Empty hallway with orange garage doors of a self storage unit warehouse.
The desperation in Manhattan was anything but quiet in 1991. After six years in the frantic, ear-grinding angst of the city, I was ready for a drastic change. While considering my next move I studied Thoreau’s Walden for guidance.
“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” old Henry advised, harrumphing about all the needless things we humans can’t seem to get along without:
“Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life” he wrote, “are not only not indispensable but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
This made perfect sense to me, so I decided to swap the complexities and luxuries of urban life for something simpler. Like the cranky cabin-builder, I prefer outdoors to indoors, so rural Arizona seemed like a good fit.
Before leaving New York, though, I had a Yuppie household to break up: Furniture, kitchen appliances, cookware, clothes, boots, skis, camping gear, rugs, bedding, roller skates, books, records, office supplies, manuscripts and journals, even a manual typewriter. There were also framed photos and diplomas, high school yearbooks and sports trophies, travel mementos and old love letters. The football jersey I wore in high school.
So I resolved to ditch a lot of that stuff.
But our belongings cling to us like barnacles. A week before buying a one-way Greyhound ticket to Flagstaff, I packed what was left and shipped it on Amtrak. As I recall, my newfound simplicity amounted to no less than twenty-nine boxes.
I insured this mountain of stuff to the limit, half-hoping that Amtrak would lose everything and present me with a hefty check to launch my new life. No such luck.
The boxes arrived in Flagstaff the day after I did, and soon had a new home at U-Store-It, just across the street from the Amtrak station. Due to the random life I cobbled together in Arizona, they would spend the next four years in that little cubby,
Storage units get no mention in Walden, but Thoreau would no doubt take a dim view. “I have traveled a good deal in Concord,” I can hear him mutter, “and nowhere have I seen men pay good money to rent places not to be lived in, but merely to store the things they own but do not use.”
That was in mid-19th century America. In our own time, vast amounts of surplus stuff fill our closets, cellars and garages. It spills from our attics, clutters our yards, and overwhelms our thrift shops. The average home built in the U.S. today is roughly 12 times the size of Thoreau’s cabin; still, we Americans cannot seem to cram all our stuff into them.
Hence the booming stuff-management industry: In 2024, 11 percent of U.S. households spent a combined $58 billion to rent storage units. That’s 14.5 million families that possessed more stuff than their houses could contain.
What would H.D. Thoreau make of all this? What should we?
Like our national curmudgeon, I am mystified by the wasteful habits and wasted efforts of our modern world. I detest my own participation in this crazy system.
During my first decades in the West I managed to shrink my mountain of stuff–gave away hundreds of vinyl records, culled the boxes of books, threw away the sentimental trinkets (well, some of them). I lived lightly, working seasonal jobs and moving often.
But that changed twelve years ago when I bought the house where I now live. It’s tiny–about the size of Thoreau’s cabin–but my nest is feathered with plenty of nonessentials. After a few years, I built a storage shed. Soon it was overflowing.
I considered building another–after all, this is home; I am retired, and don’t plan to move again. But the words of another 19th-century oddball, John Muir, came drifting through the ether:
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
Muir’s words helped me decide not to build that second shed. Instead I pawed through the first one and put a sizable dent in the latest mountain of stuff. I think Henry would have been pleased. I certainly was.
