Maybe the life you’ve always wanted is buried beneath everything you own.
You can’t give anything to others because you feel like you don’t have enough. You feel that you are still struggling to fulfill your needs. The constant feeling of lacking is not without a cause (and a cure).
The more stuff you own, the more time you need to take care of them or at least try to make use of them (even when you actually don’t need such tool). You spend all your weekend cleaning, dusting and organising while your five-year-old daughter is playing alone. Maybe she wants you to join her tea party, but you have other ‘important’ tasks to do...
Regretting your purchases is one thing. Realising how the stuff keep you from being grateful is another thing. You may have realised that your possessions are not making you happy, but you may not have realised that those things have started to take you away from the real source of happiness in life.
Minimalism
Owning things is not necessarily bad. But owning too much stuff may have led people to the opposite direction of happiness and freedom. The more unnecessary things we possess, the more overwhelmed we are: we feel that we have to put use to it (instead of selling it for a cheaper price and throw it out of your life), that we have to care for it (the dusting, the organising), that we have to carry them around whenever we move. We must realise that with the bombarding advertisements (and how tricky they get as they use our personal information to personalise their ads), we are more vulnerable to become victims of a consumer culture.
Minimalism doesn’t ask you to restrict yourself by owning “only 100 stuff” or that collecting an impressive amount of books is bad. It is a philosophy that guides us to be more conscious and mindful when we give meaning to things we own and things we wish to own. We are asked to choose wisely because the importance does not lie in whether or not we possess it, but the value it brings.
You need a phone casing to protect your phone. Buy it. But do you need an extra phone case cleanser? Maybe wiping it off with random cloth and water is enough. You want to own a house and build a family. If those things bring you joy, do it! But then the house is too big and you keep having this urge to fill in the empty space. The space that actually set your family members apart from each other.
As humans, it is normal to not feel enough or have enough. Just remember that you have once dreamed to have what you have now. Don’t undervalue your possessions, but at the same time don’t overvalue it to the point of forsaking you real life --relationships, family, passion. Make sure that your possessions actually support and benefit your life, instead of sucking your time and energy to value them.
