own term for this: being “house poor”). Montaigne was perceptive
enough to ask whether it was in fact he who was the pet of his cat.
We also find a version of it from the East. Xunzi explained:
The gentleman makes things his servants. The petty man
is servant to things.In short, mental and spiritual independence matter little if the
things we own in the physical world end up owning us.
The Cynics took this idea the furthest. Diogenes supposedly lived
in a barrel and walked around nearly naked. When he saw a child
drinking water from a well with his hands, Diogenes smashed his
own cup, realizing that he had been carrying around an extraneous
possession.
Today, we might call Diogenes a bum or a loser (or a crazy
person), and in some sense he was those things. But on the few
occasions when Diogenes met Alexander the Great, then the most
powerful man in the world, it was Diogenes who observers came
away thinking was the more impressive. Because Alexander, as much
as he tried, could neither tempt Diogenes with any favors nor deprive
him of anything that he had not already willingly tossed aside.
There was nothing but a shirt between the Stoics and the Cynics,
joked the poet Juvenal, meaning the Stoics were sensible enough to
wear clothes (and refrain from bodily functions in public), unlike the
Cynics. This is a pretty reasonable concession. We don’t need to get
rid of all our possessions, but we should constantly question what we
own, why we own it, and whether we could do without.
Have you ever seen a house torn down? A lifetime of earning and
savings, countless hours of decorating and accumulating until it was
arranged just right, the place of so much living—and in the end it is
reduced to a couple dumpsters full of debris. Even the incredibly
wealthy, even the heads of state showered with gifts throughout their
life, would only fill a few more bins.
Yet how many of us collect and acquire as if the metric tonnage of
our possessions is a comment on our worth as individuals? Just as
every hoarder becomes trapped by their own garbage, so too are we