Stuff steals time.
Remember always that “stuff” is a means to an end. We want many things – happiness, status, respect, freedom, legacy. We almost never want “stuff,” we just want stuff to represent those things, to be a vessel for those things in our lives.
Sometimes they are! Even though I’m generally a minimalist, I acknowledge that sometimes a physical thing can actually carry those aspects through your life for you. Like Jack Sparrow says, “What a ship is… is freedom.” My car, despite the demands it makes of me in terms of time and money for maintenance, makes me more free on net than I would be without it. A well-deserved trophy for a noble victory might focus some status on you, which isn’t necessarily bad. And so on.
But more often than people realize, stuff actually drains those things out of you, primarily by draining the time out of your life, time you would spend pursuing those things more directly.
Every day, people lament that they can’t seem to ever get their laundry all the way done and it drains both their free time and their contentment to constantly have that battle, never once considering that they should just throw away 90% of their clothes. All stuff has a maintenance cost, and it’s really a maintenance opportunity cost because whatever juice you’re spending keeping your stuff in a useful shape is juice that could be spent on anything else.
A car might be freedom, and a castle might be status, but a castle certainly isn’t freedom – and the best cars for freedom aren’t the best cars for status. And an extra pair of shoes might not be any of those things. In the same way that people don’t really want money, but rather the things money can buy, people don’t really want stuff either – they want the way stuff makes them feel.
Consider how you want to feel. Then, consider your stuff. Is it helping? Or, like the laundry you can never quite finish, is it actually getting in the way?
The Opportunity Machine 