Material Bulimia

There is only so much that one can say about recycling.
I suppose that it is up to the individual to decide how much they want to change, save or delete. For me, it has always been a part of my life to use, recycle, reuse and then, finally, when it it is really badly broken beyond compare...tape it back together for one last round.
I grew up with a 'waste not want not' mentality and although I probably am very materialistic about 'stuff' and was quite spoilt as a child, I do value my objects and probably obsessively so. My father was quite an Eco genius from the get go, which is definitely down to a relatively poor up bringing in Jamaica where people just made do and got on with it. He was not 'potato sack for trousers' poor but, from what I can decipher from a million "I milked the cows every morning" stories, life was not that easy. I used to laugh (under my breath of course) when he used to tell me how grateful I should be and that "We never had television and video, fancy trainers and Designer clothes."
Now, twenty years on I find myself telling my children the same thing about ipods games consoles and mobile phones. We just have more to lose theses days. We worry about our children getting mugged for their Ipods and gadgets. When I was young(younger) it was jewellery and Naf Naf Puffas.
But I digress. We need to find a way to tune young people to a wave length where it is acceptable to wear secondhand clothes or to buy an old bike and put the hours in to do it up (or pimp it). Status seems to far out way any sense of morals and duty to our planet. I do not mean from a ozone layer, global warming sense, but, from a land fill, too much crap on our planet sense. I blame the Romans with their gluttonous ways.
We are material bulimics, throwing up everything that was great for a moment but out of vogue the next. Why do you need the latest mobile phone, laptop or outfit. Why do you want a new car every three years?
Life is too short to want so much stuff and spend sleepless nights worrying about how to pay for it and how to protect it. I overheard an elderly West Indian man in pub last week, talking to his friend he said "What is the point of being the richest man in the cemetery."
He has a point.