. Most families seem to acquire stuff as they are able, but that ability has less to do with merit--more than one breadwinner in a less-developed nation works two or three jobs--than with accidents of birth. (Pick your parents carefully, and you too can learn to take affluence for granted.) However, there seems to be no clear correlation between absolute wealth and family happiness, a conclusion reinforced by economic studies.

Equally revealing is Limited Wants, Unlimited Means, a collection of eye-opening essays about life among...