Our lives are surrounded by stuff.

We buy stuff, replace stuff, maintain stuff, and throw stuff away.

Our homes are too small because we have too much stuff — so we upgrade. Then we buy more stuff because our new home looks empty with all of the extra space.

We rent storage for the stuff we don’t use but feel the need to keep.

And every day we got to our jobs to trade hours of our lives for money to pay for our stuff.

When we travel, we agonize over what stuff we’re going to take with us and what stuff we’re not.

And if we’re going to be gone for a long period of time, we’ll need a friend or neighbor to watch over the stuff we left behind.

If somebody steals our stuff we get upset.

If we don’t have enough stuff, our peers question us and wonder why we don’t have more things.

We agonize over misplacing things because we hate losing stuff.

Our weekends are spent organizing and cleaning stuff and sometimes, it’s hard to figure out what to do with all of this stuff!

When we’re sad, we go buy more stuff because we think it will make us happy. Often, we are afraid that we may need our stuff and not have it.

If we have enough stuff we can impress others and make them jealous. In fact, we love stuff so much, that we buy it with other people’s money and go into debt.

We pay money to insurance companies to protect our stuff in case of a disaster.

The advertising industry spends 1.2 Trillion dollars a year trying to get us to buy more stuff, and we do.

We get caught in the trap of buying new stuff because our old stuff isn’t good enough anymore.

It’s not uncommon to trip over stuff or stub our toes on it.

There are times we have so much stuff we have trouble choosing which stuff we’d like to use at any given moment.

And when we die, some of our stuff will become other people’s stuff, but most of it will get thrown in the trash.

Thanks for reading A Minimalist’s Thoughts On Stuff. I hope you enjoyed this article.