Justin Pot

If you want to understand America, spend some time in thrift stores. These are monuments to our collective excess—a museum of the things we’ve collected and discarded. 

I love digging through the electronics shelves looking for potentially useful adapters or devices. I also get most of my clothes from the racks there, mostly for environmental reasons. If I’m honest, though, I mostly just hate being in retail stores and have fun in thrift stores. Finding something great amidst all of the junk is a great feeling. 

But there’s a feeling of melancholy mixed in. It is impossible to browse a thrift store and not feel like society is collapsing under the weight of consumerism. There is just so much of everything. We buy cheap crap, accumulate too much of it in our homes, and then we get rid of it. 

Now, that’s not the origin of everything in these stores. A lot of it, I assume, belonged to someone who recently passed away—families keep what they’re interested in and donate the rest. Some of the like-new items were probably gifts briefly kept out of a sense of obligation only to be inevitably donated a few years later. Some are overstocks from retail stores or custom event swag. The rest, though, is crap someone bought for themselves and never actually used, or only used a little bit, and then donated (possibly in order to feel a little less guilty about it). 

There is so much excess and waste. We buy way more crap than we need, mostly because it’s affordable to do so. And the crap we don’t need is made overseas under conditions intolerable to both the worker and the environment. It’s something we all know but try not to think about.

Knowing and feeling all of this makes the current political moment complicated. I sincerely believe that the chaotic trade policy being pursued by the aging game show host currently running the country is going to be a disaster for America. He’s going to drive the country into an unnecessary recession that causes a lot of pain, and I don’t want to underplay that. 

But I also believe the world would be a better place if we all bought less stuff. This is not the logic of infinite-growth capitalism, an ideology that left unchecked would have us buying and throwing out more stuff each year than the year before. The idiots running the country have accidentally given us an opportunity to go the other way—to buy less. 

If we’re going to survive as a species on this planet of limited resources, we need to acknowledge the absurdity of our consumption and learn to reduce it. We can start small. We can learn how to repair things instead of replacing them. We can learn to take care of the things we own, or observe we really don’t need another one. And we can get better at borrowing tools from friends instead of buying them ourselves and only using them once. Higher prices are an opportunity to learn these skills. 

Featured image via Gwyn Fisher (Creative Commons)