For the past ten years, my father-in-law has been dutifully sending checks to a storage company. Checks that were being cashed. Every month, the same amount, on time, like clockwork. He finally decided to visit the unit recently, only to discover that it didn’t exist. Gone. Vanished. A decade of payments, a decade of holding space for . . . nothing.
What he was most upset about was the cash he had sent in, not so much the things that were gone. He told me that he didn’t even really know what was in there. And yet he was content for all those years, spending money to hold on to distant memories of the things he once owned.
It’s funny, and kind of depressing—paying others to keep things that we’re not sure we need. It reminded me of this job I worked right after graduating college. I was taking just about all the odd jobs you could imagine at the time, and one of them was helping this very wealthy woman sort through her four storage units (one for each home she owned in Los Angeles). She had no idea what was in any of the units, so she had me visit them, take stock, and report back. And there was a lot—stacks of boxes, plastic-wrapped furniture, multiple TVs of all sizes, old cutlery, air conditioners, dehumidifiers, paintings, toys. Paperwork galore, tchotchkes galore.
It was disorienting to sort through someone else’s forgotten life. One box held family photo albums—faces I didn’t know but could tell had once meant something to her. Another was full of designer shoes, still in their original boxes—pristine, though they hadn’t been worn in years. There were duplicates of everything: four printers, three coffeemakers, endless sets of linens. Each item made me wonder why she’d held on to it. Was it sentimentality? Indecision? Or just a simple act of avoidance?
Each unit was bigger than my tiny studio apartment. Each unit could furnish my tiny studio apartment multiple times over. It all felt frozen in time. The dim overhead lighting cast strange shadows, making the rooms feel more like mausoleums than storage spaces. Where our many unnecessary things go to die. She didn’t want to throw these things away, give them away, or sell them, she just wanted to remember what she was holding on to. (To be transparent, I did take a printer from one of her units. Who needs four printers!?)
Driving through Los Angeles, I can’t help but notice the massive storage facilities scattered across the city, their hulking structures occupying valuable land. In a city facing a housing crisis, it’s striking to think how many of these buildings could be homes. The self-storage industry is a $50-billion-a-year business in the US alone, with more than 2 billion square feet of rentable storage space. That’s enough to house every single American simultaneously. It’s a staggering number, one that speaks volumes about our collective attachment to material possessions. A storage unit becomes a time capsule of uncertainty, a towering monument to our inability to let go.
Storage units are often marketed as solutions for temporary situations—moving, downsizing, or transitioning. But studies show that once people rent a unit, they rarely let it go. Many renters (like the lady I worked for, my father-in-law—maybe you) forget what’s even inside yet continue to pay for years. The industry thrives on this inertia, feeding off our reluctance to make hard decisions about what we truly need and our insatiable appetite for more—more things, more space, more places to stash what we can’t confront. An empty house always fills itself. An empty closet begs to be packed.
This drive to expand, to accumulate, feels almost hardwired into us, an instinct we’ve rarely questioned. We don’t just store objects; we store memories, identities, and fears. It’s what so many Buddhist teachings try to combat. The dharma teaches impermanence (anicca), the understanding that everything changes, everything passes. It speaks of nonattachment (anatta), the practice of not clinging to things, not defining ourselves by what we own. It reveals how suffering (dukkha) arises when we try to hold on to things that cannot be held—whether they’re physical possessions, relationships, or even our ideas of self.
There’s a well-known parable about a man crossing a river with a raft. The raft helps him get to the other side, but once he’s crossed, he keeps carrying the raft on his back, even though it’s no longer needed. The Buddha asks us to consider: Why carry something that no longer serves its purpose? Why hold on to what we don’t need? Maybe it’s because we equate objects with security: If we have more, we feel safe. Or maybe the emptiness and spaciousness that dharma speaks about frightens us to our core: We can’t comprehend that we aren’t the objects that surround us.
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My father-in-law’s discovery felt like a modern-day equivalent. He was holding space for an absence, for nothing at all. And in many ways, aren’t we all? We cling to all kinds of things—old stories about who we are, identities we’ve outgrown, habits that no longer serve us. Sometimes it’s a relationship we can’t let go of, even though it’s been over for years. Other times, it’s an idea of success or perfection that keeps us chasing, striving, always reaching but never arriving. We pay the rent to store these thoughts in our mind and body, we pay to hang on to these stories that we no longer need. Yet we just keep sending in the check over and over again. We just keep hanging on. What would happen if we let go?
When I was 25 years old, I gave away all my possessions. All of them. For a dollar. I was moving, and I put up a listing on Craigslist that said: You can have everything I own for one dollar. You must pick it up in one go, no picking and choosing. All of it. One dollar.
Three days later, a man with a red pickup truck scooped it all up and gave me a crisp dollar bill. I remember him stretching it out wide before handing it to me. He hit me with the unoriginal but genuine, “Pleasure doing business with you.”
I’m not saying I’m amazing at letting go. I probably think I’m better at it than I actually am. I don’t own a storage unit, but I do have a box full of every journal I have ever written in since the fifth grade. Do I read them daily? No. Do I read them yearly? No. Biannually? Not even. And yet something about the idea of not having them around is really sad to me. I have contemplated letting them go many times, staring at them and considering what it would be like to throw them into the trash. But each time, I don’t. . . . There is some lingering idea that they are still a part of me, and that throwing them away would mean throwing away a part of myself.
If it isn’t evident by now, I live in Los Angeles. We just experienced one of our worst fires of all time. Ravishing neighborhoods, homes, and lives. Eating and consuming objects of all kinds—journals and printers included. I had to evacuate because of the smoke, and in that process, I was forced to ask: What do I bring with me? Should my home not be here when I return, what really matters when it is all said and done?
The air was thick with smoke, the kind that burns your throat and coats your lungs. The sunlight was muted, filtered through a haze that made everything look apocalyptic. Ash fell like snowflakes, collecting on rooftops and car windshields. And I stood in my living room asking, what really matters when it is all said and done? Staring at a lifetime of objects: books, journals, mementos, photos. Some well-made, some made cheaply, with fast labor, easily replaceable, sent overnight (part of the problem of a burning city to begin with).
I can’t bring it all—nor am I meant to, I thought. Or as the old saying goes, “You’ll never see a U-Haul behind a hearse.”
The journals didn’t make the cut. Not much did, in fact. Just my passport, my partner, my dog, and the two cold beers I had left in the fridge. It reminded me of an NPR special about Greece’s economic crisis: One episode featured a coffee shop that somehow survived when so many businesses crumbled. The owner said something I’ve never forgotten: “If you can’t afford your rent, you might as well still enjoy a nice espresso with a friend.” I figured if my house might burn down, I can still enjoy a nice cold cerveza.
Driving away from my home, I felt a pang of guilt as I left things behind. Why do we cling so tightly to what we can’t take with us? Is it because these things feel like anchors in a world that’s constantly shifting, a world we can’t fully control? Or is it because letting go feels like an admission that the stories we tell ourselves about these objects—stories of identity, security, and meaning—might not be as solid as we think?
The dharma speaks of “freedom in emptiness”—that true security comes from letting go, from not needing the crutch of material. I’ve come to understand that emptiness isn’t nothingness, it’s spaciousness. And spaciousness isn’t empty; it’s full of possibility. Without the constant clutter of thoughts and desires, there is room for something deeper to emerge: this moment. Letting go doesn’t mean losing; it means making room. It means trusting that what we release will be replaced not by nothing but by freedom. It’s not about giving up but about opening up—opening to the truth of impermanence, the beauty of not knowing, and the relief of not having to carry it all.
We’d rather box up our messes and put them out of sight. But the mess doesn’t go away just because it’s in a unit across town.
The dharma offers us a different path: to look at our mess, to sit with it, and then to let it go. To embrace impermanence and the beauty of living lightly. The challenge is to see the empty storage unit not as a loss but as liberation. What could our lives look like if we stopped clinging and started clearing out? Not just our closets but our minds and hearts too?
Maybe the real work is not in acquiring more space but in creating space by letting go. . . . Because the less we cling to, the more room we have for what truly matters. And that, I think, is worth holding on to.
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Everything you own, owns you — unless you simply use it as a resource without a sense of fear-based ownership.
Fear tends to live in our mind rent-free until we recognize its presence and influence. The ultimate price is living in the past or future and not the present moment which is our gift.
And in that way we are also owned by the past we measure or the future to which we aspire. There is no freedom to be found there.
I spent two periods of my life owning less than 100 things -- one when I was on the run and one as a choice. It made things very simple and freed up large amounts of time and energy. But it was also odd. During the latter period I went to a naturopath with a bad cough and was given a loose leaf tea. I had no mug, no teapot or tea ball. I couldn't explain that to her because it felt too weird. And it wasn't like I couldn't have purchased both on the way home. But I knew that if I did, I'd find it easier to buy other things when I needed or just wanted them. And so it happened. And it's lovely to have stuff. To have the right sized bowl for mixing something. To be able to choose the color of shirt that makes you happy that day. The problem I find is that as an American I'm constantly being told that what I consume is what I am. The brainwashing is so multivocal and constant that it's impossible not to fall asleep into that dream. And then you have to wake yourself up and clean out the closet.
Good connections, Christopher.
Everything you own, owns you — unless you simply use it as a resource without a sense of fear-based ownership.
Fear tends to live in our mind rent-free until we recognize its presence and influence. The ultimate price is living in the past or future and not the present moment which is our gift.
And in that way we are also owned by the past we measure or the future to which we aspire. There is no freedom to be found there.
I spent two periods of my life owning less than 100 things -- one when I was on the run and one as a choice. It made things very simple and freed up large amounts of time and energy. But it was also odd. During the latter period I went to a naturopath with a bad cough and was given a loose leaf tea. I had no mug, no teapot or tea ball. I couldn't explain that to her because it felt too weird. And it wasn't like I couldn't have purchased both on the way home. But I knew that if I did, I'd find it easier to buy other things when I needed or just wanted them. And so it happened. And it's lovely to have stuff. To have the right sized bowl for mixing something. To be able to choose the color of shirt that makes you happy that day. The problem I find is that as an American I'm constantly being told that what I consume is what I am. The brainwashing is so multivocal and constant that it's impossible not to fall asleep into that dream. And then you have to wake yourself up and clean out the closet.