Why Do We Need All That Stuff?

I have a friend of mine that pointed out a family member once commented that people have too many things--the point of view being--who's going to clean out their houses when their dead. When I first heard this, I took a moment and paused. "What an odd thing to say", I thought to myself. But then I started to think a little more about "stuff" and I thought to myself, gosh, this person has something there! The truth is, we all have way too many things. I personally spend hours of whatever free time I have, trying to make my very small home appear bigger. I rack my brain with storage solutions and read anything that has the concept of storage in it. I search through web pages after web pages for anything that resembles the term "apartment size furniture" and for the life of me, still can't figure out how in the world the front room of my house was considered a "dining room/living room". I don't think they make the lilliputian furniture that could bring that vision into a reality. The truth is, we really only need 1/10 of what we have in our homes. We probably don't need the 10 versions of the same color shoe, or the 15 suit jackets that would be better donated. We probably don't need whatever is in that storage box that we can't recall that we put in the basement or in my case, crawl space. We probably will never use that second iron, second coffee pot or 3rd chess set or whatever it is that we have more than one version of---but we keep it for reasons that I guess we feel that we'll need it someday. So, why do we spend all our money on buying more things or getting bigger houses to put more things in? Maybe we all need a moment to take stock of our surroundings and think about that. After all, we can't take it with us.