sum of its parts

Washing machine, part 2...

I blogged about my washing machine, and the cost of fixing it vs the cost of purchasing it, and how I somehow doubt that its original cost is actually its value! I am taking a shortcut here, and literally copy-pasting an article I wrote for another purpose. It applies, and I don't think you have to read between the lines too far - especially if you check out the story of stuff.


I often reflect on what technology has done for us. It has provided us with a means to do more. We can communicate more quickly than we can with most other forms; we can share files; we can get information.

Consequently there are other “mores” that we get, those that we don’t enjoy. Ironically, we get more communication, more files, more information. This translates into more of our time being spent using technology, the same technology that was designed and created to save us time.

Let's look a bit more closely at the "more" … More time, more resources, and even more paper. Yes, we are now able to produce things faster than ever before, but to what end? With information at our fingertips, almost at the ease of a button, why are we still printing so many documents?

We spend hours online--social networks, research, games, shopping. US e-commerce spending reached $34.7 billion by the third quarter of 2007. What are we buying—things to make our lives “better?”

With so much time spent online, with this influx of stimulation, and with the time spent earning an income to pay for them, it’s hard to find the time to use our things; Soon they become out of date and obsolete (whether actual or perceived obsolescence). We dispose, and buy more.

We’re a culture of disposable goods, disposable incomes, and possibly disposable values. We are disposing at a phenomenal rate. In six months' time, 99 percent of your current purchases will have been consumed, used, and disposed.

We talk of recycling, composting, and other "earth-friendly" practices (don’t get me wrong, I am not saying we should give up on those) but these only have a slight impact on our overall consumption. The average factory produces 70 times the waste that we do.

[ Want the facts? http://www.storyofstuff.com/pdfs/annie_leonard_facts.pdf
or watch the video: http://www.storyofstuff.com/index.html ]

What can we do? How do we get back to the point where this all started, the point of using technology to aid humanity, and not using it to destroy ourselves? We start now. It sounds simple, and in reality it’s not so simple, but it truly has to start with a different attitude.

We need to think of less as being more. Less intrusion into our time, the time we are meant to spend on other things – Our relationships with people, for example. We need to want less, do less, use less, and in doing so, we might find that what remains is so much more than we might have expected.