The meaning of all things

BY DOMINIQUE JAMES

One way or the other, and eventually one day soon, the things we buy and own and use will break down. Either from normal wear-and-tear or by accident, all things that we handle do get physically battered and all used up. That’s all well and good. That’s the nature of things.

But despite the fact that the things we own are nothing but inanimate objects, we somehow develop a dogged attachment to them. In particular, we get attached to things that we deem important to us: such as objects we acquired through difficult and expensive means, tools that define our personality, or objects that represent significant meaning in our lives such as our relationship with other people and events that has happened to us.

And because of our attachment to things, we devote an extraordinary amount of time, effort and money to taking care of them. We show how much we value our things by being extra careful with how we tend to them–from the way we acquire and use them to the way we maintain and repair them.

The focus we devote to the things we own sometimes seem absurd. We are passionate about them. We are crazy about them. Often, to the point where our things dominate our lives. Our regard for the things we own become even more important than our regard for other people, particularly those with whom, one way or the other, we are related.

This is, of course, no longer unusual. We can start blaming it all on our materialistic world and on our acquisitive instincts but that wouldn’t do us any good. The world is filled with toys that we just can’t help but lust after. And the truth is, nowadays, it’s almost easy to lay our grubby hands over practically any object of our desire. We just have to focus, and it’s almost ours.

And so, as we fill our coffers to the brim, as we compete with others to amass as much things as we can, and as we surround ourselves with our material loot, we find ourselves being defined more and more by what we own rather than for who we are.

Is it a bad thing? No, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. That’s partly how it should be.

The truth is, our society have set us up to material acquisitiveness. This is how we have chosen to define us as a human being in a highly organized and structured material society. The things that we acquire and the things that we surround ourselves with are our own gauge, and society’s gauge, on who we are as a person.

Unfortunate as this idea may seem, that’s just how it is. Unless we have a better and more accurate means of defining us, our material possessions will do the defining for and in our behalf.