Do we really need so much ‘stuff’? Do we own it? Or does it own us?

By David McElroy · July 12, 2012

Why do I pay for 1,450 square feet of space to live in? I think about that frequently, and I don’t have a good answer. I live alone, with just the cats and a dog to keep me company. (They mostly hang out close to wherever I am.) I basically need a desk for my computer, a place to sleep and a bathroom. So why do I waste the money on space that could house four or five families in some parts of the world?

I’ve been thinking about this more and more lately. That makes it sound as though it’s just a rational thought, but it’s more than that. I’ve been feeling something I can only call a compulsion in my heart to get rid of almost everything I own and move to a much smaller place.

Do we really own the things we own? Or do they own us? I don’t have a tremendous amount of stuff — certainly not compared to most people I know — but the stuff I do have is making me feel weighed down. I don’t know why. I just know I don’t like it.

We live in a society with certain expectations of what’s acceptable, especially for those of us in the middle class or higher. We’re supposed to have a home that looks a certain way. We’re supposed to fill it with socially acceptable furniture. We’re supposed to care what other people think about what we have. We’re supposed to want the things that other people have. And most people believe they do want those things.

I don’t think I want those things. They seem like sad things to chase, and they seem to alter a person’s values, justifying doing whatever he needs to do in order to keep making the money to keep buying his trinkets and his expensive space. What if you’d rather get off the treadmill and have a simpler life instead? The world doesn’t seem set up to accommodate those who don’t want the typical home and lifestyle that represents “the American Dream.”

If you look for someplace cheap and small to live, you’ll find shacks and dumps. (I know. I’ve looked.) Aren’t there at least some other people who’d like to live more simply? Who’d like to live in a safe neighborhood with other people who are trying to live a more simple and less stressful life? And if there are, why does no one build housing for that niche? Are there really so few that it’s not worth catering to?

When I think about getting rid of things and living more simply, I can’t help but think of the story of Jesus and the rich young man, which is recounted in several of the Gospels. In Mark 10:17-31, for instance, we read of a rich young man who comes and asks Jesus how he can be saved.

Jesus first lists some moral commands the man should follow, but the man says he’s done all those things. Then comes this famous part of the story:

And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.

Some people have used this passage to claim that Jesus told all of His followers to sell everything and give the money away, but I think it says something much more important. I think Jesus knew that the man was a slave to his possessions, and He knew the possessions were keeping the man from being whatever he needed to be. Is that the real lesson of this story — that we need to get rid of anything that is so important to us that it owns us. Since the rich young man “went away sorrowful,” it sounds to me as though his possessions were more important than whatever salvation he understood himself to need.

Some people look at the lesson of Jesus and the rich man and think it can’t have any applicability to them, because they’re not rich. By world standards, anybody who survives in this country is rich. Someone I know who recently returned from Cambodia told me that a salary of $80 or $90 a month made someone quite prosperous over there. Most of us spend that much every month on soft drinks or hamburgers or tacos. By world standards, we’re wealthy — and our wealth owns us.

Honestly, I have no idea what I’m going to do about this. Maybe nothing. But it’s also possible that this will be the time I decide to do something very different and quit letting pride dictate whether I have the kind of place to live that’s socially acceptable. Maybe I’ll go live in a small, cheap place and save the money I’m paying for this place. Maybe I’ll go live in a trailer — if I want to really test whether I’m finished with pride.

Why do I keep feeling this compulsion to get lighter, to get more free of “stuff”? I can’t say for sure. But it’s become something of a compulsion for me lately. I’m not sure I can keep ignoring it, because it doesn’t seem to want to let go of me until I do something about it.

Note: If you’re interested in a much more serious treatment of this issue from a Christian perspective, I highly recommend a book by my pastor, David Platt, that’s become a bestseller. It’s called “Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream.” The book grew out of an experiment that we started talking about and participating in at my church several years back called The Radical Experiment. Here’s something that he wrote for CNN about 18 months ago about our church’s experience.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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