Learning how bad our need for posession is – When I didn’t buy anything new for 107 days

Some events leave a void in your life. The emptiness which cannot be filled by anything or anyone.

A year and a half ago something like this happened in my life: my grandfather passed away.

We just had marriage in or family and just in a moment he was just not there. That day a small part of me was gone. There were so many hard parts, one of the hardest was not being able to mourn in peace.

Nope, in our society you can’t just mourn a person’s loss—you need to work. Not just at your job, but on piles of paperwork, people to let know and arrangements to be made. I had to leave for joining my first job in 3 days. Going through my grandfather’s old things, I felt the loss of my grandfather with each item I sorted. This is when I realized that we were living the life of accumulation.

We are destroying the planet and there will be nothing left for the future generation, all of this so that we can enjoy or the lifetime and the possessions we hardly use. We invest time, effort and money to get all the material possession only to be disposed of with great difficulty. And all of this for enjoying a very short time in this world with the things we rarely use and easily forget.

I then decided that let’s do something different in memory of the person I loved. So, I embarked on a journey that lasted 107 days where I didn’t buy anything new, obviously excluding groceries, medicine, and basic toiletries.

I have never been disciplined in buying things. I just buy it impulsively without any thought. Never thought this will give me a lot of learning along the way:

• There is too much stuff in this world already there. As I embarked on the journey not to buy anything new. I started browsing second-hand things on online classified, Facebook groups etc. I was shocked to see the volume of the stuff we have already created and all this stuff being thrown away and new created
• Humans buy things on pure compulsion. The number of things listed for second-hand sale in stores and groups was uncountable. Right from lock to dresses to anything was available second hand. Clearly, the act of buying is often completely disassociated with real human need, or even want. It’s much more akin to a compulsion.
• There is a great stigma for the pre-owned items. This is attributed to hygiene, not being civilized, weird, etc. People thing that these discarded goods are only good for people of lower income group among us but not “us”.
• There is so much abundance in our lives and in this world the made me realized that I didn’t need 6 pairs of shoes or 25 pairs of clothes. But it also made me realize that there are enough and more people to give you things you need at a very low cost as they don’t need it anymore.
• When everything is old everything is cheap and everything old comes at a steep discount. My bank account grew very fast in these days and made me realized that I have more than enough to survive. The quality is something which I think I never compromised.
• One more thing is it feels good to pay to people instead of companies. People are in general honest and helpful. They were normal people just wanting to recoup a portion of their purchase price by selling perfectly usable items.
• There are some things which you cannot just buy pre-owned. When I was forced to not buy them against my strongest impulses at times, Iw as surprised that nothing changed. Most of the things are generally “nice to haves” and real needs are generally very limited.
• Living in minimalism was a transformative journey. When someone leaves, you are expected to get past it and move on. I just didn’t want him leaving me a normal phenomenon. Hence this experience which left me better than before and a lifetime remembrance.

Sharing this has only one agenda that at the very least, I hope you’ll just change the way you think when you buy another item and thing if you really need it or not.