Poor. Choices.

There are about 82 million single family residential homes in America:

Of those 82 million homes, about 63% have a garage or carport:

And of those 52 million homes with a garage, about 0.01% have space for a car in it:

This leads me to my conclusion:

So, what?

Why do I care?

Because…

Filling your garage with children’s toys, tools, second fridges, bins, old furniture, bikes, shoes, half-empty paint cans, clothes, cardboard boxes, novelty street signs, knick knacks, holiday decorations, broken trampolines, dirty kayaks, muddy boots, weed killers, folding chairs, and garbage bins is not only uncivilized but it’s a sure sign of excess.

Maybe I’m biased.

My first house didn’t have a garage or even a paved driveway. This meant my car was either snowy and muddy half of the year or dusty the other half of the year. Bird poop and tree branches fell on it constantly. Commuting to work every morning required 5 minutes of scraping ice off the windshield.

If I wanted to do a project that required ventilation, like sanding and painting a piece of furniture, I had to do it in my front yard.

I always wanted a garage.

And I finally got one!

Now my wife and I happily park our cars side-by-side inside its protective four walls.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say having a garage and being able to park in it is literally the pinnacle of human existence.

Could Genghis Khan, King Tut, or Alexander the Great park a car in their garage? I rest my case.

But as I walk around my neighborhood, and any neighborhood for that matter, almost everyone has to park in their driveway or on the street because their garages are filled with all the refuse I mentioned above.

It reeks of consumerism, hoarding, and utter disrespect to those poor saps who have to deal with, well, sap, dripping from the neighbor’s pine tree onto the hood of their car. Or was that just me?

I’m a firm believer in the simple equation of “less stuff = more happiness”:

I do understand the desire to be self-sufficient and that to be self-sufficient requires a baseline level of equipment. A good saw, shovel, hose, and ladder is required of almost every suburban family. I can even understand couple hooks to hang a bike and a corner for your push mower to call home.

That’s how I landed on the optimal level shown above. Less stuff than the average person equals more happiness than the average person.

But beyond that, most people just accumulate shit for the sake of accumulating it. And it all comes with a price tag.

Not only is there the direct cost of you buying it in the first place, but there’s also the environmental cost of the raw materials, the making of it, packaging it, shipping it around the world, and stocking it in a warehouse or a store.

Then there’s the mental and physical cost of you storing it in your garage. As you collect more and more, you may even come to believe you need a bigger house. Another price tag.

If you have a house, and that house has a garage (and I know there are 52 million of you!), take time this spring to donate, throw away, repurpose, or sell as much clutter as you can.

Not only will you see the physical weight of all that stuff diminish before your eyes, but you’ll feel the mental weight disappear from your psyche, too.

You’ll feel freer, lighter, and less burdened by all that useless junk.

No matter how much money you have, if you can’t park in your own garage, you aren’t wealthy.