What's Wrong?

I've been wanting to write this for a while, but I haven't been able to figure out what I want to say, so I have been avoiding it.

I still don't quite know what I want to say, but I can't avoid it any longer.

Something is wrong.  I know I'm not the only person to notice it.  It's, a vague sense of unease that I carry with me all the time.  It's a sense of existential dread when I actually sit down and think about my life.

Somewhere along the line, we have made a horrible mistake, and humanity has gone awry.

I don't think I can identify what that mistake was, or what the underlying problem is, but I have noticed a lot of the symptoms.

Back in January, I published an article about Gift Giving, and I mentioned at the end that there was more to follow.  Well, this is what I was talking about.  Let's start off there.

I've been noticing more and more lately (thanks to the addition of a child who now is able to walk and indicate things that he wants), that everything has become more and more commercialized.  Let me give you an example: My son loves Baby Shark.  I am rather annoyed with my father for showing it to him, but it has it's perks, so I try not to complain about it too much.  I had no idea how much merchandise was available for a YouTube channel!  We have a sub that has slots for different block shapes that sings when you put the correct blocks in the slots.  We have a book that sings the YouTube songs with the words on the page.  He has little cube plush toys that sing if you squeeze them.  For Christmas he is getting puppets that sing as you move their mouths.  Also, a watch that sings if you hit the button on the side.  We have a pop-up tent that's baby-shark themed.  Yesterday I saw a hoodie at the mall that had Baby Shark on it.  I am sure there's more, but I can't think of it right now, and I think I've made my point by now.

Baby shark is just a YouTube video.  Imagine the merchandise available for shows on TV.  In our local Wal-Mart, there's an entire aisle dedicated to Disney.

The problem is, this extends beyond Children's toys.  What it eventually turns in to is this: we have way more stuff than I'm really used to having in a house as small as ours.  A lot of that is just because kids require a lot more stuff, especially when they're younger, but that's not the biggest issue.  I mentioned above all of the Baby Shark stuff we have.  That's just Baby Shark.  There are so many toys in my house that most days I step on at least one.  If we go a week without breaking a toy I'm impressed.  It has become literally impossible to keep all the toys cleaned up unless we clean when the kid isn't here or is asleep, and even then the moment he's here and moving around again there are toys on the floor.  It's a bit depressing to have to watch where I'm walking so carefully around my own house for fear of injuring myself or breaking another toy.

Again, though, the kids' stuff isn't everything.  My wife and I have been acquiring more stuff, too.  I'm a bit of a tech enthusiast, and lately Megan and I have been allowed to work remotely on a semi-regular basis, so I spent a good bit of dough on upgrading our office space from a desk that I sat at with a laptop to a dual-monitor, L-Shaped desk with a mechanical keyboard and wireless printer.  If I had a coffee pot in here, there would be little reason to leave this room for hours on end.  Did these upgrades make me more productive when working from home?  Slightly, but, in all honesty, I could have lived without them.  The only upgrade that was actually a necessity was a new chair, since sitting on the tiny task chair that was too low for the desk we use wasn't really a long term option if we cared for our backs, and I didn't really splurge too much on that.  The new monitor and docking station to allow me to run two screens were each more expensive than the new chair we picked (which is quite comfy, by the way).

My office isn't the only place I've been splurging since we moved in.  I've filled the house with IoT gadgets in the last two and half years, and I've spent quite a bit of money on all the gadgets and the upgrades to my network that having so many gadgets connected to it required.  As I've likely mentioned at some other point, my wife and I are book hoarders, and in this office alone I am sitting with six 6' book cases full of books, some of them with books stacked on top of books.  There is another case in the living room with more books that we like to show off.  We're paper hoarders as well, and recently had to upgrade from a two drawer filing cabinet to a four because we are afraid to throw away anything that might be important later.  My wife and I both like shoes and have probably more than we actually need, though I try to keep my shoe collection at a level in which all of my shoes actually have a use and there are no duplicates besides running shoes (which I rotate through).  It still means that I have at least ten to fifteen different pairs of shoes for different purposes, and my wife has more shoes than that.  An excess of other clothing is also becoming a problem, as my dresser is no longer able to contain all of the clothing that wouldn't normally be hung, and my closet is completely full.

Here's the thing: I generally hate spending money.  I've mentioned this before.  My upbringing made me understand the value of a dollar (or so I thought, more on that later), and our budget, assuming we want to meet our financial goals, doesn't really leave much room for splurging on stuff all the time.  Thus, almost every time I spend money, I spend time thinking about whether I need to or not.  Example: I want to make most of the lights in my house into IoT controlled smart lights.  I cannot justify spending exorbitant amounts of money on the smart bulbs, so as I replace switches, I'm putting in smart switches.  Even with that, so far I've only done switches that needed to be replaced, so I haven't purchased any that I didn't need; I just spent a bit more on the ones I did need.  Long story short, I spend a lot of time justifying any purchase I make, especially larger ones.

As such, and due to the fact that for ten years or so I was moving from place to place every 8-15 months, I've never had the ability to accumulate a bunch of stuff.  Now, we've been in this house for two and a half years, and it seems like it's bursting at the seams a little bit.  What happened?  Well, I'd love to blame it all on my kid or my wife, but though they share in the blame, so do I.  I've become a mass consumer, and it's been weighing on me.  Every time I throw away food because I let it rot in my refrigerator, I make myself a little sick.  Every time I break a toy and just throw it away because it's not worth fixing, I make myself a little sick.  All of this consuming with little to nothing to show for it is starting to wear me down.

This is where I've been trying to get.  Consumerism is just a symptom, but, lately, I've been thinking, "Is this really life?"  I mean, as a teenager and young adult, I spent a lot of my time thinking about purpose and meaning.  Lately, though, I can barely put five minutes together to just think...about anything.  I've been putting off writing this post because I didn't know how to write it, mostly because I honestly haven't given myself time to sit and think about what it is I want to actually say.  My wife and I make more money than we've ever made, but, due to our spending habits, both now and in the past (because I'm still paying for past mistakes), I still feel pinched for money every month.  I don't feel like we're getting anywhere with our debt.  I don't feel like I am going to be able to retire at an age where I can appreciate being retired.  Most of all, though, I don't really feel all that happy a lot of the time.

I have all this stuff, but most days I come home and veg out on the couch with my phone or watching Netflix or YouTube for hours and accomplish nothing.  I don't feel like I spend enough time with my son.  I don't read anymore (which I want to get into somewhere else).  I don't exercise as much as I should.  My house is never very clean.  Cooking has become such a chore that most nights we don't cook, even on the weekends when we have plenty of time to cook.  It took over a week to put up our Christmas decorations, which is especially bad when considering that 75-80% of them were put up on a single Saturday, then no work happened again until the following Saturday.  I don't walk my dog as regularly as I should.  The list goes on, but the point is the same: I don't feel like I'm doing anything with my life lately.  My job is, less than fulfilling to say the least, and at home I'm existing more than I am living.  I want to do more, but then I get distracted by some desire for some new thing and spend the limited funds I have on junk I probably don't need.  The more I think about it, the more depressed I get, so instead I do my level best to stop thinking about it and distract myself with my phone, or TV, or computer, etc.

This is wrong, and I know I'm not the only person that is feeling this.  The problem is, I don't know what the real problem is, so I can try to fight this symptom, but then I get caught up with another symptom, and in the end I don't feel like I'm making any progress.  I'll discuss some of the other symptoms later, but what I'm really trying to figure out is, What's Wrong with me, and the World at large, and why does it make me and so many people I know so depressed, anxious, and otherwise feeling awful most of the time?  More importantly, how do we fix things and actually start to approach self-actualization and happiness?