Storage solutions..

Big Yellow Storage company must be doing quite well. I have just seen an advert on television for it. The tag line was along the lines of: "Don't throw away the things you love. Get some space in your life!".

What a fascinating place we live in. Marx would have us believe that we define ourselves in society by our relationship to a means of production. More contemporary theorists talk of the act of consumption as a methodological construction of 'self', so that we are able to 'make' ourselves in the image of what we buy and consume. (This idea is certainly played on by the fashion companies of the world!) But in that sense, consumption needs to be understood as the obtaining of goods and then the destroying of them to make way for more goods: as one buys food and then consumes it. Yet what happens when we consume goods that we then decide to store?

What items do you store? What mementos or trinkets? Are they family photos? Old blankets and clothes? Kitchen wear you hold back for your children's first flat? And how long do you hold them for? What items would it be worth holding on to, yet not cluttering up a house? And how much would you pay for that?

We live, we work, we consume and the economy of the world continues on its merry way. In consumption, there is a reduction of resources. In resource depletion there will be wild spread poverty. But don't worry... those old books you have read a thousand times, and can not bare to throw away, and that horrible vase your mother bought you that you can not stand, but need available if she comes round, they will be there waiting for you - safely in a little yellow box.