Balancing out Justin

The similarities between being overweight and being cluttered are something that makes me think real hard about those behaviors that are tacitly encouraged by our consumerist society.
Consuming food in amounts that are not conducive to our health or consuming stuff in amounts that are not conducive to our financial well-being or to order in our households- both are fuelled by the misconception that more of a good thing must be a better thing.
Actually, it isn´t. One bit of folk wisdom from DH´s family came from a male relative who used to say something that in English translates to "too much and too little is just the same thing".
The man was right.
The ancient Egyptians worshipped a goddess called Ma´at. She was the divinity in charge of "the right measure" or, in other words, the goddess of balance.
We seem, as a society, to have lost that balance long ago.
How else to explain the so-called obesity epidemic, or the rising number of people who are suffocating under mountains of debt and clutter and, in order to feel better, proceed to buy even more stuff with borrowed money, thereby effectively making said mountains grow even bigger?
Evolutionarily, perhaps, that kind of behavior even makes sense. In times of general scarcity of resources, the one who managed to secure for himself as many as possible of those resources had a decided advantage when it came to surviving, say, the next famine or the next ice-cold winter. "Having a lot" became synonymous with being secure.
In our times of an abundance the like of which has never been known before in the history of mankind,  this connection is something that must, at the very least, be redefined. In first-world countries, at least, there is mostly no danger of things running out or becoming unavailable anytime soon.
Thus, we´re called upon to find out the right measure of things to have or food to eat. The paleolithic forebears to whom we owe our clutter genes as well as the propensity for overeating are, in terms of asking how much of something is good for us, not exactly the best advisors to listen to.
If we ever should need it, it will be available.
How much of the space inside our homes is taken up by the glaring manifestation of the fact that we still refuse to believe that?
And- even worse-  how much debt has been incurred in order to fill our stashes of things who have entered our homes, not because we needed them at once, but "just in case" we might need them someday?
This Justin Case person is singlehandedly responsible for quite a significant percentage of clutter and debt.
Any time we invoke his name when buying something, what it really means is "I don´t need this right now". More often than not, it even means "I won´t ever need this". Either way, it means that another piece of clutter is about to enter our life and our habitation.
Simply by not catering to the pretended needs of Justin Case, we could save ourselves quite a lot of money and space.
So how does one tell them from legitimate foresight?
For me, the litmus test is asking myself whether I can reasonably expect to use the item anytime soon. What "soon" means depends on what item you´re looking at. For a winter coat or warm boots, it may mean "within a year". Same thing for an oven pan that holds a whole turkey, or a set of snorkeling equipment. If the item is already in my possession, I usually prolong the period of grace a bit before I toss it. But if I am in the process of acquiring it, I tend to be ruthless and set the time limit for using it no further than it would take me to get to the place where the item is sold again. (as in, we do not have a big electronics store where we live, so, if I go there twice a year and the item is, say, a USB stick that I may need in the future, I set the time limit to six months because I could, if I needed it later than that, buy it on my next visit).With items I could grab on every lunch break, that means strictly no buying in advance, unless it´s consumables and the last pack at home has already been opened and is being used.

Every Jew and Christian probably knows the biblical story of the manna in the desert. God gave the Jews who had just escaped from Egypt with little more than the clothes on their backs food that just had to be picked up from the ground. But there was a hitch to it- they were only allowed to pick up enough to feed them for that day. Anything more than that was spoiled and rotten by the next morning.  Generally, this story is interpreted as being about trust. They had to trust their God to repeat the miracle on the next day.
We are, in a way, called upon to make a similar leap of faith by trusting that most things we would bring into our lives "just in case" would still be available to us if ever said case should arise. Doing so frees up time, money and space in our lives that would otherwise likely end up wasted.


Julia