You Are Your Possessions
How much stuff have you got?
How much crap do you own?
Probably more than you realise. It’s probably got out of hand, but, in a sense, it doesn’t matter, right? because there is a place to put the stuff, so all’s well and good. And, even though you might tell yourself that you’re not your possessions, it’s a bit hazy as to just what your life would look like without them, even though you can’t really put your finger on why you have so many.
Let me pose a thought experiment (I trust you won’t nitpick, focusing on the forest for the trees, etc.).
Let’s say, you wake up tomorrow and find you own nothing but what is consumable and mandatory, that is, connected to keeping you alive. What would you do? Where would you go?
Over the last two years or so, I’ve slowly—the process is so slow—been removing excess physical items from my life one-by-one. I’ve become quite merciless, in fact, at getting rid of things. I’ve come to feel their gravitational pull on my very being. This feeling is often so heavy that I often get the sense of wanting to strike a match and start over. In fact, I’ve known two separate people who lost everything in a house fire, and both said it was an immensely cathartic experience.
The physical and mental toll this process of shedding takes on one is both revealing and draining. The felt tether between you and something you forgot you even owned is frightening, and I speak as someone who is thoroughly unsentimental.
The more you get rid of, the more you realise you have. The more you realise you have, the more various constructs come to light with regard to your own priorities.
A single thing is a node in a discursive chain that runs all the way down to the root of most modern action—fear! Or: possessions bolster the illusion of security, the illusion that you’re the main character, and the illusion that you’re in control, but I repeat myself.
You purchase bed sheets, for instance, that connect to a chain that roughly looks like the following:
Bed sheets Bedding (duvet, pillows) Bed (mattress, topper) Bed frame Bedroom Shelter Security
The chain moves from real (I have a sheet over my body) to ideal (There is such a thing as ‘security’). This might appear like a rather radical or even mad way to look at possession ownership, but I would state that such a projection arises from the possessive mindset. Each incremental addition is not just one more in kind (quantity), but a further deepening of one’s own possession by a conceptual framework that revolves around such signifiers as: Security, safety, ownership, ‘Mine!’, and permanence.
This seemingly small matter of individual items has, then, an implicit relationship to the largest of all matters that is Life! Life is flux. Life is living, is becoming, is growing and dying, is starting and ending, is the season change of that great, grand, beautiful, and delicate ineffability we call the ‘Just passed by’.
There is, then, as far as I’m concerned, something rather cringeworthy, tacky, and downright sad about the modern masses’ relationship to, and possession by, stuff.
Possibly the worst offender is people and their cars (sheet metal over an engine), the obsession toward which has its own term in Bavarian, das heilige Blechle—the holy tin can. The expanded implication—that possessions are somehow sacred—makes sense with respect to what I have already mentioned, that possessions, and the act of possessing, are downstream of a default understanding of how life should be, and, as such, the very substance of what makes up most people’s personal identity. Watch, for instance, when the car worshipper gets a ding or scratch on his new vehicle, does he not act like it is he or she who is being attacked? Mention that you don’t like X film, Y product, or Z brand, and prepare for an onslaught of emotionality. Think about the fact that for so long, and still today, the very idea of one’s house burning down was understood as one of the worst things that could happen, despite the fact that for most moderns, everything would be absolutely fine, it’s insured, after all! The conclusion derived from all this can only be that such people are their possessions. That life has come to be understood as a game of acquisition on all fronts, the purpose of which is to acquire for its own sake, which makes complete sense when life itself is mistaken for acquisition.
Possessions, and collections of possessions especially, are materially assumptive statements. The bed sheets assume a bed, assume a house, assume security, assume a secure neighbourhood, assume a stable nation, assume good health, assume that all of this will just keep on going.
Yet, each act of thing-possession is simultaneously a grasping out from the very life they seek to bolster, caress, and apparently wish to engage in. Life as flux laughs in the face of things for the fact that they rely upon an idea of stasis for their existence.
It is evident in my immediate relationships to those whose lives are possessions-heavy, that there is a correlation between increased ownership of things and a general sense of unsettled dread. Each addition, then, isn’t just a desire fulfilled, status signal procured, or Kodak-moment secured, but a delusional attempt at keeping death at bay!
Which brings me back to the initial thought experiment—Without possessions, what would you do?
The answer for many people will be simply to draw a blank, because not only does their existence primarily (in terms of time) center around washing, folding, sorting, checking, tweaking, cleaning, improving, revamping, refurbishing, and generally maintaining their already ‘owned’ possessions, but secondarily derides a large part of its purpose from the acquisition of further items, because that very act has become synonymous with living itself.
The case for so many is that to live is to acquire. Yet, as mentioned, living is flux, and so the act of acquisition as a life purpose is inherently tragic, whereby the masses’ unconscious reasoning is to try somehow halt life. As if, at some point of acquisition, there will be enough to have sculpted the perfect, ever-lasting physical place and forevermore live from that stasis. We know, of course, that this isn’t the case, and that thing-possession knows no bounds. The foundational ideals and concepts it relies upon are infinite in their abusive scope.
You will never be secure enough. You will never be pretty enough. Rich enough. Cosy enough. Efficient enough. Happy enough. Enough enough. Because these are states, flag poles rammed into the ground, they’re against life.
Life that is moving, fluxing, growing, blossoming, dying, decaying, singing, fleeting, and generally just going on by without a care for you or that which you are trying—with all your might!—to hold onto.
Possessions, as per the name, possess in the sense that they attempt to hold something in a constant state, a state that doesn’t exist in reality.
Ownership is fear of intrusion, of turbulence, and ultimately, of death, as everything is.
Your crap doesn’t go with you when you die, which you will.
No one wants all your junk.
Give it up.
Give up.