Need or Want

Need or Want

In his essay Dumpster Diving, the author states that a thing that is not useful has no value. I can relate to this statement to a certain point. If you do not have an immediate need for something when you have no place to keep it, why have it.

My brothers and I used to go on multiple day hunting and fishing trips where if you did not need something, it stayed home. We only had so much room in our backpacks and we had to carry our fish or game, along with our garbage out of the area we had been camping. If a person brought extra, he would not have room for the essentials to survive. We would often cook what we had caught, or shot, so meat was not something that we needed, it was the flour, spices and bread were important and light enough to carry. The survival gear was the most important thing to go in the packs that we carried.

While I was in the military overseas, there had been numerous times that I wanted to buy an item knowing that I had no place to store it until we got back to the states. While onboard ship we had only the room in our bunks, which was six inches deep and 3 foot by 6 foot, and a very small locker. The lockers that we had were smaller than a high school locker and had just enough room to fit a couple of dress uniforms and two coats. Many items were left in the stores of Naples, Italy, Palma de le Marco, Spain and several other countries that our ship visited. I wish I could have bought the Alfa Romeo Spyder that I had been looking at also. That car had captured my heart back then, it was a beautiful burgundy with a black ragtop, and definitely not something that was a need item at that time in my life.