There are moments at this place where I am in life where it seems like the wisest move I could make is to just get rid of all this stuff I’ve accumulated over the years. It seems like there could be a great freedom in actually doing that.

The truth is, most of my stuff I do not use, or if I use it, it is rarely. When I read a book, I like to keep it. It becomes a trophy, and it sits on one of my bookshelves for years, even decades. I do that with most entertainment items in my life. I use it once, maybe twice, and it sits untouched for years. I picked up a multi-volume history of civilization back in 1994- probably 9 volumes in total- that I have packed up and carried around for 23 years and never read.

And the truth is, that minimal usage behavior that governs my life applies to a lot of stuff I claim to love a lot, stuff I have sentimental attachments to. My Bible books. My college books and notes. And yes, even my game collection. For all the games I own, I play probably less than 10% of them even occasionally. The rest just sit, like my beloved books, for years on shelves.

There are so many things that vie to claim significance in our lives, and we tend to live by the influence of a number of those things. But among them, it is easy to forget that each one of us has a limited amount of time. That expiration date is out there for you and I, and it is too often easy to forget to order a life taking into account that reality. There is never enough time, it seems, to get done what we want to. And perhaps, more importantly, there is even less time available for us to get done what we need to, when we discover what things really matter to us. And usually at that point, when we finally realize that it’s the people around us that make life rich and worthwhile, our stuff becomes optional. Most of the stuff I have now- if I got rid of it, would I miss it? For 90% of it, I would say no. But a culture of things adheres to the belief that having stuff is important in defining and creating a life.

The reality is, if lost 90% of what I owned, I don’t think I would miss much of it. Most all of it is non-essential to my day-to-day existence. And if I would not miss it then, why do I hang on to it now? If I lost it and I really needed it and it was a non-sentimental item, couldn’t I find a replacement for it? Most likely, yes.

But you don’t get time and how you spend it back. The hours you spend counting counters that came in a game box or keeping track of your games or books or music cannot be reused to build life-shifting experiences doing other things.

Time or things. They are often a challenging trade-off.