Our lives are saturated with stuff. This is now a serious problem for millions of people living in materially prosperous societies, hence the publication of works like James Wallman’s Stuffocation. In 2009 the United States had 2.3 billion square feet of space in storage units. Ten percent of households were renting at least one such unit. And although the average house size was larger than ever, half of the storage units were being used to store stuff that people had no space for at home. In the UK there is an Association of Professional Declutterers & Organisers, people who are paid to come in and rescue those who are drowning in their own acquisitions.

The problem afflicts people across the socio-economic spectrum. At the top end you have someone like Arizona senator John McCain who, when he was running for president in 2008, was embarrassed by the fact that he couldn’t remember how many houses he owned. It’s common for members of the wealthy elite to purchase houses, cars, boats, and luxury goods far in excess of what they can sensibly use or meaningfully enjoy. But at the bottom end, too, people can lose control of their own clutter. Drive around rural America and it’s quite common to see dilapidated houses and trailer homes surrounded by junk–plastic playthings, broken appliances, rusting car parts. Whether the stuff constitutes an odd, almost defiant, display of abundance, or is there simply because disposing of it would be too expensive or too much trouble, it vividly illustrates the saturation of people’s lives and living space by material possessions.

This problem is fairly new. For much of human history, most people would have been able to fit their possessions into a box, or at least onto a small cart. But the industrial revolution, the advent of mass production, capitalism’s need for ever expanding markets, rising incomes, and eventually the fully-fledged consumer society, complete with 27-7 wall to wall advertising, changed all that. Now the problem for many people is what to do with all those excess boxes of junk that fill their attics, basements, and garages. They look at them and despair! Unwilling to discard, unable to move away, the ultimate solution for many ends up being to die and let the kids sort it out.

This kind of saturation does not feel good. Few people visit their basements or storage units to contemplate with satisfaction, like the miser in his counting house, their accumulated possessions. Just the thought of them produces a feeling more like indigestion than satiation. So how, and why, this situation arises is a little puzzling. After all, it shouldn’t be too difficult to avoid. What could be easier than not acquiring too much stuff?

There are actually two questions here. Why do we acquire so much stuff? And why do we have a hard time discarding it? Neither question has either a single or a simple answer. But here are some suggestions.

Why do we acquire so much?

Regarding our acquisitiveness, first, and most obviously, we live in a consumer society where we imbibe consumerist messages and values as regularly and as unthinkingly as we take in the air we breathe. The basic message behind most ads is: buy X and you will be sexier, happier, more admired and more powerful.

Partly as a consequence of this, shopping has become an important leisure activity. Groups of friends spend whole days cruising the mall; tourists often devote much of their holiday shopping for souvenirs; online shoppers spend many hours comparing items and looking for the cheapest deal.

But contemporary consumerism didn’t appear out of nowhere. It builds on certain ingrained tendencies and habits that are hard to change. For the longest time, when most people possessed so little–one hat, one coat, one pair of shoes–any opportunity to acquire more would be gratefully seized. If a bargain came your way it made sense to bag it. (Advertisers today regularly exploit this impulse:” Buy X! You may not need it, but it’s a bargain!”) Since the end of the Great Depression, though, everything has changed. Today, prosperous societies like the US are so awash with stuff that it’s quite easy to buy things like clothes or household items for next to nothing. Less than a hundred years ago, a decent pair of shoes would represent a significant outlay for most people, and would be unaffordable to many. Today, you can buy good quality used shoes at a thrift store for two dollars. Less than ten minutes work at minimum wage.

We are still in the process of adjusting to this radical transformation of our material circumstances. The analogy between stuff and food suggests itself. People who live for many years on a tight budget become accustomed to taking full advantage of any free food they come across at. Hard-up students, for instance, will make sure that they eat enough of the savory snacks on offer at some campus event to constitute dinner. (Yes, this example is drawn from personal experience.) Later, they no longer need to do this; but the habit has become ingrained, so the behavior continues. A similar observation applies to our society over a much longer time period. From time immemorial, most people had a limited diet and could never be sure of having enough food in the future. Until recently, poor people were typically, in Phillip Larkin’s phrase, “skinny as whippets.” Suddenly–over the last thirty or forty years, that is–an abundance of cheap, calorie-rich food has become readily available at all times. Because it is hard for human beings to shake off the ingrained habits of millennia, we can’t resist stuffing ourselves with more than is good for us. The result, of course, is the obesity epidemic.

Arguably, though, the ingrained tendency that consumer capitalism inflames is not so much a desire for stuff as a concern about status. After all, plenty of cultures have set little store by individual possessions; but in every community, normal people desire and seek some level of recognition and respect from their peers. Nor is this surprising, given that a concern about status is found among our nearest relatives in the animal world. And it’s easy to see how evolution would select in such a desire for status: higher status members of a group will typically have more sex with more mates and consequently produce more offspring.