In an age characterized by elevated environmental awareness--reducing our carbon footprint, enhancing our sustainable output--we remain nevertheless obsessed with our attachment to the material world. By all indications, our responses to things tell us who we are, what we value, why we do (or don't do) the things we do. Material culture is social culture, and social culture is intrinsically connected to making--and yes, to saving things. (The opposite may be equally revealing: in Part II, I'll take a look at how we respond to material loss.) You can choose to reject nostalgia, or to embrace market research, or even sell all your belongings on eBay and join a monastery, but at the end of the day, everyone has a story to tell. And a good many of those stories, it turns out, involve actual things.