I’ve recently been reflecting on why it feels so good to throw things away. There’s an element of freedom in it I think, lightening a burden, even a sense of relief we are no longer responsible for something that was in our charge. Out of sight, out of mind. But it’s well documented that away does not mean gone. There are many statistics out there that quantify the consequences of this freedom over the last few decades, but they are just numbers1. For most, myself included, they mean very little beyond a sobering statistic we can’t really wrap our heads around and therefore have little interest in dwelling on. What I want to focus on instead is not the statistical side of this trend, but the behavioral one, and how it came to be.