My parents are hoarders. Visiting their house is almost like visiting a demented museum, a trove of once-treasured curiosities. You can sense it as you step in the door, ghosts of the past trapped in a lifetime's worth of accumulated objects – a lifetime's worth of rubble. I feel as if my entire childhood is buried somewhere amongst it all. And though I've moved on, a part of me remains there stagnant.

Sometimes it's as if we don't own our possessions, they own us. They all vie for our attention, and, like inanimate vampires, steadily consume our energy. We become torn between them all and are trapped by their very presence. It's like being at a big art gallery, perhaps the Louvre – every piece is precious, intricate and beautiful, yet we can't fully appreciate any single one of them because there are too many! The object loses some of its charm by being surrounded by a multitude of other similarly charming objects. And if we try to look at them all we quickly become exhausted of energy. This feeling is analogous to what you'll experience by being in the house of a hoarder.

For hoarders, it's easy to give in to it all, to just give up caring. In my parent's house, I know, as soon as you remove something there's something else in its place. You can't organise anything because all the space is already taken. It's absolutely overwhelming, there's nowhere to begin. And at night, alone, you wonder how it ever came to this.

We buy things because it brings us pleasure to do so. There are so many beautiful objects; we want to have them, to enjoy them, to show to the world how well-off we are. Look at how a child's face lights up when you give her a lovely new doll. You feel a similar pleasure when admiring a shiny new vase or a new dress, for example.

And yet we know full well that money can't buy happiness, that the pleasure we feel is only momentary and entirely empty. We try to prolong it, to make it real, by buying more and more, but this has precisely the opposite effect – the more we acquire the less happy we are and the more shallow our lives become. The child who immediately receives every new doll she wants may become spoiled and ungrateful. She may have difficulty coping on her own in later life, and suffer anxiety and depression. Couples who place too much emphasis on material wealth put their relationships under enormous tension. Arguments about money are estimated to be dominant in 90 per cent of divorce cases. In South Africa, some people have even attempted suicide as a result of the stress of adopting Western-style materialistic values. Although most of us won't die as a direct result of pursuing material wealth, life can easily pass us by while we are lost on our quest.

Buying things regularly means we don't appreciate them as much as we would if we acquired them sporadically and at a slower rate. Once precious possessions get lost, rust, collect dust and fade away. Yet we can't bear to part with them, and it's no wonder, considering how much of ourselves we put into the process of acquiring and maintaining these things.

This is not a message to throw things away, but rather should encourage you to think twice before purchasing them in the first place. If you're buying things to supplement a meaningless existence, be honest with yourself and stop immediately. On this site you'll find a lot of material to assist you in re-evaluating what's really important in life. Also, don't buy something cheap and disposable if you can avoid it. Buying junk causes more and more junk to be produced, at the expense of the planet (and good taste!). Instead, you should seek out only a small number of quality objects of timeless appeal and functionality – things that will continually bring you pleasure without becoming a burden on your spirit. Money is far from being the only thing you'll save.

by Karen Julia

June 16, 2007