The Weight of Stuff

We humans seem to have a complicated relationship with stuff. We buy it, collect it, organize it, insure it, clean it, and repair it. We build bigger houses so we have more room for it, and when those houses somehow fill up anyway, we rent storage units for the stuff that no longer fits.

Then we go shopping.

George Carlin had a wonderful routine years ago about this very thing. His basic observation was that a house is largely a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff. Like most good comedy, it was funny because there was an uncomfortable amount of truth in it.

Our travels have made me think about this more than I ever did before. Carla and I spend much of the year moving from place to place and living with far less than we once did. The longer we live this way, the more aware I become of how much of our lives can be spent acquiring things, taking care of them, storing them, and eventually trying to figure out what to do with all the things we once thought we needed.

We really do love our stuff, and I find myself wondering why.

I understand wanting beautiful things. I appreciate good design. Carla is an architect and designer, so I would be on rather shaky ground arguing that our surroundings don’t matter. They do. A comfortable chair is wonderful. A beautiful room can lift the spirit. There is nothing wrong with owning things we enjoy or having a home that gives us pleasure.

The trouble begins when having becomes confused with being.

Somewhere along the way, possessions can become measures of success. We want the larger house, the newer car, the more expensive clothes, the remodeled kitchen that replaces the perfectly good kitchen that was remodeled eight years ago. We tell ourselves we are improving our lives, and sometimes we are. But there never seems to be an obvious stopping point.

Enough is a very difficult word in a culture that depends on convincing us that what we already have is somehow inadequate. There is always another version - a newer phone, a larger television, a car with features we didn’t know existed last year and suddenly feel strangely deprived without.

We are remarkably cooperative consumers, and I include myself in this. This is not an essay being written from a mountaintop by a man who has transcended material desire. I like a good iPhone. I enjoy nice clothes. I appreciate a comfortable place to stay. I am perfectly capable of seeing something I don’t need and immediately thinking life might improve if I owned it. In other words, I am human.

But the way Carla and I have lived over the past several years has taught me something about possessions that I don’t think I understood as clearly before.

Almost everything we own now travels with us in two carry-on bags.

That wasn’t always the case. We once had a house filled with furniture, books, dishes, artwork, tools, clothes, and all the accumulated belongings that gather around a life. None of it seemed particularly excessive at the time. It was simply what we owned.

Then our life changed, and we let most of it go.

I want to be clear about something: this does not make us better than anyone else. Living with two carry-on bags is not a spiritual achievement. Plenty of wonderful people own houses full of things, and plenty of people with almost nothing would very much like to have more.

But living this way has taught us some powerful lessons.

One of the biggest is how little we think about possessions now. When Carla and I are walking through a town we have never seen before, trying to understand another culture, photographing streets in the early morning, talking with someone we have just met, or sitting over coffee watching another place wake up, I am almost never thinking about what I own. Our attention is free to go outward - to the people around us, the place we are in, and whatever the day happens to bring.

I find that wonderfully freeing.

Possessions require attention. They have to be maintained, protected, stored, repaired, organized, and eventually disposed of. Every object we own asks something from us, even if it is only a little space in a closet and a tiny corner of our consciousness. We worry about things being damaged. We make decisions about whether to keep them. We buy furniture to hold them and containers to organize them. We move them from one house to another.

That is one of the things I didn’t fully understand until most of ours were gone. The weight of possessions is not only physical. There is a mental weight too.

Eventually your stuff develops its own little ecosystem, and you become its caretaker.

It’s a strange arrangement when you think about it. We bought the stuff to make our lives better, and then we spend a considerable amount of our lives taking care of the stuff.

There is also an environmental cost to all of this that is difficult to ignore. Everything we manufacture requires something from the planet - raw materials, energy, water, transportation - and much of what we buy eventually becomes waste. A culture of endless consumption cannot help but take a toll.

The planet does not distinguish between the things we truly need and the things we bought because they were on sale. It simply absorbs the consequences.

Which brings me back to that difficult little word:

Enough.

What would happen if more of us actually knew when we had enough? Enough clothes, enough furniture, enough square footage, enough money.

Enough.

That doesn’t mean living without beauty or comfort, and it doesn’t mean rejecting prosperity. It means understanding that there comes a point where more stops adding very much to our lives.

And sometimes more begins taking something away - our time, our attention, our freedom, our peace.

There is another problem with possessions that troubles me even more. We have become very good at confusing wealth with worth. We look at people who have accumulated enormous amounts of money and possessions and assume that accumulation tells us something important about their wisdom, intelligence, or value as human beings.

It may tell us they are very good at accumulating money. It tells us far less about the heart.

A person with very little can be extraordinarily generous. A person with enormous wealth can still live believing there will never be enough. We can own almost nothing and feel abundant, or own nearly everything we ever wanted and remain convinced something is missing.

The amount of stuff is not the measure. The heart is.

I have long been drawn to Indigenous traditions that emphasize reciprocity, gratitude, stewardship, and sharing. There is no single Indigenous worldview, of course, and I don’t want to romanticize hundreds of distinct cultures as though they all believe exactly the same thing. But many traditions have understood something our consumer culture often forgets: take what you need, give thanks for what sustains you, share what you can, and remember that we belong to the earth far more than the earth belongs to us.

That way of understanding our place in the world has always resonated with me.

I believe that much of what passes through our lives is really borrowed. A house shelters us for a while. A chair supports us. A shirt keeps us warm. A piece of art gives us pleasure. Land provides food. Trees give us shade. Eventually all of it passes to someone else or returns to the earth.

Even the things we are most certain are ours are only temporarily so.

That includes our bodies.

There is something liberating about remembering that. When we stop thinking of everything as something to possess, life begins to feel less like accumulation and more like participation. Use what you need, take care of it, enjoy it, share it, and when the time comes, let it go.

That has always felt to me like a more natural way to live.

Travel has reinforced this again and again. When everything I need fits into a small suitcase, my attention is freed for other things. I can be interested in people instead of possessions, experiences instead of acquisition, stories instead of shopping.

My idea of wealth begins looking different. It can be a five-mile walk through a beautiful city, a conversation with a stranger, dinner with someone we met three years ago and happened to reconnect with halfway around the world, a sunset, a photograph I love, or a morning when Carla and I have nowhere we need to be.

None of those things fits in a storage unit, which is exactly the point. 

The things that have brought the most joy to my life have rarely been things at all. They have been love and friendship, curiosity and wonder, shared experiences, and that wonderful feeling of walking down an unfamiliar street and realizing once again how enormous and interesting this world is.

Those are the things I want more of. And unlike possessions, the more we share them, the more there seems to be.

I’m not suggesting everyone sell the house and start living out of a carry-on. That would be ridiculous. Carla and I have simply found a way of living that works for us at this particular point in our lives.

But I do think there is value in occasionally looking around at everything we own and asking a very simple question:

How much of this is actually making my life better?

Not what it cost, whether it might be useful someday, or whether somebody else will be impressed by it. Does it genuinely add something to my life?

And an even better question is this:

What might I have more room for if I needed less?

More time, more freedom, more generosity, more experiences, more attention for the people I love - and more life.

Stuff is not the enemy. It is just stuff.

The problem comes when we forget that and begin asking possessions to give us things they were never capable of giving. A car can carry us somewhere, but it can’t tell us what makes the journey meaningful. A house can shelter us without creating the love that makes it a home. And money can provide enormous comfort and opportunity, but at some point we still have to decide for ourselves what enough looks like.

We have to figure that part out ourselves.

And I think that is one of the great challenges of living in a culture that is constantly asking us to want more: learning how to recognize the moment when more is no longer the answer.

The world has already given us so much to experience, use, enjoy, care for, and share.

We don’t need to own all of it. We need to be present for it.

And the lighter we learn to travel through this life, the more room we leave for everything that was never stuff in the first place.