It's tiring to move with my belongings!

We like to move it move it.

People moves all the time. We move even since we wake up in the morning, we get ready, dressed up, and we go out to make the world a slightly better place to live. Let’s not fool ourselves, obviously It is more to make our life better living, weather it is to meet our friends, go to school, work, or simply running errands. For all the reasons that make us move from one coordinates to others, we always have our belongings with us. 

Belongings as per dictionary definition, is a person’s moveable possessions. We carry our belonging in respective of our moving purposes. For instance, shopping bag, phone, wallet when we go for groceries. Laptops, water bottle, books, lunch boxes when we go to school, and they keep adding up the bigger our moving purposes become. When we travel we pack our necessities, such as toiletries, clothing, electronics, and other personal items. So when we move to a new house or apartment, you get the idea!  

Here’s an illustration of how our belongings pile up the bigger our movement purposes are.

Size matters! Are You making it easier for me? 

Big Cities are designed with complex and high technology transportation system, we can move efficiently and safely cross town in short time. Trains, buses, bikes, boats, car sharing are all designed to support people mobility. But how do they cater people with their belongings? 

With our belongings, we restrict our movement in space, time, energy, and sometimes what we can bring. It becomes less flexible and often times we need to make adjustment accordingly. For instance, try to get into London Tube at their rush hour with your luggages. Not only we will get those secretly judging stare from people around, we might find it frustrating to move around in such crowd, limited elevator access, and space in train. Another example is the variety of restricted and prohibited goods traveller can bring differs on each countries, and we usually got this information before we land. Looking back to when I have to throw away my delicious Indonesian beef jerky at US border.. I heard once a man just ate them in front the inspection officers just so he didn’t want those delicacies to be a waste. Hah!

What is it with us and our belongings? 

Let’s face it, sometimes people are crazy! They pack more than what they can physically carry, or sometimes situation and condition require them to do so. Sure, some people need different set of clothing everyday on our vacation to look fab. To all the girls I know out there who packed 30 inch suitcase for a weekend trip to Bali, you guys definitely take awesome pictures with your OOTDs ( Outfit of The Day ). 

I will have to come back to this section after more research on people behavior and their belongings. But consumerism, that term did not come in a phoof! According to Wikipedia, it is a social and economic order that encourages the acquisition of goods and services in ever-increasing amounts. It started in 20th century, where overproduction of goods leads manufacturers to start a advertising scheme to increase people spending.We are living in a culture that encourage us to buy more products. We are labelled through how much we spend, what brand we use, the most updated gadget, fashion, postal code, that they unconsciously become our life goals. While it began to increase economic growth, consumerism grows to a social behavior. We grow from consuming products for our basic needs ( food, warm, water, home ) to self actualization ( brands, prestige, social status )

Next I will write about how city can help people movement and their belongings..