Check out this blog post by Charles Hugh Smith.
I do enjoy beautiful and useful things. Alas, most of the rest of it is made in China. I think that's much of the problem. Not that there are not many beautiful and useful things made in China! But scads of what we buy today -- clothing and household electronics, especially-- is just junk, poorly made, and more likely than not by people who are either close to slavery or maybe even, and once you're done with it, unless you want to pay to store it because you've got some pesky chakra attachment to it, it's not worth $5.
At Goodwill recently in Silicon Valley, I was there when a woman drove up in a late model open-roofed Jeep ferrying the great sausage roll of an oversized Oriental carpet. The Goodwill worker told her, "It's too large, they'll probably recycle it." She pouted. "I should have Craig Listed it!" But in a split second she said, "Oh well." Then she hopped in her Jeep, and blazed out of the lot.
P.S. How to Declutter a Library: The 10 Question Flow Chart, ye olde blog post by Yours Truly.
And: Decluttering Your Writing Or, The Integrity of Design.
