I’m Gen X. My youth was a more or less peaceful and sane time. At least it seemed like that. But I met plenty of what I called “Depression People”. I don’t mean that in a bad way or anything related to the serious mental illness of depression. I’m referring to people who’d come of age during The Great Depression; particularly those who’d been deeply impacted by it.
Even a clueless kid could see the scars. I had empathy and respect. What they endured, I cannot understand. I was carefully humble in their presence; even as I wallowed in the “spoiled rotten plastic plenty” of the 1970’s.
“Depression People” wasn’t all old people, just some. You could tell by how they acted. They hoarded the tiniest resource. I remember seeing a box labeled “small bits of string” that had, you guessed it, small bits of string. It wasn’t a person who needed the bits for some logical reason, say a fly tying hobbyist. This was a person who’d been through The Great Depression. It created a desire to preserve things they might need. I remember other things; jars of buttons, dull needles, bent nails. All available for a song in the 1970’s. All carefully stored in case the “plenty” of 1970’s disappeared.
Our current world is inconceivably wealthy; even for the poorest among us. Despite spastic baying on social media, we are the richest humans to ever exist. (I think the absence of want causes susceptible people to get funky. If you just ate a squirrel for breakfast because that’s all you’ve got, you’re based as hell. Oddly, that comes with a more contented disposition. A whiny barista clutching a thousand dollar phone, who squandered six years of college, and sports tattoos that cost more than my first car will twist themselves in knots over the fact that Bill Gates lives in a solid gold house. I do not habitually compare myself to either the rich or the poor. I’m merely me. Much of modern suffering is mere envy.)
Paul R. Ehrlich wrote the Population Bomb in 1968 and was more wrong about human starvation than any man in all of human existence. Starting right when he got famous for his dumbass book, for the first time in human history, starvation was almost eliminated. If there’s a famine in our modern world, it’s caused. In my lifetime, North Korea has had famines, as well as Haiti, Ethiopia, and (depending on your definition of such things) Cuba. (There may be others, I’m not a history professor lecturing about the details.) The point is that none of those tragedies were a crop failure. Terrible governance creates pockets of misery within a species that seems to have mastered the production of vast quantities of food. If you see a person in America that’s starving, it’s tragic and lamentable but it’s most likely serious illness (often mental issues such as anorexia or drug addiction). None of us waste away because peanut butter costs $50 a jar.
The Great Depression was the last time failure of the backyard garden might just cash an American’s chips. You’d need a heart of stone not to empathize. I wanted to give every geezer stashing bottle caps and cornflakes a big hug.
Of course, none of that affected me. Or did it?
The Great Depression hit in 1929, just shy of 100 years ago. My youth in the 1970’s is about as far away from now as The Great Depression was then. My youth had nothing like the wealth of now. It wasn’t all that bad but it was definitely not like now.
No regrets! I got to watch Star Wars in the theater (long before Disney piledrove a great story into the ground). In 1981 MTV was playing music on Cable TV. I didn’t get cable in 1981 but I would soon. Our house switched from black and white to color TV in time for me to discover the Hulk was green! It’s mostly good memories. If I suffered food-wise it was because my mom bought Tab soda, not because of a potato famine. (*Tab soda, anyone remember that? It was awful!)
Last year I was cleaning house. As a rural fellow, that means stacking shit in my truck, driving it to a landfill, and tossing it on the heap. Amid the trash cans and plastic bags was an old broom destined for disposal. Having emptied my truck, I grabbed it and swept my truck bed clean.
I am not Depression People. I swear I’m not. But the broom was handy so I kept it. It stayed in the truck ready for the next dump run.
It got increasingly battered but I kept using it. My son viewed the broom with suspicion.
“Why don’t you toss that thing?”
“It still does an ok job.”
He shrugged. I suspect his thinking was that I’m such a goddamn fossil that I experienced a real live black and white TV and reminisce about it. Thus, allowances must be made for my weird behavior.
The broom disappeared for a while. I’d used it to brush snow off some firewood. Then it reappeared under an old tarp. I tossed it in the truck again. By now it was frayed and the handle was slightly bent.
“You gonna’ toss that thing?”
“Nah, it still works.”
Several weeks ago, on another dump run, the handle finally got bent completely out of shape. We were chucking things at the dump. The broom had given its all. My kid was up in the truck bed kindly helping me toss something heavy. I forget what it was. He’s a grown man now and helps me because he’s kind and he knows I’ve been having health issues. I much appreciate his help.
He looked at the broom. The handle was nearly folded in half. He looked back at me.
“OK fine”, I admitted, “it’s shot.”
He cocked back his arm to send the broom to the dust heap.
“Wait!” I interrupted. “Can you spin off the handle? I could use a whisk broom in my shop.”
Sometimes you say something and realize you sound like a dumbass. I could almost hear his eyes rolling.
“Just chuck it.” I surrendered.
He hurled it in a flash, lest I come up with some other cockamamie reason to keep it. He looked satisfied and I had to admit he was, in this topic at least, the wiser of us two.
Am I like the Depression People?
A couple weeks later he told me “a broom was on the way”. It was a gift. Apparently he’d ordered delivery from Walmart. This based on DoorDash or some other technology that is not now and never will be at my rural location. It makes sense to buy a bunch of shit all at once if you’re paying delivery. Part of that was a cheap broom.
The thought of delivery from WalMart seems amazingly luxurious. But I don’t mock it. I once lived where I could get Chinese Food delivered. It never got old. One must enjoy things when they can!
Here’s where things get modern. For some reason, known only to computer algorithms, the broom was slated “for delivery” but it was delayed, coming from some other location. There was no additional fee for this.
We discussed the broom. Where was it coming from? Who knows? How was it going to get delivered? No idea? All we knew was the computer said it was “on the way”.
It arrived a few weeks later; in the mail. It came in it’s own box. It was packaged in three pieces. My son assembled it and handed it to me. I can’t remember how much he paid but it was a pittance. I think it was $6?
$6… for a whole damn broom. A broom delivered from God knows where it was manufactured to a mailbox a million miles away. There can’t possibly be much profit in that?
It’s lying in my truck bed right now. It’s not an heirloom, just a cheap broom that through some inconceivable reason was sent via mail. I’ll use the hell out of it and in due time I’ll chuck its battered hulk; probably in the same landfill where the other one went.
All for $6. The mind boggles.
There’s no way a $6 delivered broom is a sustainable model. We all sense such things. On the other hand, nobody knows what will come next and it doesn’t necessarily have to suck. People have been predicting collapse as long as I’ve been alive and it keeps not quite happening. I’ve predicted 7 of the last 4 economic downturns so my track record ain’t great.
It’s nutty that a broom would come in the mail for $6 but nobody knows what comes next. Will it be $150 handmade, organic, hippie approved, locally made brooms? Will they be heirloom quality? Such a broom would require that you care for and maintain it for a lifetime and maybe pass it on to the next generation. Or will it go the other way? Will SpaceX drop one from space for $3? Will it be the bare minimum number of molecules, fall apart in a week, and come in six packs? Disposa-brooms?
I’ve no idea.
Does some portion of each successive generation become “Depression People”?
I do not have a box labeled “bits of string”. I do have a bunch of campfire wood culled from old pallets. I’m damn near there aren’t I?
Mom and Dad were both GD babies. Both of them knew hard work. Moms family drove upstate and neighboring states and picked crops. A family of ten, they lived in large tents, emptied garages or barns of the farmer they were working for. Foods – cotton (she described the spines of that often). From fall, to early winter, they did this, so school was a sometime thing.
Dads family was a family of six, living in a small town. Besides running a larger general goods store for a relative, my Grandfather had a ‘hole in the wall’ general store for himself, about 15′ wide x 40′ deep. Board shelves along the wall and tables with produce set in the middle. Two light bulbs and an overhead ceiling fan were the electrical needs. Dad was given a bicycle, this to deliver groceries to customers who could afford to pay for the service. I don’t know the cost to my Grandfather, but Dad earned 10 cents a week. Very frugal people my parents.
I had a family member on Moms side that collected nails from construction sites after hours, sweeping with a magnetic along the edges of the roof line. Some were usable, but many were bent and would require time to straighten them for use.. He took those along too.
Because he also collected aluminum cans to sell. Before crushing them, he would add a couple of bent nails inside the can to increase the weight of unit. In his mind, he figured the labor he ‘provided’ also generated extra income for his trouble.
My grandmother’s sisters bought cans of food with the labels missing, because they were cheaper, long after they had all the money they needed to live comfortably. This was well into the 70s or early 80s.
———–
There’s no way a $6 delivered broom is a sustainable model.
— add in that as many as 80% of online purchases get returned, and you can see that there is something else going on with the economy. I’ve read speculation that in the case of made in china goods, it’s a money laundering thing, and a way to get money out of china.
I know from my involvement in the secondary market of reselling returned items, there is an awful lot of ‘returns fraud’ going on too. That’s when you buy something, but return an old version and keep the new item. Some of it, they return random cr@p, not even a similar item. Some of my resellers say that it can be over 40% of the returns they buy. Some categories are even higher.
Right now, amazon forces the supplier to eat the cost of returns, but that isn’t sustainable either.
————–
It all points to disruption and hard times ahead, as far as I’m concerned.
Glad you are recovering,
nick
I can relate to what your saying; I tend to save things that I probably shouldn’t or at least don’t need to…
But such is the curse/value/echo of having parents that were young in the Depression years. And having the grandparents that had to deal with it directly.
Having the ‘resuse/retain’ mindset has value, its just sometimes annoying..
I think it’s because the stuff rubs off over generations.
My dad was born in 1936 so he doesn’t remember the depression per se, but his family was very poor so the effect was similar. He vividly remembered times when all they had to eat for the week was a big pot of soup beans and a pan of cornbread…and they were doing pretty well compared to some. They had the ability to grow beans and corn.
Funny thing is he never got tired of that type of food even though they ate it from necessity. When I was growing up, soup beans and cornbread was a special meal and we all enjoyed it.
There were obvious signs that my dad was raised poor. One of the more interesting ones is that he refused to wear denim until much later in his life. When I was a kid, he never complained about us wearing it, but he wouldn’t do it. “Jeans are what poor people wear because they can’t afford real pants, I’m not poor.” But the big indicator was as you mentioned: he never got rid of anything that might possibly be put to use later (and some things that could never be used again). When he passed and my mom sold the farm, cleaning out the garage and attic and barn of all the bits and bobs he’d collected over the years was a huge undertaking.
I’m like that on a smaller scale your post reminded me of me. I have a very hard time getting rid of things that still work, even if they’re outmoded, beat up and “reduced” in functionality, if they still work, I keep them. Example: I have three post hole diggers. I had one, but when I was in the middle of digging post holes for a fence, a handle broke. I couldn’t readily find a replacement handle without ordering it, so I ordered it, but bought a new digger so I could get back to work right away. When the new handle came in, I fixed the old one. So I had two. Then several years later, another one with a broken handle came my way (long story…short version: truck crashed into the neighbor’s house and came to rest in the trees between our properties. The contents of the bed of his truck ended up in my yard. The truck was hauled away and he never came to claim his property, so it became mine. Mostly trash but a post hole digger (and a shovel) with a broken handle were among the debris.). I can’t throw away a perfectly good post hole digger just because it’s got a broken handle. Ordered a new handle…fixed it…now I have three.
You need a post hole digger? I can send you one.
Anyway, I’m like that with lots of things. I don’t keep pieces of string or bottle caps, but I do keep scraps of wood, wire, pipe, things like that if it’s of a length that I deem might be useful in the future. Pretty much anything over about 24″ I keep. Stuff like that has saved my bacon many times when I needed to make a repair and I happened to have a piece of replacement wire or pipe or whatever on hand.
I don’t keep bent nails, but I never throw away screws, bolts, nuts, washers, things like that. If they’re not rusted away to nothing or stripped out, they go in my hardware bin.
Most of the stuff I own is older than the median age of today’s population. I have hand tools that I still use that are older than I am (got from my dad) and I’m old.
We grew up hearing “waste not, want not” from our elders. Maybe we don’t live it to the point of washing and saving tin foil and plastic wrap, but we still remember it and live it in our own way.
Youngsters these days grew up in the disposable world. It’s more expensive to fix something than to buy a new one. The new one will only last six months or a year, but when it breaks, throw it away and buy another.
Not necessarily saying that’s a bad thing…as you mentioned, we live in a world of riches and leisure that would be unimaginable to our grandparents, let alone our great grandparents. 19th century kings would be envious of how our poorest citizens live.
But I think we do that because we are modeling to a lesser degree the examples that were set for us.
Identify with this. I have a garage of what I call “What ifs?”. Do I need 5 calf bottles? Not now, but “What if?”. None of the cattle has thrown a calf in the past 3-4 years and walked away, but it might happen again. Perhaps it is the last 5 decades of having stuff happen that I have no control over, or hard times that lend to my habit. I am okay with that. The next generation hasn’t experienced hard times but some of them maintain they have. To be a fly on the wall when they reach for the broom…and it is not there.
I, too, think it’s passed down. My grandma was a child during the depression. I never learned why and no one seemed willing to tell me, but she despised tomatoes and refused to eat them (made me wonder if at some point she’d had to survive on tomatoes alone).
“Use it up. Wear it out.” “It’s can still be useful.”
My husband and I both had/have this to some degree. We saved a LOT, just in case. Or it was, “We’ll just put it here for now and then take care of it later.”
Eventually later arrives.
And now all the stuff has paralyzed me. I need to get rid of it so that I can move on. But it’s HUGE job for one person.
I’d recommend shedding as you go, as much as possible.
Also, Tab will also remind me of stomach flu. Yeah. It was the only thing you could keep down, but that TASTE… ick.
I’ve got a broom head in my truck to whisk out sand when I take the dog to the beach for a run, the handle went TU long ago
I struggle with the same affliction. It is stuff to use as a material, and tools to craft the materials. As a small woodshop owner, it is also necessary to be self limiting- as floor space has it’s own value, and time has value- so if for example, the piece of cutoff hardwood cannot be found within a minute or so, it will never be used and be a negative value. The wood stove is the last place of value for it.
My wife is fond of saying we have everything here we need, we just have to find it.
Remarkably, although we can spin, weave, sew, weld, machine, wire ,plumb, plane, sand, etc.,we are largely free of a worse affliction- “chotsky-itis”.
I once went to stay with a relative, in a big suburban house, and realized after a day, although the entire house was filled with “stuff”, there was neither a tool, nor a weapon, nor food, anywhere in it. Plenty of beanie baby’s though. And rock star memorabilia. I felt exposed and vulnerable and dependent on some unknown external force.
>There’s no way a $6 delivered broom is a sustainable model.
There was no human hand involved, and that’s where the expense is.
The broom factory is a conveyor of materials that probably reduce the broom to around $1/each if you keep everything moving.
The transport system is also a constantly moving flow, and packages can be tossed onto the pile by the automated shipping systems. There’s always room for brooms. If you don’t pay for Amazon Prime, if you buy one item at a time, you’ll (or at least I’ll (in remote Texas)) get it the next day, two days max.
God bless capitalism.
I never thought about the automated manufacturing. I sure do appreciate our new robot factory systems.
I was born at the end of the first year of Gen-X, according to the stats.
Does anyone else have trouble throwing away a good, sturdy cardboard box?
At least I know I’m not the only one with coffee cans (some metal) full of random hardware.
I had the box and coffee can situation too. But time is curing that. Amazon is burying me in perfectly good boxes so they no longer seem rare. And now that I have a 3d printer I don’t need to stash hardware in coffee cans; I can make super cool hardware storage stuff!
How about pasta sauce jars?
Oh wow! I used to save pasta sauce jars but I didn’t think anyone else did that. Eventually I broke myself of the habit.
I think a lot of the actions are not only memories and warnings passed down from generations prior, not just the appearance of wealth and overconsumption of many, but a large factor of rural/urban mindset and being an actual craftsman versus an NPC.
I know in my case it takes a 45-minute drive to the nearest hardware store, and my trips are fairly limited, so I buy extras and rehab anything of use to limit trips. I can also rehab the used parts and use them in ways they were not intended to fulfill a need that arises, which I find is not the mindset of most people anymore.
Disposable culture leads to disposable people.
I haven’t been able to find a copy of Paul Ehrlich’s not-so-famous follow-up, “The Race Bomb”, sounds like it could make “The Bell Curve” sound like a DEO best-seller…
https://www.amazon.com/Race-Bomb-Paul-R-Ehrlich/dp/0345251008
Here is how it is done. A) you have 1.3 billion people that need to eat and have a roof overhead. B) The material cost for the broom, metal, wood and plastics (likely subsidized through price controls), about 30 cents in China or India and the factory pays a cumulative dollar in labor cost for it. The shipping in bulk to America adds maybe 25 cents inclusive of all handling to end destination. Walmart charges the seller 10 cents per item sold for use on platform. So your 6 dollar broom is actually a $1.65 item in China or India to keep their people fed and employed. U.S. importer is getting a nice chunk as is Uncle Sam with taxes.
Where we lose as a nation, is that there are no broom manufacturers left that can compete, so no jobs or benefits to our population. This is what has to change, if we can make a broom at a profit for $10.00 as sold, do like the Japanese, pay a bit more to keep the jobs local. Our mental outlook has to go from “global” to “support your local sheriff or manufacturer” as the case may warrant.
And before everyone starts whingeing about how our “poor” cannot afford the price, ask yourself if they would be “poor” if they were employed making the broom in U.S.A.? Henry Ford was a curmudgeonly old bastard and had a few race/political related mental issues, but even he recognized that paying his workers enough to afford what they manufactured, improved the overall business and as an afterthought, the nation as a whole.
Modern unions are however another issue as most are now parasitic in nature and do not provide benefits to their minions unless you are at the top of the pyramid and support communism or the more palatable (to some) socialist democrat views which can be summed up as “I got mine, so FU”.
It’s not just a depression issue, it’s an economic issue. Going to town is an hour drive, so I stock up on things. If I need a bolt for a plow I get a couple of the ones I think I need, a couple shorter, a couple longer, and eat the extra $1 to have extra bolts versus spending $25 in gas and wear to make a return trip. Which I store in the shop and wonder why I have no room for the machinery. On the other hand, I’ve old paint cans full of bolts from grandpa who lived during the depression and never threw away anything of possible value. My fault, I’ve not spent the time to go through and organize that bolt collection to pick out the right one and avoid that trip to town, and it’s faster and easier to go to the hardware store than it is to organize the paint can full of crap I was given. In other words, I was given self-sufficiency and didn’t spend the time to secure it. On the other hand, surely there is an economic equation that explains why we spend $600 in seeds and tillage and water to grow $100 worth of tomatoes and squash, but if we ever presented it to our gardening spouses I suspect the cost of divorce would weigh heavily on our economic decisions about the cost of tomatoes from then on.
I didn’t grow up in the depression but I was raised by people who did.
And it shows.
Yea, cardboard boxes. Jars of nails… all of that.