What You Own, Owns You

I almost wish everything I Own was stolen from me

I believe a 2000 Popular rock sock can be paraphrased as follows:
“Possessions are Simply Obsessions”

Physical Possessions

American culture in particular is fast paced, money oriented and very materialistic, frivolous and wasteful. And all these traits are related to each other. We work fast so we can make fast money, so we can buy products that have a short lifespan. We want the newest model, the most features, and to follow the latest trends.

I'm victim to this culture as well, even being someone who clearly recognizes the incredible problems with this type of society, as someone like Peter Joseph could articulate very well, I tend to make sure I have a top performing PC, near state of the art (though useful) electronic gadgets, and keep up on the cutting edge of health advice. In the common sense I wouldn’t say I was obsessed with food, but when digging deep down, considering I was stocked up enough on random items that I could stop shopping for a month and still eat all the recommended calories, yeah I was obsessed with allocating food.

Even the food we have owns us. If we indulge in junk food, ice cream, pastries and processed sugary goodness bombs, we can become fat and ill. On the flipside if we concern ourselves too much with what is healthy, we can become orthorexic (obsessed with being healthy). Modern society gives us so many choices in categories like food I even am owned by deciding what mustard I want to use (I have 3 different kinds!)

The new modern trend is hoarding. We tend to own more than we need, and with owning more comes more responsibility. You have 1 car, you need 1 parking spot. You have 5 cars, you need 5 spots, garages, driveways or side yards or even long-term storage to put such large machines. Interestingly enough, I’ve seen many lower class people owning way more cars than their middle class counterparts.

Each thing we own, whether productive or not, takes up Time, Effort and Thought.

Time

We all know time is money. I spend at least half an hour of every day just moving around the stuff I already have. I spend an equal amount of time or more accumulating new things.

Probably in a Week I spend the following time with physical posessions:

• 5 Hours simply organizing or moving things from one place to another
• 3 Hours moving clothes, from putting on and off, to storing dirty, taking to washer, dryer and bringing back. Simply organizing, deciding what to get rid of is extra time on top of this after I realized I have too many clothes since I want to live minimal.
• 6 Hours putting things in and out of my car
• 1 Hour Opening and deciding where to store new items from Amazon – And likely over 6x that amount of time just looking over reviews and deciding what to buy

Effort

All the motivation in the world can’t get me to keep my room clean this year. With so many ideas and projects and businesses I’ve been starting, the last thing I can do is clear my mind and perform a semi-trivial task when I don’t know where to stack the 31st CD case, can’t decide how many locations of rubber bands I should have, if I should keep or throw away twist ties and “I don’t have the focus right now to input all these notes I’ve taken over the last week.”

Thought

Thought combined with effort on the left side of the equation equals stress on the other end of the equation. Just writing the paragraph on effort got me a little stressed contemplating if my hoarding of twist ties over the years will even be worth it.

Digital Possessions

Being a computer science major, a techie and video producer, most of my possessions are actually in digital form. I keep all the raw audio and video from my projects since the start of my career. And no I don’t have them on some abandoned, in the shadows, cobweb covered external drive in the corner of the room. I have them right on my main PC! I do this in case I ever need to reference them or perhaps revisit or reuse a part of an old documentary or interview.

I may be one of every 10,000 people who keeps more personal files on their PC than exists operating files. In case you didn’t know, Windows operating systems have tens of thousands of files.

I spend so much time organizing files it’s mind boggling.

It’s a complex paradox in my mind. Being an INTJ, I’m extremely concerned with maximizing my efficiency not just in my life but in my contributions to the world. As such, and by coincidence the last few months of my life have got me to think deeply about whether all my possessions are holding me back or they are part of the grander scheme of what I am to accomplish with my life. It seems to be a very volatile moment with my future career and personal life being indeterminate to a high degree...being subject to all the stressors in the diagram above.

But don’t worry steemit - I will pull through for you! Not just because you are my venting ground at the moment either.

Follow me if you enjoyed this article, I think shortly I will write about Opportunity Cost which is a subtle theme of this article, but will delve more into what it's like to make choices and have so many choices and humans in 21st century western society compared to our ancestors.