From the Archives – September 2007

How Much Stuff Do We Need?

I don’t think I fully understood it at the time, but I was on my way to realizing the evils of American Consumerism and how wasteful it all is. I still feel like I have too much stuff today, but thinking back one year ago I can remember a lot more junk on my entertainment center shelves and I don’t miss any of it.

I think the other problem inherent with large collections of ’stuff’ is that we naturally must put less value in each individual item that we own. If you own 4 DVDs, there is probably a good chance you really like those 4 and you will watch them over and over. If you own 50, how many of those DVDs do you really like? Could you possibly name all 50 that you own? If not, what is the point? What if you could go back in time and turn 40 of those DVDs into $400 that was sitting in the bank right now or being paid toward your debt? I know which I would rather choose, though I probably would have made the wrong choice not too long ago.

Might as Well Lose Some Weight Too

This was just a short post announcing my intention to work on losing weight again. The said thing is, I mentioned how I canceled my World of Warcraft account and started to take back my time and become productive. I guess that was going well until I re-subscribed earlier this year.

Spending Too Much on Groceries

In this post I was just discovering the problems I had with wasting food and buying too much of it.

Just last week I threw out about $12 worth of old food from the refrigerator. A couple weeks before that I threw away a rather large amount of food from the pantry because it was expired, though I did not take the time to think about how much money was wasted then. It strikes me as rather ridiculous that I throw away perfectly good food just because I didn’t feel like eating it in time or I was too lazy to do so.

Looking back, I can see that I have made a lot of progress in this area. I don’t over stock the pantry and freezer any more and I work really hard to make sure I use up everything before it goes bad. I’m definitely saving a lot of money on groceries now compared to one year ago (and making much better use of basic ingredients to prepare my own food).

By Eden, Sun 14 Sep 2008, Comments Categories: Web Favorites