Evolving opposable thumbs for grasping, and an upright gait that freed our arms for carrying wasn’t perhaps the best thing to ever happen to humans; for we’ve been collecting stuff and hauling it around ever since, constantly confusing who we are (and how we think others see us) with what we have.

The large plastic bin, high on the garage shelf, was marked “Telemark Related” with white tape and my two-decades-old handwriting. I opened the lid to the smell of leather and wax and aging rubber. The new plastic boots were at the bottom, packed spooned on their sides. There were also various bundles of wax and spare binding parts and climbing skins. At the top were the leather boots, purchased first but worn less once I upgraded.

I picked up the right boot — it looked almost as good as new, a classically aesthetic, functional marvel — and flexed it. The heavy rubber sole cracked all the way across and split in two.

Time did this.

I have a lot of bins.

The week before, I had opened one labeled “headphones & audio” — shoebox sized — and found a cheap pair of over-ear headphones inside, among others, that had begun to disintegrate, the remains of the black ear pads staining my fingers and drifting down to the carpet, threatening to stain it as well. How long had they been there? Why did I still have them?

At the bottom of that bin, an original Apple iPod, dark and quite dead despite my effort to charge and turn it on. If I had known in 2003 when I put it in the bin that I would never use it again I might have given it away instead, or sold it or done something useful with it. But I didn’t know. I put it in the bin and it wasted away, a white and silver sliver of the world’s resources hoarded and uselessly destroyed by time, now of no use whatsoever and difficult even to dispose of properly.

The boots, headphones, and iPod had been intentionally put away, organized and labeled as I managed “stuff” that was ever accumulating. But not everything is in a bin; some sits where it was last used, on a shelf, or in the drawer or closet where it had always been kept — set down in one moment and never returned to; a moment of transition rarely recognized at the time.

We don’t decide to never use these things again, we simply don’t come back to them one day, and then the next, and all the days after. Once precious to us — we thought — we lose sight of the stuff we are no longer using, hidden in plain view by familiarity; the white noise of our material lives, accumulating but no longer seen.

We find them again— we see them again — years later, or the people cleaning after we die do as they sort what to keep and what to throw in the dumpster. Or we notice this stuff finally when the need for more space grows excruciating. And maybe we still keep it even then because…we might play chess with a timer again, or do something with that WWII era Brownie camera, or get back to juggling.

So things remain until they are more than worthless: dissolving, crumbling, rusting and quite unable to turn on — all the while using up space and in the way and hard to dispose of. When we set it down it was just days out-of-date, replaced by a new generation or, perhaps, we just stopped doing the particular activity for which it was intended (not knowing we had stopped for good). That was fifteen years ago, twenty, thirty.

How beneficial it would be to know, at that moment, it is the last time you will use something.

We are used to feeling the (imagined) value of a thing before we get it, and as we anticipate having it (during the wanting phase). And then it is ours, and we use it for a while. But after, we are much less good at feeling the cost of keeping it around, maintaining it, storing it, (searching for it when it is lost), much less good at noticing the accumulating psychological and practical weight of keeping so much stuff. Until it builds up to the point of real pain.

Such as running out of open space in which to live in our homes. Such as feeling trapped where we are because it “would take so much work to move,” (a euphemism we all recognize for “it will take months to sort through and pack and then unpack all this stuff”). Such as having trouble finding something in particular amongst all that, and spending hours looking in frustration. (“Did I keep it or not? Where could it be?” “Maybe in that box. I’ll look again. I’ll dump it out this time.”)

When you wanted more figurines, a third curio cabinet seemed a good idea. Now you have to turn sideways to get past the end of the couch and into the hallway.

When you got the Foosball table you thought you would play it a lot.

When you bought two more bookcases and unboxed all the biographies from the attic, you thought it would help you get around to finally reading them.

In a non-intuitive way the accumulation of stuff may be more of a problem for those who have just enough money to keep acquiring, but not enough to consider buying things a second or third time. Someone with more money can clear it out without a second thought, “I’ll buy another set if I ever decide to ski again. I hear the newer skis carve better turns anyway.”

The weight of stuff on our lives is incremental and insidious.

You find yourself fantasizing about clean shelves and open space, and you think, “That would be the good thing about a house fire, or a flood (in which no one was hurt, of course); I’d be rid of all this stuff in one go without having to decide.”

Here’s another thing we don’t seem to do very well: recognize when the house (and garage, and shed) are in fact full, as full as we would ever want them to be. There’s no automatic red light that goes on over the front door to let us know (perhaps there will be in some future smart home). We suffer from a resilience (and creativity) in being able to always find a way to fit a bit more. A clever re-packing of a cabinet, an additional shelf in the closet (California closets here we come!).

It becomes a continuous challenge to find a way to store more in the same space. The fold-a-way exercise bike. The Murphy bed (one of the oldest and most iconic of these clever tricks). The sliding interleaved shoe racks. The rope hoist systems to store things above the car in the garage. The vertical wall hangers for bikes. The stacking bins. The full size under-bed drawers. Even a new addition to the house, primarily in order to have more space for stuff. Industries to sell us stuff, and industries to help us try to pack it all into our homes.

If we did have that light (metaphorical or physical, let’s call it the “full mode” light) let’s imagine it activates a condition where bringing anything new into the house required first removing something (of similar size or number).

“I’m sorry,” the cashier says. “I can’t ring this up for you. The system shows that you are, oh my, yes, in full mode, with a bit of an overrun, in fact.”

“Ah…I’m buying this for my sister.”

“Well, that’s nice. But, I’m sorry, I can’t. Not until your house reports…ah, let me see…yes, a reduction of 12 square feet of storage items. Oh, and I see your spouse has filed a fullness restraining order as well. I’m sorry. Here, let me give you this flyer for our Consumerholics Anonymous meetings. We host meetings once a week, as all the larger retailers are required to do. Ours are Thursdays at 7:00 PM upstairs. I go myself, there are always donuts.”

As we age and the likely end of our lives begins to come into view — measured now in too easily counted decades, two or three (no longer much of a chance at four) — we might turn to the bookshelves holding every issue of the Paris Review, and so very many novels, and wonder, why? That ambiguously magical “I’ll get back to them later,” begins to run headlong into the reality of limited, now countable time; is there even enough to reread all of this (and again, why)? And if we did spend time retracing our earlier reading, would we have any left to do anything new?

So we keep them just so we can look something up? We have online for that.

Once we are a certain distance along in our lives, there is not enough time in the day to do all the activities our retained belongings — our past — presents to us.

In the beginning there were only a few of these (interests, hobbies, pastimes, avocations, whatever you call them) and the belongings that went along with them. And then another year passed, and we moved on to the next thing, setting the stuff for the previous activity aside on a shelf. And then the next. And then again. We evolved, our saved stuff didn’t, it just sat. Surrounding us with the psychological weight of “I’ll get to that,” of past money spent you don’t want to think wasted, of the ongoing need to store things, and box things, move things, dust things, fix things, and to find more space and pay for that space; our living environment reduced to storage. Clumsy and expensive and continually weighing us down; both a physical difficulty and a mental burden as we are persistently aware of the need to “go through those shelves sometime,” in a dozen variations.

And how many of us are still planning to digitize all those old printed photos in the two large boxes downstairs?

The life we used to live accumulates around us in these things left behind, progressively piling up; a growing weight, a limitation, on our current lives. A sense of less time, day to day, as we try to live both in the present and curate the past through this stuff that just maybe we will want to use again, or that remains a proxy for some part of our self-image.

The balance shifts past a tipping point to where our daily lives become majority curation.

Peter Menzel’s 1994 book “Material World” was a global project to make photographic portraits of families — selected for being somewhere near the middle of that locality’s socio-economic status — with all of their possessions moved out in front of their homes. Looking again at these photographs (in a book I’ve moved the full width of the country twice, but could not touch now, buried in the overflow book boxes in the garage, so I looked them up online instead: Material World Portrait Gallery) I was reminded of a distinction between the possessions of people in more wealthy, consumer cultures and others: consumers have more things than they can possibly get around to using very often. More furniture than they need to sit on, more kitchen appliances than they use regularly, more TVs, more VCR tapes, more clothes, more toys, more of everything.

The norm for much poorer, non-consumer, cultures is that they have what they need, barely, with only a few additional prized possessions of ceremonial or ornamental nature. And what they have — what they need — they use constantly until these things are polished to a dull shine from the grip of hands, chipped with the paint worn away, and repeatedly repaired out of necessity.

Not so for us.

We consumers each choose to have our own particular sets of things: wilderness travel and camping equipment of the non-hunting type, with Patagonia in the closet in solid colors; ATVs and a deluxe fireproof gun cabinet with 23 guns, and lots of camo in the closet; dozens of feet of display shelving for collectible action figures still in their original packaging; tools, a shop, a table saw, router, planer, jointer, and a 3D printer; 400 pairs of shoes; five cars and a 70” TV in each room of a larger-than-you-could-ever-actually-use house; four guitars, three bongos, two keyboards, amplifiers, a drum set, six microphones, and the latest DAW software; five road bikes and three mountain…and it goes on, and each of these things (or groups of things), tell a story, not just of what we do (or have done) with our time, but who we think we are (or want to be) and how we want to be seen.

We are taught to want new things. We feel excitement and pleasure when we shop and anticipate the next. We are addicted to this. And so we drive the economy, and fill our space, while we incrementally collapse our future life under the weight of accumulating stuff.

Like an addicted gambler placing one more bet, we say it isn’t a problem. We imagine going through the shelves downstairs, scanning the photos, sorting through the novels, cleaning out the wood racks in the shop, and we say to ourselves it is all right, we will get this done…this weekend. But how much time would this actually require? Four months of full time work? More? Who can, or will, do that? Instead, for many, getting through these things becomes what we plan for the first years of our retirement.

Eventually, with a growing sense of disgust and despair, we do reach a limit (an inner sense of “full mode,” the red light finally fully in view). But the resiliency with which we push that day further and further away, and the resources we may expend to do this, are remarkable. And even when we reach that limit we are still addicted. Like any addict, we always will be recovering, never fully out of the woods.

Once we finally got rid of that NordicTrack in the corner we thought, “Hey, there’s room for a stepper machine now.”

And around and around we go.