The Things You Own End Up Owning You

“The things you own end up owning you.”
-  from “Fight Club” (1999)

Inseparable from awakening to the truth that you are in control of your life and embarking upon the path of self-improvement, it seems, is awakening to a new perspective on the acquisition of material wealth and creature comforts, or as they’re commonly known, “new stuff”.

I’ve noticed this idea of turning your back to consumption gradually creeping into the collective focus of In Mala Fide authors’ writing: Frost wrote about cutting unnecessary expenses which really add little of value to your life, and HarmonicaFTW took it a little further toward philosophical ground by suggesting that we often buy things more for the sake of the buying than because we need them for any practical purpose.

Both conclude, essentially, that buying lots of stuff damages you because it makes you waste your life working for the money you’re wasting – you lose freedom. So far, neither has gone much further than the financial aspect of it, so I’ll pick up the baton for the next leg of the race where we cross from thinking about the loss of financial freedom into the realm of thinking about freedom in general – money is not the only thing that the acquisition of possessions costs you. Buying lots of stuff damages you even if you’ve got money hanging out the wazoo, because just having lots of stuff imposes limits on you.

It seems counter-intuitive – we’re raised to believe that more is always better. Having lots of possessions is supposed to provide more options – to say that it reduces them sounds outright crazy to most. How can having more make you less free?

The fact is that “nesting” ties you down. When you have your perfect little apartment with you nice neat perfectly picked furniture and a painstakingly built DVD collection, you become attached to it – no news there – but in the long run, the notion that your private designer-catalog castle is better than any place else can reveal itself to be a delusion, and a harmful one at that.

What benefit do you really get from owning stuff? In the case of things without which you could not perform necessary daily tasks the answer is obvious. Everything else in your life is pretty much just there because it’s “nice to have”.

What do you really need to own? I’d say I “need” these things:

• Bed. I have to sleep and unfortunately I’m not a bad enough dude to do it on a hardwood floor. The bed frame is not necessary for sleeping, I could sleep on just a mattress, but the storage space under the bed comes in handy. I probably wouldn’t buy a bed frame but since I already have one I may as well reap the benefits.
• Computer. I need the internet to work, to learn and to share information. I also need some extras like a bigger screen and a bigger external hard drive because they greatly improve my effectiveness.
• A piece of furniture to put the computer on and another piece of furniture to sit on while working. I spend long stretches of time working at my computer, and unfortunately I’m not a bad enough dude to do that on the floor or even on my bed. Working in uncomfortable positions for long periods of time might eventually also cause serious damage to my health, so it’s worth avoiding.
• Toothbrush, razor, soap, etc. Unfortunately the human body doesn’t maintain itself to the standards of modern society, and looking like a homeless person would limit me much more than having to buy these things does. The quality-of-life benefits of not having my teeth rot off are also substantial, as are the health benefits of being able to wash away the grime and bacteria of public spaces.
• Food, cooking utensils. I could eat takeaway Chinese every day but for my health, I prefer not to.
• Cell phone. I often need to find people in places too big to be searched and communicate with people driving cars. Not having a cell phone would impose massive limits on me.
• Clothes. Not that I care that much, but other people couldn’t refrain from causing me all kinds of problems if I went about my life with no clothes. A minor fraction of the clothing items I own are also necessary for moving about during the cold season and others during the sunburn season. Shoes are also pretty much a must in any weather, given the kind of stuff I have to walk on in the city.
• Medical supplies for the occasional emergency.

This is a quick list and something essential might be missing, but I think I covered most of it. Shelter, heating fixtures, electric outlets, plumbing: you don’t need to own them. You might need to own some lighting fixtures if none are included in your rented home.

Everything else is just “nice to have.” But how nice is it really? How much value does a DVD collection add to your life? How about all the furniture in the right matching colors? DVDs and matching sofas are things you can look at for a few hours, but pretty soon the enjoyment starts to fade. If you buy a new pair of curtains, how long do you really enjoy them? A day, if you’re lucky? Pretty soon every new item that’s “nice to have” fades into normalcy, and it isn’t that nice any more.

But while its appeal fades, its hold on you stays strong. You’re still attached to your stuff, even though you don’t really enjoy it that much. It becomes a part of you, mentally. Logically, you shouldn’t value your nice things any more than you value the corresponding amount in numbers on the ATM screen, but you probably do. We attach value to things that we identify with, things that we treat, in a sense, like family members. Losing them can feel like losing part of ourselves.

If a wizard appeared and offered you a deal whereby he would transform everything you own into the amount of money that you could buy a new similar item for, how many of us would take the deal? Almost everyone has a few things they regret buying, but almost everyone also has a few things they really love. The wizard doesn’t let you pick and choose – it’s everything or nothing. Assuming you don’t have a problem with spending some time on going out and buying stuff, the rational choice would probably be to take the money and then optimize your possessions by planning the complete collection from the ground up. Could you do that?

Could I do that? Most of my stuff is just stuff, and I’d be just as fine with other stuff, but I do have a few items which are quite dear to me. It would be hard to give up the scale model airplanes I cherished as a kid, and the toy car my father brought me from a business trip that was so nice I wouldn’t even play with it for fear of breaking it, which eventually ended up happening anyway and my father had to glue one of the doors permanently shut.

I would miss those things, but even so, taking the deal might be what’s best for me – and not just to save money. If that were the only reason I’d probably rather hold onto my things. But there’s another reason: as this thought experiment demonstrates, attachment to things can limit us from reaching our full potential. Realistically, even though those possessions are dear to me and I would miss them if they were gone, I probably wouldn’t miss them nearly as much as it feels like now.

I’ve had to let go of dear possessions before and I don’t think about them very much now – “out of sight, out of mind” has some truth in it. The day my parents decided I was getting too big for teddy bears and made me collect my soft toys in the basement to be donated away was a hard day to live through, but living without them once they were gone wasn’t that hard. I know my age was still in the single digits because we still lived in the house with the basement, and I’m pretty sure I loved those stuffed animals at least as much as anything I own today – even at that tender age, I got over it just fine, so I’m sure I’d be okay giving up the stuff that now feels dear to me.

Is the fear of losing something worse than actually losing it?

Are we living with a losing-things-phobia that needs to be cured by facing our fear? That’s what you’re supposed to do if for example you’re so scared of heights that it affects your life – if you take the longer route to work to avoid a bridge or something like that – you’re supposed to go to the highest place you can find and face your fear until you get over it, and that frees you to live your life unhampered by the limiting fear. The fear of losing things controls our lives, too – it’s just that nobody tells us to get over it because they all live with the same fear.

All the stuff you don’t actually use – it’s still limiting you, it stops you from moving to a better location because you’d feel compelled to carefully pack and unpack all your knickknacks and it would just be so much work… if you didn’t have that stuff, you would jump at the chance of a shorter commute. And losing the stuff really wouldn’t be that bad – I was fine without the stuffed toys once I got over the pain of the actual event of losing them, and I was a little kid for whom it was probably a lot worse than it would be for a grown man.

So if you see an ad in the paper for a place closer to your daily destinations, and you think “that looks great but moving would be such a hassle”, what’s going on is that your fear of losing things is directly causing damage in your life in the form of wasted commuting time every single day. That’s a huge amount of damage when you add it up, probably much, much worse than giving up your material things in order to achieve freedom of movement.

If you’re like me and don’t need to go to a specific location every day to work, the damage is even worse. You could go anywhere, take a trip to another continent or whatever, as long as you have the money, but all the stuff you’re attached to at home raises the threshold to leaving and having new experiences. I can and do leave whenever I can find the money, and in the between times (which is most of the time) I keep from accumulating stuff that I would then grow attached to. Everyone knows love makes you weak, and while it may be a sacrifice worth making where interpersonal relationships are concerned, love of stuff also makes you weak but stuff does not love you back. Stuff just sits there, and you don’t really enjoy it much after you’ve had it for a while, but you still feel loathe to let it go.

The things you own really do end up owning you. You think you have the things contained in your home, but really, it’s the other way around: the things have you contained in their home. Home is where your heart is – if your heart is with your things, that’s where you’ll be drawn to. If your heart is with your experiences, the world is your home.

I love hotels because of the transience. I sleep in a bed, watch a TV, adjust a radiator – but none of them have power over me. When I leave, I feel no attachment, no breaking heart at leaving my love behind – and it makes me free. From a hotel, I can go anywhere, chase any opportunity or experience that I find, moving to another hotel at a location that enables me to have more of the experiences I want.

I try my best to bring that sense of transience, and the freedom that comes with it, into my home. I don’t pick out furniture. I have curtains and carpets dug up from my parents’ storage. Nothing matches anything. It wouldn’t cost me much to replace everything so it all fit together and looked really nice and inviting, but I consciously choose to keep it industrial: everything is selected for function, not form. I don’t have a closet full of different outfits, and I don’t buy DVDs. I don’t buy paper books either when I can have them on my computer – half the books on my shelf are from airports, and if I ever get a laptop battery that can last an intercontinental flight, two shorter ones and two layovers, that collection might stop growing too.

Everything I own in the world, furniture included, might not even fill half of this van:

Everything I own, furniture excluded, would probably fit into one of these:

…and most of that is stuff I don’t even use.

It’s been my policy for years now to travel with carry-on only, no matter how long the trip will be – partially because I don’t feel like waiting at the luggage carousel, but partially because I want to consciously minimize the amount of stuff I live my life with. The way I see it, being owned by the things you own is limiting in just as real a way as being owned by a cubicle farm. I want my life to fit in a carry-on bag. I want to be able to move around chasing experiences, not be tied down and rooted in a prison of my own making.

If you don’t know what freedom of movement feels like, go to the bank and take out all your savings in cash. Hold the stack of hundreds in your hands and think to yourself: this is what I have in the world. I can take this anywhere. Walking around with your life’s savings in a backpack is quite possibly the closest you can get to a feeling of pure freedom. It’s also risky which is why I don’t do it anymore, but I remember the feeling. I also remember the feeling of climbing up from the subway into a bright day in a mythical city on a foreign continent with nothing out ahead of me but wonders waiting to be explored and the freedom to do something about it.

Coming back home, the color of the curtains didn’t matter to me anymore.

Curtains can’t make you feel the way a man setting out for adventure feels. Sofas, dining tables, computer desks, carpets, surround sound systems with massive sub-woofers, wall-sized fish tanks, sports cars, mansions, golf courses and private airports can’t make you feel that way. I know people with their own private airports – guess what, your own private airport is only worth as much as the time you spend there. First, you spend a lot of time there, flying your private planes all over and basking in the glory of being a super cool guy who has everything and then some, but pretty soon the appeal wears off.

That’s the nature of life: the appeal of everything always wears off. I have it on good authority that even the appeal of unlimited sex with an endless stream of drop-dead gorgeous women eventually wears off, and believe me when I say the men I heard that from know what they’re talking about.

Man is an explorer by nature. We always want something new. Even the men who settle into routine – especially the men who settle into routine – keep wanting something new, but for many it’s unfortunately easier to just settle into what’s tolerably comfortable.

They say “you can’t take it with you” – that all the stuff you accumulate is nothing once you’re dead. This applies not only in death but in life as well. You can’t even take your enjoyment of stuff with you as far as your breath lasts – you can only take it to the point where you get bored of the stuff, and after that it’s just tying you down, hooked into that possessive part of your brain that says “no, I can’t give this up because it’s mine“.

Your precious possessions end up possessing you.

Monks of various faiths take vows to renounce material possessions. Is it because they just want their lives to suck? That’s not why it is. They’ve found something that makes them feel better than stuff does, but focusing on that something requires that they stop distracting themselves with stuff.

Freedom is elusive – as soon as you commit to a choice, it’s gone.

Compared to men, women don’t much care for freedom. They like predictability, home, matching sofas and curtains, unbelievable piles of stuff growing perpetually to swallow the emptiness inside. It could be said that most women today live in a perpetual feeling of ungroundedness, a fear of slipping away from themselves that they must alleviate by adding more and more material weight onto their self-image – it could be said that what they really need is a man to anchor their world to… but that’s an article for another day.