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Comment by kerryfalk | Hacker News Reader

I don't see your point. Can you expand on it a bit?

I live like the OP. I barely own anything and I avoid distractions like the plague (There are some I still fight to avoid at certain times... HN). The increased focus is liberating.

I would see needing to buy things as trying to fill a hole and ridding yourself of those things as trying to cure the issue. They may be rooted in the same problem, but are they really the same?

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Not the GP, or the author of TFA, but my take on it is pretty simple: the problem is attachment. It's not our things that are the problem, but our attachment to them — the thing has somehow come to define us, or, more correctly: we've come to define ourselves, in however small a way, in terms of the thing. "I have a nice TV, so I'm somehow better", on some imaginary scale of better-ness.

The fact of the matter is, you have a TV. Period. Any notion of better-ness you have is a story you're telling yourself. There's no better or worse here. Stop telling yourself the story, or at least learn to recognize it as a story — let the TV be a TV — and you'll be amazed at how much you can simply enjoy watching TV when that's what you want to do, and walk away from it when you don't.

TFA is right in that experiences are what make us happy, but where he gets it wrong is by defining himself in antithesis to things. That's just as much a story, and just as much an external definition of self as, "I'm an awesome person because I have a really nice car," or, "I'm cool because I'm an Apple fanboi," or any other thing or set of things. He's become attached to, and identifies with, the absence of things; he's over-corrected.

Once you get over attachment, you can have things, or not have things, or whatever else you might want to do with them, without having some kind of complex about it — without that external thing somehow becoming definitive of who you are as a person. You realize that they're just things, and like everything else in this life, they're transient.

Now, be careful, and don't make the novice mistake of conflating "attachment" and "liking". I like my TV and my car and my computers and my books and all the rest of the crap I schlep along with me through this life quite a bit; I wouldn't have bought them if I didn't. But if I lost them tomorrow, it wouldn't change my identity — it wouldn't change me — a whit. I'm still exactly and only me, whatever that happens to be. It's life, and my experiences therein, that change me, and that can happen with or without things.

That "imaginary scale of better-ness" that you speak of is called happiness. At least, that's the scale on which I would find a difference between pushing around a $500 beat-to-shit Dodge Neon and cruising in a brand new BMW.

If you're driving a nice car, you worry less about it breaking down at an inconvenient time. You're probably also safer; as an extreme example, I believe one is less likely to be injured in an accident doing 120 in a Ferrari Enzo and wrapping it around a tree than doing the same at half the speed in a budget car. Having a nice AWD car affords you the opportunity to drive up to Tahoe for a snowboarding weekend without worrying about whether you will get stuck in the snow. If you've got a nice home with plenty of extra sleeping space, you have the opportunity to invite a bunch of friends to fly out for a weekend to party and have an awesome time. In all of these cases, the material things serve as tools by opening doors for you to have experiences. And aren't experiences the root of happiness?

Nice things are not better than average things because they are more expensive, they are better because they offer more opportunities for experiences. The ownership of things is not an end in and of itself, but a means to an end.

That said, I totally agree with your thesis: "the problem is attachment". I think the OP's article can be summed up in a sentence: He had unhealthy compulsions resulting from a factor, got rid of that factor, and was happier. That factor, for the author, being material possessions. Broadly presuming that everyone has the same unhealthy relationship to possessions is where his article fell apart for me.

If you're not already, it sounds like you'd be interested in the Buddhist philosophy which, at it's core, states that attachment is suffering and that removing said attachment is the path to liberation.

Sure, the point is that either way (either by compulsively buying things, or needing to purge down to the absolute bare necessities) you're allowing consumer goods to control you. Those of us who don't feel consumed by goods would gain nothing by purging of everything. I own all the things that the OP purged off in his need to cleanse, but, none of those ever get in the way of me going out.

My point is simply this: I read things like this all the time, and it makes me very happy that I don't feel compelled to control my belongings to be able to live a happy life.

"Paraplegics are often unhappy, but they are not unhappy all the time because they spend most of the time experiencing and thinking about other things than their disability. When we think of what it is like to be a paraplegic, or blind, or a lottery winner, or a resident of California we focus on the distinctive aspects of each of these conditions. The mismatch in the allocation of attention between thinking about a life condition and actually living it is the cause of the focusing illusion."

http://edge.org/response-detail/1703/what-scientific-concept...

In other words, when you're reading how someone improved their life by paring down possessions, it may sound like they define themselves by compulsively purging possessions, but they probably don't. It just seems that way because all you're seeing while reading their writing is one aspect of their life. You are focusing your attention on only one of hundreds, if not thousands, of the author's opinions and life decisions.

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