Race to the bottom
There is a great “aside” in this bike blog about the “race to the bottom” concept. I have been thinking about this a lot subconsciously lately, I never really had a name for it. Each day recently we have made the boy pick up the 18 toys he has managed to leave lying around the house and simultaneously shop for his birthday next week. I think our family is above-average when it comes to intelligent consumption, social consciousness and conservation… but boy, do we still have a long way to go. We’re taking a stab this week at putting a bunch of stuff on craigslist, including my 8′6″ long board that I break out every 3 years. It’s mostly just taking up space.
June 15th, 2009 at 13:05
Yeah, we’ve had a bout of this as well. For example, camera bags. Every photographer I know ends up with a several with one or two getting the brunt of the workload.
I’ve started selling off the old ones. And I’ll probably hold onto my first Domke for sentimental reasons, but thinning the herd is good. Probably make another pass next month as well.
June 15th, 2009 at 18:58
Thanks for the link. I think the same of my family. We have our second child coming this summer, and we were re-arranging our 2 bedroom apartment to try to accommodate the new addition. We were both frustrated with our stuff, and then reminded each other that we lived in Europe for two months last year out of two backpacks.
But handy things are indeed handy. And nicely-made things are intended to last a long time. Such thoughts are counter-cultural in our contemporary society drowning in advertising and peer pressure for the accumulation of mass quantities of goods – quality be damned!