I read this with the same irritable suspicion I feel whenever I read such statistics. How do they know this? Did they take a random sample of American households and then count the objects within them? Seems unlikely. Did they combine aggregated retail sales data with census data and obsolescence assumptions? Seems complicated and fraught with distortion.
Furthermore, what counts as a possession? Every book on the shelf? Each sock in a pair? Every Band-Aid in a box of 100? Every nail in a box of 1,000?
And how do I know that Joshua Fields Millburn didn't just read a statistic somewhere, misremember it and type it into his blog, to be read and repeated by people like me?
With all these limitations, how can we ever really know anything outside of our immediate sphere?
One thing I do know: with the disposal of this landscape edging, there are no objects left behind my potting shed.
One hundred twenty-seven down, 299,873 to go.
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