This was the scene: I was at one of those off-site storage facilities that looks like a medium-security prison, the kind where you enter a code and the gate slides open, you drive in and it shuts ominously behind you. I kept thinking the system would malfunction and lock me in. I was visiting the eight-by-10 storage locker my wife and I rented when we moved, filled with stuff that had been taken away in the fluffing process. (“Remove the personal,” the agent had said. “Buyers need to imagine their lives in the house.”) I was looking for my wife’s blow-dryer, which was in one of the 35 boxes stacked to the ceiling.

A woman came in and opened the locker across from me. I nodded hello. She rummaged around for a bit, then sat down on the concrete with a cardboard box. She took out a sheaf of letters and began reading while I went back to my odyssey. When I turned around 20 frustrating minutes later, she was crying, a dozen letters beside her. I thought of offering some inadequate words of comfort, but it seemed like an intrusion on a semi-private moment. After another half-hour, I found the stupid blow-dryer and quietly left the woman to her stored melancholy.

I had planned to rent our space for two months, but it ended up being more than a year, a pattern that turns out to be typical. In the course of that year, I visited my shed dozens of times and saw other units in the process of being filled or emptied. Some of them were generic, like mine: furniture, files, boxes of books, ugly lamps. But some were surprisingly singular—empty except for three televisions, for example, or a collection of life-sized ceramic dogs. The world of self-storage is not a simple one.

There is an industry that revolves around organization (California Closets, Shelf Help, Space Solutions) and a pop philosophy that accompanies the fetish of organizing clutter, one that outlines a causal link between efficient storage and mental health, financial success and general well-being. (This was nominally borne out by sociologists at Northwestern, Colum­bia and Michigan Universities, who drew a link between a neat, well-organized home and the eventual educational and financial success of the child living there.) But all the talk of maple peg drawer organizers and ash wood telescoping boxes deals with our on-site lives, the part other people can see (and judge). Off site is something else.

Self-storage is the dark id of clutter. It’s one thing to buy seagrass baskets from IKEA, another to rent 500 cubic feet of space in an industrial park. You can put anything in those sheds. They’re like the mental institutions built a century ago on the edges of cities and towns to accommodate relatives who had exhausted a family’s ability to cope, or were an embarrassment, or sometimes merely an inconvenience. Self-storage represents what we can’t live with but can’t part with, either.

In 1997, there were fewer than a million square feet of storage space in Toronto; now there are close to four million, with nearly double the facilities (from 45 to 80). Some of this is attributable to the increase in population, but there has been a rise in per capita space, as well, from less than one square foot per person to more than two and a half. We spent the past decade consuming, testing our credit limits, and the city’s storage facilities are full of things we didn’t need, couldn’t afford and can’t bear to look at.

The self-storage era began in Texas, with the comprehensively named A-1 U-Store-It U-Lock-It U-Carry the Key (a motto, oddly, for several Toronto companies), which opened in Odessa in 1964. The concept spread throughout Texas to California and then quickly moved across the country. More tin garages were built on the edges of more cities and towns.

They came to Toronto in the late ’70s and were initially built on remnant land that couldn’t be sold for anything else—brownfields or industrial properties close to major roads. The first facilities were almost exclusively mom-and-pop operations, with pre-fab sheds protected by chain-link fences, razor wire and junkyard dogs.

Joe Kormos, president of Canadian Storage Centres, has been in the business since 1976. He confirms that the main reason for the massive surge, which began in the mid-’90s, is consumption. “Between 1990 and 1995, there wasn’t that much new construction,” he says, “and real estate prices were depressed.” Our houses were worth less, and so were we. But we came out of that recession with a collective amnesia about the bad times and a pent-up urge to spend. We had more discretionary income, and we bought more things, and our purchases—the label maker, Mickey Mouse lamp, beanbag chair, exercise bike, turkey smoker, unused camping equipment—soon rose up and buried us.