I can even remember the time when we had more than one bathroom..

Due to a quirk with the seller’s title, at one point THE ONLY tangible property I owned were the clothes on my back and the contents of my wallet and one manilla envelope. No home, clothes, furniture, knick-knacks, vehicle–not even a toothbrush, nothing. Even the two underbed plastic containers of stuff I intended to put in the RV were thought to have been mistakenly thrown out.

I spent a couple of nights in a motel until seller’s problem with the RV title could be solved

It was strange and very liberating. All the psychological weight of all those things is a remarkable phenomenon that we are mostly unaware of.

Since then I have managed to curb much of my acquisitive nature, though an objective person might still think I own too much for the small space I occupy.

As for the thrust of the posted item, those who are on the acquisitive but non neurotic side of the continuum will never change their behavior as long as they are presented every day with thousands of scientifically designed and placed messages urging them to acquire more.

For many years I bought jeans whenever they were on sale because with three boys someone would fit into them eventually.

Now that we’ve been here for seven years–the longest we’ve lived anywhere–I’ve finally started to get rid of things we’ll never need again.

But that was after I got my in-laws’ furniture and my parents’ when they all died. It’s been hard to remember possessions are not the same as people and tossing out my father-in-law’s desk is not the same thing as rejecting him.

I’ve also learned that because we moved so often, our children tended to identify with the furniture not the house–so while my mother’s sofa was of much finer quality and theoretically I could toss our junker, the kids’ memories were with the junker. Now the kids are gone, I can throw things away a little easier . . . or, in the case of the couch, they took it with them!

We did build a library in our house in Michigan, by taking the mostly unfinished basement and building three rooms (tool room, library, and bedroom). One wall was built-in bookcases, with the lower shelves big enough to hold encyclopedias and yearbooks and all that stuff. The rest of the walls had our assortment of bookcases, except one corner which had a nice comfy recliner and a table-lamp (i.e. the lamp was built into the table).

Of course the drawback of such a room is that it stays with the house when you move…

First, Stuff is to be enjoyed and then recycled into the community. Both rich and poor need to do this. Second, the entitlement mentality needs to be flushed. No one owes you anything. Rather, we should try to give back to our communities on a voluntary and regular basis.