It started, like this note, with a blob. A canary yellow smudge of paint in the middle of the white canvas pallet. A few more strokes of the instructor’s brush, and two circles emerged, one balancing precariously on top of the other… But what is it?, my 7 year old self wondered. After another few strokes, suddenly it was clear:  the yellow head and body of a baby chicken. When the instructor then drew a dark black line around the bird, my life was changed forever: until then, I never knew you could paint by filling in the middle before drawing the lines.

There are two types of people: blob people and line people.  Blob people explore life like the yellow canary painting: putting color down first, and seeing what emerges. They wander across the pages of their lives, and when they find something shiny, stop, and let the ink in their pen saturate that part of their story. You know them: the guys who picked their major in college based on what department they happened to have the most courses in.  Or that friend who moved to a foreign country because they were curious. If you ask them to identify a good investment, they’ll probably cock their heads to a side, remember a cool article and exhibit they saw about 3D printing, and suggest looking there.

Line people, by contrast, are the planners, who draw the black line first, and then fill the rest in according to their outline. They have their act together. Line people figure the exact combination of courses and hours they need to get into medical schools, or how to hit all of Rome’s best tourist spots in 12 hours. Ask them to identify a good investment, and they’ll structure you a spreadsheet of recommendations, with weightings for risk appetite and investment horizon. You know them too.

A mix of these personalities can achieve incredible (and fun) things. And indeed, many people that have defined history are blob people who figured out how to draw a line around what they were working on:  the men that drafted the sentiments of the rebellious colonies into the US Constitution; business leaders who took intuition about market trends built railroads; religious prophets that used memorable parables to define good and evil in ways that resonated across the world for centuries; scientists who captured observed curiosities in universe in simple equations; writers who defined the subtle sensations of the human experience in words that affect how we see the world ourselves.

To finish this Aabservation, I suppose I should draw a final clear black line around the idea that emerged over the past paragraphs.  Namely, this post postulated personalities of three types of people: (a) Blob people, (b) Line people, and (c) Blob people who draw lines.

Pigeons are stunning creatures.

Trust me. I also once thought pigeons were vermin: dirty, stupid rats with wings. No longer.

The turning point for me came at Everest Base Camp. I had schlepped there from Lhasa, Tibet: three days of off-road driving at increasing altitudes. When I arrived at the (bottom of the) top of the world, there they were. How could my city-slicker birds also survive in the Himalayan heights?

The more I looked into pigeons, the more incredible these birds became. Pigeons are a type of dove whose native home is a rocky cliff, which is why they feel so comfortable in Manhattan window sills.

They are by some accounts the smartest bird in the world, able to recognize themselves in the mirror and even recognize letters.

They are homing birds, instinctively able to return home from anywhere — and at up to 100 miles per hour for many hours on end. There’s a culture of racing these birds by putting them into an enclosed van, and releasing them hundreds of miles from their homes. Scientists suspect magnetic elements in their nose and their exceptional eye sight lets them find their way home, even over oceans. Their eye sight works better when their eyes are stationary which is why they try to hold their heads in the same place when they walk.

This homing ability earned them war medals. During World War I, there were thousands of pigeon handlers, who managed communications with the front lines by tying messages to pigeons’ feet and letting them fly home. Some pigeons heroically flew through mortar fire to get the message home and safe their human comrades.

This homing ability is probably why we see pigeons everywhere; mankind’s armies have been using pigeons as carrier birds for thousands of years, and so they have become as domesticated as dogs, horses and cats. They’ve adapted to eat our food, ignore our crowds and cars, and find homes in our buildings (and on our statutes).

And they even resemble us socially. Like humans, they tend to mate for life. That pigeon couple you pass on your way to Starbucks has likely been together for years, having made a home in a window near you.

Watch the younger ones in a park while listening to club music on your headsets, and you’ll see more social similarities: the males puff up and dance in circles while the lady in question will look demur and continue to peck at the ground. If a person throws out a handful of pizza crusts nearby, the guy will interrupt his wooing to get some grub. (Typical.)

Pigeons even kiss. The first time I saw it happen was, ironically, on the death wall of the Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona. They smooched for a minute, he popped up on the back of her to do his thing, then jumped off just as fast, fluffed his feathers, and flew off.

And of course, pigeons also poo on things. So, the last few decades, we’ve come to think of them as stupid.

But watch them more closely, and admire them: their intimate human-like relationships, their intimate relations with humans, their incredible adaptability, and their strength, endurance, intelligence, and skill. Perhaps you’ll come to see, as I did in the thin air of Everest, how beautiful ordinary life becomes when you find pigeons beautiful.

Yours,
Liz

—

If you want more pigeon info check out http://www.deterapigeon.com/21-amazing-facts-about-pigeons.htm and Pigeons, by Andrew D. Blechman.

Yes, there’s a book about pigeons. And yes, it’s good. And, yes, of course I read it.

One of the greatest misconceptions I had before my MBA was thinking that things had value.

I had this idea that a thing, whether it was a company, a product or a service, had a value, and that getting an MBA would teach me out how to calculate that value.

But what I’ve learned over the past two years is that things don’t have an intrinsic value based on just what they are, but also on the 5 other “Ws”: who, when, where, how and why they are being valued. If you want to find the “value” of something, you need to ask 6 questions:

– Who is doing the valuing? You might call this defining or segmenting the market. To increase the value of something, find the people who value it most — who really hate being cramped on flights and can pay for business class, or who love watching Olympic volleyball.

– When are they doing the valuing? In other words, what else has just happened to them? Maybe they are entrepreneurs who are about to go bust; they may value cash enough to give up more equity than they would otherwise. Or maybe they are on a first date, and happy to splurge on champagne. Or just lost their life savings in the financial crisis. Timing matters.

– Where are they when they are valuing it? You might pay $15 for a gin & tonic at a posh club, but would balk at paying that in a dive bar. “Where” is relevant to real estate, as anyone renting a flat in London knows all too well, and anything that relates to real estate. Which used to be almost everything, before the internet anyway. (And now with mobile browsing location detection, the “where” is making a comeback.)

– How are they valuing it? People value most things in reference to other things, so understanding what someone is using as a comparison matters: are they comparing the price of the Gucci wallet to cheaper wallets, or to other more expensive items at Gucci? Are they valuing a company based on its assets today, or on its potential future cash flows in 5 years?

– Why are they valuing it? Buying a white cake costs $20. Buying a white cake for a wedding costs $200. People will value the same thing in radically different ways depending on the reasons for valuing it. Valuation by brokers can be particularly tricky for this reason: are they pricing the house low to get it sold, or high to increase their commissions?

– What are they valuing? Oh yeah, the thing itself matters too. A little.

Well, Liz, you think, what an obvious Aabservation. Of course the value of something depends on who, when, where, how, and why as well. Of course it’s not just the “what.”

But I promise you’ll forget that complexity as soon as you see a statistic about the value of Greek debt (“the” value? really?), or observe price volatility in the stock markets (surprise!), or see a supply and demand curve showing a thing’s value at the intersection.

If you are interested this topic, I’m happy to chat further as we learned a number of techniques to get at the value for a specific transaction throughout our MBA — in marketing, financial modeling, negotiations, and organizational behavior classes.

But that would take longer to explain here, and your time, by any metric, is valuable.

Yours,
Liz

www.lizaab.com

As part of my friend Silvia Chiang’s wedding last week, I was asked to prepare a short talk on the topic of “Humility.” Thought you might have fun with this. Congratulations to Silvia and Parker!

On humility
Ode to an Onion

Oh onion, humble onion —
How modest you are. You never seek attention, growing underground, dressed in brown.
Then, when peeled and brought to light, you hide in white.
So that you stay overlooked, when cooked, you turn clear:
You disappear.

But onion, humble onion —
It’s not this modest humility which awes.
It’s how humbly you serve, enhancing everything around you, adapting yourself in a thousand ways.
Diced or sliced, you turn bland salads into spicy fests of flavor.
Or sauteed with ginger chicken, you melt into caramel, sweet and tender.

For onion, humble onion —
What recipe do you not humbly grace?
Sauces, stews, salads, sandwiches, stir fry, shish kebab,
Meats, marinades, curries — cuisines of all types, from so many cultures.
You unite us all in flavor.

So onion, humble onion —
Though it’s not your nature, accept this song of praise.
And remind us, next time we see you, hidden on our plates, to be like you :
As humble as an onion.

– Liz Aab

Why, really, do nerds wear glasses?  As a nearsighted nerd myself, I’d often heard the usual reasoning: reading strains your eyes.  But surely non-nerds strain their eyes too, don’t they?  Like by looking at screens like this one?

I think the causality is wrong: it’s not nerdism that causes bad vision;  it’s bad vision that creates nerds.

I observed this phenomenon a year and half ago, at the start of my MBA at London Business School. I sat in the back of the U-shaped 80-person lecture theatre (yes, with an “re”).  When our first lecturer projected an Excel spreadsheet on the whiteboard, I had to move closer to the front — I couldn’t see the microscopic print from far away.  The past year and a half, I’ve asked to sit in the front 2 rows for all my classes, so that I don’t have a problem seeing the board clearly.

Now, what happens when you sit close to the front?  You speak more often and with less inhibition, because you literally don’t see the 70 other students behind you in the class.  You don’t have to shout across a long distance, so you see education more like a conversation more than a speech.  You can’t get distracted by your iPhone, because the professor will definitely catch you.  And so day after day, you are more engaged in the class than your peers in the back row, you pay more attention, you ask more questions… You are a nerd!

Remember back to where this all started, to when you got your very first pair of blue plastic glasses. Your vision had been squinty just before you saw the eye doctor, so your 10 year old self inched closer to the chalkboard.  Once there, the teacher called on you more, you asked more questions, you talked less with your neighbors, you doodled less with your crayons… You became a nerd!

By the time your vision was corrected (and it had to get corrected each year as your eyeballs grew, remember), your position at the front of the classroom, and in your class, was set. You would always be a nerd.

If you did a study comparing the distance students are from the whiteboard with their academic performance, I’d bet you’d get statistically significant correlations. And if you extended this study to see how people did in life after school, I suspect you’d get lasting effects.

If my theory is right, then it might be worth seeing what happens if schools have no “front” or “back” of the classroom.  If all 4 walls had chalkboards on them and our seats swiveled around, everyone would have some time when they were equally close to the board. Would everyone become a nerd, or no one at all?

It’s an interesting topic, and something I thought you might be interested in looking at closer.  Assuming, of course, you are a nerd.

Yours,
Liz
www.lizaab.com

If you want to dictate someone’s character, buy their shoes.

No, this Aabservation isn’t about how shoes look — it’s about how shoes feel. Sure, a shoe’s appearance sends a message about the wearer’s social group and personality. But a deeper reason, I think, is that shoes physically affect how we walk. And how we walk affects our mood.

Two weeks ago (wearing slightly heeled boots), I power walked around New York City. I’d arrive each place somewhat breathless from walking briskly, my brain whirling with the increased blood flow. One such whirling thought was this: could the city’s energy stem from the fact that its residents literally have to run around it, and therefore end up at each meeting physically energized?

As I got my breath back, I watched closely how people walked. Amazingly, people’s shoes were completely affecting their gait. Next time you’re outside, try it yourself: watch people walking down the street, but don’t look at their shoes. Then, just by their gait, try to guess what shoes they are wearing — not just whether they are sneakers or how high the heel is, but how shiny they are, how new, how well they fit. Chances are you’ll be able to describe their shoes most of the time.

To see why shoes have such an impact on our mood, let’s take an easy example: the flip flop. You cannot run in a flip flop. You can’t even hustle down the street at a New York pace. Your toes are vulnerable to being trodden on, so you are less aggressive walking. To keep the flip flop on your foot, you have to tense up your toes and lunge forward more tentatively with each step. Dog poop is terrifying.

Now, wear a boot. The heel clicks like a metronome as you clatter across the concrete — you are on a mission. You could step on anything and squish it without a care. You feel in control, protected, powerful.

Unless it has high heels. Take the most driven, self-confident woman you know, put her in (or really on) a pair of high heels, and not only can she not rule the world, she can’t walk five blocks. Due to her shoes, she’s become vulnerable. She looks around, like a ballerina, for a prince in stable shoes to hold on to — which is probably why she chose to wear such silly things in the first place. (And why he decided to wear those power Oxfords — solid, stable, secure.)

Shorten her heel to something a bit more reasonable and voila, you get the power pump. She’s a bit more stable now, but taller than she’d be at home; in her power pump, she doesn’t have to look up at (or really to) as many people. The calf muscle is already engaged, ready to pounce.

Yet though this seems obvious, think of the last time you consciously thought about how a new pair of shoes would affect your gait. We try on shoes standing in front of the mirror, not parading around Parade of Shoes. There’s a gap there that the MBA student in me wants filled: for some shoe company to really study this relationship between shoes, gait and mood, and scientifically develop shoes that help us better become the person we want to be. Mood shoes.

If that’s too commercial a challenge, how about this one instead: isn’t it a peculiar coincidence that history is the story of men with boots conquering those with flip flops? Might Jared Diamond have got it wrong — that really it’s Guns, Germs and Boots? Apologies in advance, Dr Diamond: I didn’t mean to step on your toes.

Cheers,

Liz Aab https://www.lizaab.com/

Water in the air is a funny thing. Freeze it the right way, and it comes down in flakes so fluffy that snowboarding feels like flying. Freeze it the wrong way, and it shuts down London Heathrow airport for days when you are trying to get back to New York for Christmas.

With so many thousands of us stranded here in Europe, it’s easy to focus on the water in the air you see. But more intriguing still is the water in the air you don’t see — which once understood, helps explain everything from why we get sick in the winter to why global warming is dangerous.

I stumbled upon this little known fact last winter, watching my cheap Chinese humidifier spray a pathetic strand of fog into the dry Beijing air. Was this thing actually accomplishing anything?, I pondered. I mean, seriously, was that litre of water really going to make a difference? How much water is there in my room anyway — a mililiter? a hundred liters? I had not the foggiest idea.

Before I tell you the answer, take a guess. We don’t usually know this number because humidity gets quoted in relative terms (e.g. 70%), not absolute ones (i.e. grams per cubic meter). Which makes sense: how dry the air feels reflects how readily water evaporates off our skin (and from our sore winter throats). That in turn depends on how saturated the air is, not how much absolute water is in it.

Ok, here’s the answer: air at room temperature is saturated when it holds about 20 grams of water per cubic meter (20 teaspoons if you don’t do grams). So my 4m x 4m x 3m meter room could hold about 1,000 grams or 1 litre of water at saturation, so hmm… yep, pumping a quarter litre of fog into the air would raise relative humidity from a dry 25% to a comfortable 50%. Humidifiers work!

But promoting humidifiers wasn’t what inspired this Aabservation. (Though I am excited to now have an Amazon referrals sidebar on my blog, which you are welcome to play with…) What I also stumbled upon that dry Beijing morning was that 20 grams is only the quantity of water that saturates air at room temperature. Drop the temperature to 10 C (50 F), and air can only hold 9 grams of water — half as much as at 20 C.

Which is why winter air indoors is so dry. Think about it: even if snowing outside (100% humidity), at 0 C air contains less than 4 grams of water per cubic meter. Bring that same dry air inside, heat it up to room temperature (which you’ll remember can hold 20 grams of water), and 4 grams becomes just 1/5 of the total amount of water the air can hold — or an uncomfortable 20% humidity.

No wonder we get sick and our throats feel dry in the winter. Indeed, low absolute humidity is a good predictor of flu transmission, according to a recent study.*

Now think more macro, and you’ll understand how even a few degrees increase in global climate can have a powerful impact on storm intensity. Air at 30C (86F) can hold a whopping 30 grams of water, 32% more water than air just 5C (9F) cooler (see table). That’s 32% more actual water that can then be absorbed into storm clouds and dumped on your beach!

Of course, I am clearly not a meteorologist and this Aabservation doesn’t take into account factors like atmospheric pressure and cloud formation patterns. But hey — this water in air thing is a kind of intriguing, no?

To close, here’s a picture from the Australian government that explains the relationship between humidity and temperature beautifully:

That’s enough about water in the air for one night. Now back to contemplating water in the airport — you know, the stuff that froze Heathrow to a standstill and has pushed my December 21st flight to New York back to December 25th.

On the bright side, maybe I’ll bump into Santa in the air that day. Maybe he’s even bought me a humidifier.

Merry Christmas from London,
Liz

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I leave China tomorrow, after four and a half years here.  I am heading out to get an MBA at London Business School (LBS), a two year program that has me graduating in the summer of 2012 (just in time for the London Olympics!). 

As my time in China comes to a close, I’ve been thinking a great deal about endings.  They don’t happen in a moment or even a day;  it’s not an “end,” after all, but an “ending.”  I am now, for instance, writing from a hotel in Beijing, as I moved out of my apartment this morning.  Did I stop living in Beijing this morning already; or will that happen tomorrow, maybe when my flight leaves the tarmac?  Ending three years at Kamsky Associates has also been a gradual ending.  While my last day was June 18th, I started transitioning most accounts to my colleagues long before, and will surely stay connected to the people I met there for many years to come.

But while my time in China is ending, there was a clear moment today when my time in Beijing abruptly ended:  when I walked away from my bike.  You see, China is a country — a concept. But Beijing is a place.  We tend to think that places are concepts too, perhaps defined by the people in them, their vibe, their ascetics, their history, their ideals.  But I would argue a place is just that:  a place, a physical location.  Maybe it’s just that I’ve been reading Omnivore’s Dilemma and watching too much of BBC’s Life series, but I do think that our brains are hard-wired to pay particularly close attention to our physical surroundings.  It’s important for survival to know how to get home, where to find food, and where to avoid becoming food as well.  Or if that’s too caveman-esque of an example, how’s this:  what I suspect I remember most clearly from my childhood are the locations of the hidden “1-UPs” in Super Mario Brothers.  Indeed, now two decades later, if you put a Nintendo controller back in my hands, I bet I would still know that the 1-UP was hidden in the red brick four steps to the left of that pit (you know, the one near the two black-shelled turtles that hit each other and change direction just as you come on screen).

Like a Nintendo controller, my bicycle helped me understand Beijing by letting me understand its “placeness”.  When some people think of Beijing they think of the Olympics, or Communism, or cheap ties.  For me, though, Beijing was the (unnecessarily high) speed bump near my apartment, and the smooth and rewarding downgrade heading east off Dongsishitiao, and the patter of the packed ping pong tables near Jianguomenqiao that I would pass on my way to work.  And, since I could bike to most destinations in under half an hour, regardless of traffic, my bike helped make this sprawling and often congested city accessible.

So, you can imagine that abandoning my bike today (albeit to the kind ownership of a friend and colleague) was really hard.  I wasn’t just leaving a bike, I was leaving the tool that let me play in this amazing city, get around it, and, in my way, understand it.  Outside of Beijing, I can still read about the city’s economic and political developments.  But how will I know if they finally put a pedestrian traffic light on the western crosswalk of Xin Dong Lu and Dongzhimenwai?

Hmm, it’s getting to be that strange time between night and morning now.  A good time, it seems, for this Aabservation to come to an ending.

This and all Aabservations are archived at https://www.lizaab.com/

It’s late April and still winter in Beijing, but two months ago, I got a preview of summer when I was in Brazil. I used to think that New York was halfway around the world from Beijing. But after my 14 hour flight to JFK (where I stopped to have lunch in the airport with my dad), I boarded yet another 10 hour flight to Sao Paulo – 17,599km all told as the crow flies. Only Argentina would be farther away.

It’s now been a while since I was there and this interminable Beijing winter has messed with my mind, so I apologize for only sharing the impressions of Brazil that I can still recall. I was there for about a week, in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janiero, and some of the coastal beach towns, mostly to see a good friend and her fiancé who are living there this year, and partially to replenish my body’s store of Vitamin D. I was not there to observe anything intensely, except perhaps how to make a proper caipirinha.

Having said that, here’s what managed to stick in my mind:

1) Obrigada: I clearly don’t speak Portuguese. After living in China for 4 years, when I even tried to speak Spanish, it came out Mandarin. I did learn one word, obrigada, which means “thank you”, and think that’s all you really need. It’s said in the slow, chilled way that all Portuguese seems to spoken there — just enjoying the sound of itself. I don’t know if all Brazilian people are kind and helpful, but certainly the ones we met were (except that taxi driver that gave us a tour of all of Sao Paulo on “the way” back from the Carnival parade). People seemed happy to try to help everywhere we went — so really all you needed to be able to say was obrigada.

2) Diversity: When the flight attendant started speaking to me in Portuguese, I realized that — unlike in China — you cannot tell by looking at someone whether they are Brazilian. Brazil is full of immigrants. How well they get along I leave to other people to answer; the sun was too bright to tell from my beach blanket.

3) Food: Meat, fish, fruit — all amazingly fresh and well-prepared. No wonder my jeans were tight after a week there.

4) Carnival (Mardi Gras): We watched a Carnival parade in Sao Paulo the night we arrived, which lasted for 5 or 6 hours (longer than we did, anyway). The parade went down the middle of a street lined with stadium seats, to which one bought tickets. There were a thousands of people from the local communities wearing extremely elaborate costumes and dancing/shuffling to a repeating samba chorus. Ever few hundred dancers, there would be a fifty-foot tall float, often of a person dancing, with more people dancing on it. At the end, torn up costumes were lying around everywhere.

5) So pretty: Rio de Janiero must be the most beautiful city in the world, with tall buildings woven between green hills and blue lakes. And how our friend managed to keep his eye on the road when we were driving up the coast is a mystery — so pretty everywhere. I hear there’s a rain forest somewhere in there too…

6) Thumbs Up: This I loved: everyone gives each other a thumbs up after asking for directions, or having a door opened, or getting change back, whatever. There was just something really chilled out about the people there, and this thumbs up thing underscored it. Even before I arrived in Brazil, when I was getting my visa at the Brazilian Embassy here in Beijing, the Embassy guard just told me to swing the fence open and go on in. In the U.S. embassy, by contrast, you have to walk through four layers of xray machines, marines, and double-locked doors to get inside.

Sure, there’s more things to observe about a massive country like Brazil — poverty, development, BRIC status, sushi, churches and cemeteries, and helicopters come to mind — but let’s do this instead: when I see you next, I’ll make you a caipirinha, and we’ll find somewhere sunny to chat about it all. Would that work for you? Awesome. Obrigada.

www.lizaab.com

Chasing after a rickshaw piled seven feet high with every item of my personal belongings last weekend, I remembered why I hate stuff.  I was just moving out of my apartment with the help of the guy who collects trash in my neighbor, and his dirty-but-sturdy leg-powered rickshaw.  Since I was living in a walk-up, last Sunday involved the rickshaw guy, me, my old roommate, and my new roommate (aka my sister) walking up and down five flights lugging ricebags of clothes, boxes with stereos, pillows, clothing racks, shoes, a camel pen my sister got me in Egypt, a pink felt cowboy hat I bought at the Houston Rodeo, squash rackets, a clay sculpture of myself that a colleague had made, a foot-thick queen size mattress, some Trader Joe’s dark chocolate covered espresso beans, my high school prom dress, … and whatever else made up those 43 bags, boxes, or pieces of stuff.

Why do I — why do we — have so much stuff?
 
One answer is that stuff is cheap.  Just a few minutes ago, for instance, the guy came with a fresh jug for the water cooler in our apartment.  The only place to put it right now is on a chair, which causes the cooler to tilt precariously.  My solution to this tilting problem is not to find another place to put it, or to try to level it, but instead to go tomorrow to buy a cheap flat-topped stool.  A stool that will be more of this very stuff that I supposedly hate.

And second, we like buying cheap stuff.  It seems obvious, but it’s not.  For a long, long time, we liked buying good stuff.  Cheap meant crappy, and no one liked crappy.  We liked buying a few good things that lasted, and then taking care of them well. 
 
But then things changed — at least in America:  First, quality stuff became cheap, thanks to the joys of mass production, efficient supply chains, competitive pressures — you name it.
 
Second, publication costs fell so much that media had to become dependent on advertising, not subscriptions. Those ads have accomplished their mission:  they help us want to buy cheap stuff (and expensive stuff, too).  Online newspapers are a great example of how cheaper publications costs have helped make ads a bigger part of our life.  For instance, newspapers can charge $0.10 per view per brick and mortar ad, but only $0.001 per view for digital ads on popular sites (for instance, with more than 100,000 views).  A friend who has worked on optimizing web-based ad displays believes that advertising will get better in time at targeting potential buyers, thereby permitting online newspapers to charge more for their content.  If so, newspapers can afford to keep providing content we want, and we’ll see more, and more effective, ads that make us want to buy stuff too.  The printed book — arguably the last domain of unadvertised content — will soon follow the ad-model as e-books gain popularity;  the next generation of e-books are already planning on serving ads.
 
And a third reason we have come to like cheap stuff is that we first learn to buy things when we are teenagers.  Teens face the tremendous task of figuring out who they are, and who everyone else is.  One great way to do that is to identify and buy the latest, most popular thing.  The “latest” part requires buying a lot as trends change.  “Popular” requires buying things that most people can afford to buy and then throw out a few months later.  In other words, teens learn quickly to like buying cheap stuff.

So looking my rickshaw wobbling down the street, I wondered whether having so much stuff is a bad thing, other than when moving, and if so, what, if anything, we can do about it.

I have some thoughts, but for another time.  Now, I have to get back to putting away all my stuff.