Our webmaster on ‘Stuff’

Posted by admin on February 22nd, 2008 filed in Hard to categorise

Don gets philosophical for his one minute of the upcoming series called Stuff on ABC TV…

Here’s the blurb…

This series looks at the human life-long love affair with material objects. It is a deeply personal and psychological portrait of our connection with our own “stuff”.

 

Stuff examines – from the cradle to the grave – the abiding passion all of us have for stuff – the stuff we buy, the stuff we treasure, the stuff we desire and the stuff that’s most important to us.

 

Present-day Australian society is one of the most asset-rich in human history. The modern mantra is that we now have too much stuff.

 

Although the topic of consumerism has been theorised and written about for many years, recent concerns about mass- production, globalisation, global warming and resource shortage, have made us all concerned with “over-consumption.” We now understand that our love for stuff could cost us the earth.

 

But how can we begin to give up our desire for stuff, unless we understand why we have it in the first place?

 

Stuff asks: Are we hard-wired to accumulate? At what age do we begin to identify stuff as our own? Why do we choose the stuff we do? How do we express our unique personalities through our stuff? And how does our attitude to stuff change on life’s cluttered journey?

 

Wendy Harmer – a pioneer of Australian comedy, and a world-class accumulator – authors, narrates and presents this four-part series that takes us from a baby shower to a retirement home; from a school yard to a prison. She asks everyone she meets : Why do you love your stuff so much? What does it mean to you? What’s the best stuff of all?

 

The answers she is given tell us that our relationship with our stuff is much more complex that we might realise… And that our conversations about over-consumption have only just

begun.