Everything in this world belongs to this world. We arrive with nothing at all, we handle a certain number of things for a certain number of years, and we leave without any of them. There is no arrangement under which this does not happen and there never has been, for anybody, in any century, regardless of how carefully it was planned.
Everybody knows this and nobody disputes it. And it makes almost no difference to how any of us behave, which suggests that knowing something and having actually seen it are two quite different states of mind that we have carelessly given the same name.
What we have is use, for a while. Not ownership. And use is a completely different relationship to a thing than ownership is, though from outside the two look identical and involve exactly the same objects. The difference is entirely in the person holding them.
What ownership does to the thing
The moment something becomes ours, it changes. Before it is ours it is simply itself and can be enjoyed freely and without administration. After it is ours, it must be maintained, protected, insured, compared with better versions, kept from harm, and eventually passed on correctly to somebody. It has acquired a whole set of duties that did not exist when it was only beautiful.
This is why acquiring something rarely gives what was expected of it. The wanting was for the thing itself. What actually arrives is the thing plus its permanent administration, and the administration outlasts the pleasure by several decades. Nobody includes this in the calculation beforehand because nobody thinks to.
Whole lives get arranged around protecting what has been acquired, and the protecting takes considerably more out of people than the owning ever gave back. And none of it stays anyway. That is the part that goes unmentioned in every version of the sums anybody has ever seen done.
This is not an argument for having nothing
This can very easily be mistaken for a recommendation to give everything away and live plainly, and it is not that at all. Comfort is good. It can be enjoyed fully and there is no need to pretend otherwise for the sake of sounding serious. Money has real value and real uses, and there is nothing noble about the absence of it.
The question is not how much anybody has. It is whether their peace is resting on it, and those are separate things which can be tested separately. Imagine the whole arrangement gone tomorrow, and simply notice what happens inside. If what happens is inconvenience, then a person has things. If what happens is that they would no longer know who they were, then the things have them.
That answer is uncomfortable the first time it is asked honestly, and what it says about several years of a life is not always welcome. It improves with asking, though never as much as anybody would like and never in every direction.
Why it is not a gloomy thought
People hear this as sad, and it is not sad. Something borrowed is enjoyed differently from something owned. There is more attention in it, because there is a limit, and the limit is not a threat hanging over the thing. The limit is the reason the thing is vivid at all.
Nothing about a life is diminished by knowing it is temporary. What is diminished is the anxiety of holding, which was never doing anything useful in the first place and which most of us mistake for care. Anxiety about losing a thing does not protect it. It only removes us from it while we still have it, which is a strange way to guard something.
We come here, we experience what we came to experience, and we go. That is the whole shape of it and it has never been otherwise. Everything in between is on loan, including the people, and knowing that does not make anybody hold them less tightly. It makes them look at them more while they are here, which is the only thing that was ever actually available.
