Things Are Just Things

What happens when these things no longer matter; when you turn away from the world you have made because now it suddenly seems so empty and hollow?

We create these lives around ourselves; stacking up so many things to shape our lives around our selves, things that we think have meaning beyond mere utility. We surround ourselves with all this stuff that is supposed to define us, as much to ourselves as to other people. We are sold fantasies of ourselves that will – in some magical way – transform ourselves both in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Sometimes we are foolish enough to believe these marketing fantasies are somehow true; despite knowing that you cannot change yourself or your life merely by buying things.

Things are just things.

For these things to have the meaning beyond themselves that will – as the marketing of them has it – transform our lives into something new, greater, deeper, we have to also buy into the rituals that surround the things. To those on the inside a ritual has meaning, to those on the outside it just seems a lot of fuss about very little, conducted with an earnestness that seem laughably portentous and absurd.