Stuff is the anti-experience. Shed your stuff.
No long-ago king could have imagined the depth and range of material pleasures affordable even for the average person in the West, (and make no mistake, soon the rest of the world too); shiny trinkets endless and overwhelming at the mall, waiting for us to slap plastic to counter and make them our own. Sheer availability can transform one’s surroundings, if not our lives, and we’d be forgiven for arriving at the conclusion that there’s never been a better time to be rich.
But for some, exploring the far reaches of material redundancy, as an life goal, has begun to feel oddly, surprisingly, less satisfying. To the extent one rushes forward to accumulate and possessions become trappings, eventually a distinction might emerge between ownership fetish and Experience, and on a far subversive wind might come the whispered rule-change: there’s never been a better time to have time. Time to improve quality of life rather than further accumulation; to attend to the essential rather than drown in more. Naturally we ‘have’ both time and possessions, but there is a primary difference in these two discretionary things for which we might set goals to reach, and wise people have always known it: Time freed from obligations is almost certainly enriching and open-ended, and materialism finds no satiation point within us.
