Why Letting Go Feels Like Losing a Part of Your Soul (Because it Was Already Missing)
We live in the kingdom of things, yet we lack a shared story. Our homes are individual temples of storage, bursting at the seams, driven by the individualism that a dismantled community requires. Everyone needs their own tools, to fix their own problems. Our digital gathering fills them further; we are only ever one click away from another delivery. We have more belongings than any generation in history, yet so many of us feel a persistent, low-grade emptiness and a sense that something essential is still missing.
I believe there’s a direct correlation between our abundance of material things and our absence of story, spirit, and meaning. We have filled our lives with objects because we have a vacuum where our mythology used to be.
For most of human history, we were born into collective meaning. Narrative, whether from religion, folklore, or deeply rooted local traditions, told us who we were, where we came from, and what it all meant. These stories gave context to our suffering, purpose to our journeys, and a sense of belonging to something larger than ourselves and fundamentally a connection with the more than human world.
In the modern West, however, many of us find ourselves in an increasingly distorted society. This distortion is nowhere more evident than in modern advertising. Have you noticed how ads are increasingly detached from reality, pumping out an alluring, false scent of bliss and trouble-free existence? If only your bathroom was free of limescale, you would finally feel complete. But this is like standing outside a restaurant in the cold; the smell of cooking is not a substitute for eating a meal. We have a spiritual hunger. We’ve traded the native narratives of our land for global consumerism, and it’s a hollow diet.
The human need for meaning hasn’t left us; we've simply outsourced it to our belongings. We now have a personal, privatized mythology of stuff and so many of us struggle to get rid of and process. How is it sustainable if we continue to consume? This is why decluttering can feel so emotionally violent. Letting go isn't just about creating space. It feels like discarding a chapter of our story, invalidating a memory, or severing a connection to a past self or a lost loved one. We aren't just afraid of being without the object; we're afraid of being without the meaning we've assigned to it, especially when our sense of place is so fragmented in a globalized world.
Each object is an artifact, a secular relic charged with the weight of our personal history, all while masking an unconscious frustration with meaninglessness. Our homes are no longer just shelters; they are museums of the self, curated to prove that our lives have happened, that we have loved, lost, and existed.
But ownership is a colonial concept. You cannot personally ‘own’ something that truly substitutes for our collective need for community, story, and meaning. We know, deep down, that behind this desire towards ownership lies the fear of being forgotten when we die, for we have not remembered our ancestors before us by honoring their stories.
