Turns Out I Have 99 Problems

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Issue 28 | February 28, 2019 | Turns Out I Have 99 Problems

In January and February, I kept an inventory of all of the things my three young children received. Every party favor, trinket from a friend, souvenir from school events, etc. I did not include in this tally birthday gifts, edibles, things the kids bought with their allowance, or any necessities – needed clothes, sneakers, etc. Just the extras.

Here on the last day of February, I have the grand total: 99. 99 small, almost exclusively plastic things that came into our home, unbidden, and usually went straight back out via the trash and recycling bins. Among the ranks are such items as slipper socks and a complete children’s pedicure set, two cans of “silly noise putty,” three coloring books, a white board and two dry erase markers, plastic gold medals, Nerf rocket launchers, sequined snap bracelets…it goes on. They’re a mix of party favors, nice-to-see-you gifts, please-take-this-toy-home souvenirs from playdates. It’s all nice, in spirit. But still. 99 things.

An Abundance Investigation
I started this tracking exercise to untangle my brain after the holiday overload. I struggle with the yawning gap between what we want holiday gift exchanging to be – a happy occasion of abundance and delight – versus what it actually is, an exercise in overload that mostly subtracts joy. The kids’ eyes glaze over. The trash overflows in the back garden. The “gimmes” take hold and they alternate between fighting and begging for the matching accessories to all the new stuff. Their happiness got a fleeting blip from the getting, but it fades almost instantly. Why did we all go to this trouble, I think. It plagues me; why isn’t this happier?

I started to suspect that the cost/benefit balance is all wrong. The benefit of gift receiving is now too low; the kids get stuff literally every single day. The happiness blip is too small. And since we already drown in stuff, having more is not a benefit. It’s actually a cost. I wanted to see the real numbers – how much do they get, daily? Now I know. It makes more sense.

A Mismatch
This is a simple case where the economics have overridden the natural boundaries of our little dinosaur brains. People like getting stuff, and in the scheme of history, stuff is now almost free and virtually unlimited. We don’t have a natural max for our desire to give and get stuff, so we now have the opposite problem of overabundance. The getting can still provide a teeny blip, but the added having is negative. The marginal benefit comes from subtracting things, not adding things, to your life.

As a child of the 80s, I experienced the getting and having of things as have many generations – you mark up a giant Sears catalog, then daydream about your wish list, maybe save some allowance to get there or wait with great anticipation for the far-apart gift giving occasions, hoping to get some coveted thing. Going to the store is inconvenient. When you get there, they only have what they have.

It’s not like that anymore. My kids literally get a thing, for no reason, almost every day. They pine for almost nothing. Everyone around them has instant access to Amazon. They value things so little that they freely trade toys among themselves. Why not? There’s more crap coming in the door every. Single. Day. We try to keep a cap on the stuff in our house, but nearly every friends’ playroom is overflowing with stuff, too. It’s no wonder that half the country has KonMari fever and is zealously cutting down their possessions to what sparks joy. (By the way, the fever is international – see Australia, Singapore, some great British memes.)

The Free-Content Problem
Here’s the rub: this doesn’t just apply to stuff. It applies to every consumable thing: TV shows. News. Text messages. Any kind of information you could ever seek. Social validation through likes and shares. Sugar. Financial white papers. All of these consumable things, like the flood of plastic trinkets in my mom life, are unlimited and nearly free.

This problem should be front of mind for every maker in the world. In the fight for attention and trust, every effort to produce something useful is going up against a mountain of free garbage. The people to whom we are appealing – the readers – are drowned every day in information. Their benefit from our work is lower, on average. We have to think very carefully about how we can make it more valuable.

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