Less is more
Less stuff, more happiness, Graham Hill
Mar 2011 TED Talks 5'50
Writer and designer Graham Hill asks: Can having less stuff, in less room, lead to more happiness? He makes the case for taking up less space, and lays out three rules for editing your life.
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"You suspect, without even thinking about it, that any business called Dombey & Sons, Trujillo & Sons, Eubelhor & Sons, or even Harvey & Daughters must be a venerable business indeed. People are not founding companies today, as they once did, in hopes that their grandchildren would someday carry on the family tradition. No. Grandchildren take time. Nor does one buy deep-blue denim jeans with their dye stiff as tin, resigned to wearing them for a year before achieving a faded 'look.' One buys them prewashed, prefaded, and maybe prepatched at the knees or seat. Who can wait for nature to take its course? The traditional leather jacket, like a second skin after ten years of wearing, was not actually comfortable in its first year. You had to make an investment. The attachment to old clothes is in the teddy-bear category, growing more from an emotional web of associations than from anything in the cloth. As our reflexes have certain speeds, so does our formation of memories, our accretion of nostalgia. So can the years of breaking-in be effectively bypassed? Apparently so, because a typical catalogue advertises the 'Been There Leather Jacket': 'A jacket that (in former lives) has seen it all. . . . There are legends and sagas in each ruck and crease of the distressed, heavy, full-grain cowhide.'"
in Faster, the acceleration of just about everything (James Gleick; 1999)
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