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fiddlemath comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps - Less Wrong
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I think this explains a lot of it. Another part is that people don't think about the costs of owning stuff: it occupies your space, you have to keep it organized, and you have to move it around whenever you move.
These costs are easy to ignore, because they aren't in mind when you're thinking about buying a specific thing. The mentally-available facts are "what will I get by using this?" versus "how much money does this cost?" Similarly, when you're looking for stuff to get rid of, it's hard to bring those costs back into light, because they're so general to everything you own
I don't have lots of stuff, and I'm pretty willing to get rid of stuff or give stuff away. I think this is largely because I highly value my space, my attention, and my time, and I've practiced being sensitive to those values when I'm making decisions about stuff.
"you have to move it around whenever you move."
Usually I'm adverse to reducing clutter, due to the cost of going through, organizing it, and throwing away most of it. Every time I move I end up losing a huge chunk of my stuff because suddenly it's much cheaper to throw it out instead of moving it :)
Good point. My heuristic is to say: My house cost $100/ft^2. A $2 knickknack with a square foot footprint really costs $102.
But could you really have saved $100 by having decided to buy that same exact house except without that extra square foot?
Probably not. But, if you had rather less stuff, you could have probably bought a pretty similar house with one fewer closet for a few thousand less.
This. My housemates and I needed a three-bedroom apartment instead of a cheaper two-bedroom because some of them have so much stuff. Especially large furniture.
Yup, also, the incremental cost of space in a self-store unit is of the order of $1/month-ft^2, say $240/ft^2 capital cost at a 5% annual rate - and that is a true incremental cost. The more severe approximation is ignoring which items stack well and which don't, and ignoring the additional costs of maintaining the items, keeping track of them and so on.