Recently I jumped on one of our biggest national bandwagons: I rented a self-storage unit. <\/p>\n
As a person who tries to live simply, I\u2019m a little ashamed to be among the one in ten American households with a storage unit. But my place had to emptied before I went to the closing and signed it over to the new owners, and I had no new home address. Into the storage unit everything went, along with my $120 monthly rent. No wonder the U.S. self-storage business takes in more than $22 billion a year. Even the recession can\u2019t slow demand for storage! <\/p>\n
Compare that to South Africa, where, a leader of the Lutheran Communion in Southern Africa told me, the fastest-growing industry is the funeral industry, driven by the HIV and AIDS pandemic. During the same decade that the U.S. self-storage business was exploding, the annual number of registered deaths in South Africa rose by 91 percent. <\/p>\n
One country stores stuff; the other stores people. What would the world feel like if the money spent on our extra stuff were spent on keeping others out of coffins?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Recently I jumped on one of our biggest national bandwagons: I rented a self-storage unit. As a person who tries to live simply, I\u2019m a little ashamed to be among the one in ten American households with a storage unit. But my place had to emptied before I went to the closing and signed it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-post"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n