Reflections: It will never be worth something

As I sift through my mounds upon mounds of $3 Garage t-shirts and tank tops and try to decide which magazines from my chronologically organized and meticulously maintained collection to pitch, and which to keep... it occurs to me how INCREDIBLY wasteful our society is. I mean, yes, individually-wrapped snack packets, fast food and water bottles are bad for the environment, but it definitely goes deeper than that.

You could say that I am a pack-rat, although I would not use the term "horder" (you wanna see one of those, check out the people who showed up for our "free" garage sale last monday--yikes!). I use things, but I take care of them and thus, they last a long time... and then I also buy more of them in the mean time. Honestly though, I do not "use up" items, and the reason I don't dispose of stuff is, yes, I'm weirdly emotionally-attached to "stuff", but I am not DONE with it yet. We live in a society where there is endless new SHIT. I have stuff that works, but Oh! a new one is less than half the price of the perfectly good old one that I already have, and Oooh! it has twice as many features and it comes in 6 awesome limited edition colours. Why not? Now, throw out the old one? Ah-ha! No, sell it on E-bay!!

Well, it's a good idea in theory, but as I look out over the vast wasteland of filled garbage bags piled on my front porch for a Diabetes pickup tomorrow AM, I wonder at what point will it stop? I am hard-pressed to find an argument against the post-apocalyptic junkyard of Wal-E... We buy and buy and buy and buy, why keep anything? You can just get a new, no, a HUNDRED new ones, at Dollarama for $1 an item, and throw out the old one without a thought.

And what is collecting any more? Who collects? No one has "stuff" anymore (except my family apparently). The Spice Girls dolls that I've saved in mint condition in their boxes for the past 11 years are worth mmmmm.... not even 0.99 cents on E-bay. Nice. And those Care bear toys and My Little Ponies from 1989? Three dollars a piece. Whyyyy bother... We just threw out 2/3 of our movie collection, literally THREW OUT, because they are movies on VHS, and who has the space to store them, the players to watch them, or the patience to wait for them to rewind, even? It's not worth the effort. No(thing) is.

What a wasteful, wasteful world.