Love People, Use Things: Because the Opposite Never Works

by Joshua Fields Millburn

You must remember to love people and use things, rather than to love things and use people. —Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, circa 1925

Stuck in their homes, people wrestled with the fact that their material possessions matter less than they originally thought. The truth was all around them. All the things collecting dust—their high-school baseball trophies, dusty college textbooks, and broken food processors—were never as important as people. The pandemic magnified this reality and demonstrated a crucial lesson: our things tend to get in the way of what’s truly essential—our relationships. Human connection is missing from our lives, and it can’t be purchased—it can only be cultivated.

Our material possessions are a physical manifestation of our internal lives.

MINIMALISM IS THE THING THAT GETS US PAST THE THINGS SO WE CAN MAKE ROOM FOR LIFE’S IMPORTANT THINGS—WHICH AREN’T THINGS AT ALL.

OUR MEMORIES ARE NOT IN OUR THINGS; OUR MEMORIES ARE INSIDE US.

Minimalists don’t focus on having less, less, less; they focus on making room for more: more time, more passion, more creativity, more experiences, more contribution, more contentment, more freedom. Clearing the clutter creates room for the intangibles that make life rewarding.

It was the venerable Fulton J. Sheen, circa 1925, who first said, “You must remember to love people and use things, rather than to love things and use people.”

MINIMALISTS DON’T FOCUS ON HAVING LESS, LESS, LESS; THEY FOCUS ON MAKING ROOM FOR MORE.

Minimalism itself is not a new idea: the concept dates back to the Stoics, to every major religion, and, more recently, to Emerson and Thoreau and Tyler Durden. What’s new is the problem: never before have people been more seduced by materialism, and never before have people been so willing to forsake loved ones to acquire heaps of meaningless stuff.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH WHEN YOU DECIDE IT’S ENOUGH.

In time, thoughtless decisions lead to thoughtless habits that damage our relationships, until, eventually, we’ve distanced ourselves from the very thing we sought—freedom.

You see, real freedom involves much more than material possessions and wealth and traditional success. Real freedom can’t be tracked on a spreadsheet—it is an abstraction. But unlike distance and time, we don’t have units of measurement for freedom. That’s why it’s so difficult to grasp. So we settle instead for what can be counted: dollars, trinkets, and social-media clout, all of which lack the meaning and rigor and payoff of real freedom.

Security resides in our ability to move on, to walk away from what’s holding us back, and to walk toward that which is worthwhile.

Yet a Rolex won’t buy you more time. A Mercedes won’t get you there any faster. And a vacation home won’t earn you more vacation days. In fact, the opposite is true in most cases. We are attempting to purchase that which is priceless: time. You might have to work hundreds of hours to buy an expensive watch, years to pay off a luxury car, and a lifetime to afford a vacation home. Which means we’re willing to give up our time to purchase the illusion of time.

The real problem is feeling as though these material items will make your life better, meaningful, or complete. But your stuff won’t make you a more whole person. At best, the things we bring into our lives are tools that can help us be more comfortable or productive—they can augment a meaningful life, but they cannot bring meaning into our lives.

Every time you part with a dollar, you part with a tiny piece of your freedom. If you earn $20 an hour, then that $4 cup of coffee just cost you twelve minutes, that $800 iPad cost you a week, and that $40,000 new car cost you an entire year of freedom. At the end of your life, do you think you’d rather have an automobile or one more year? That’s not to say we must eschew coffee or electronics or cars. I personally own all three. The issue is that we don’t question the things we bring into our lives. And if we’re not willing to question everything, we’ll fall for anything.

SINCERE PEOPLE DON’T CARE WHAT KIND OF CAR YOU DRIVE, WHERE YOU LIVE, OR THE BRAND OF THE CLOTHES YOU WEAR.

Allowing others’ expectations to shape our desires and behavior and, ultimately, our lives will always lead to guilt and shame because we’ll never be able to live up to everyone else’s conflicting values. As long as you’re not harming anyone, you need only live congruent to your own standards—everything else leads to discontent.

But each promotion, each achievement, each new purchase moved me one step further from the truth. I wish I would have known that buying a luxury vehicle wasn’t going to make me a better person. I wish I would have questioned what was essential instead of letting outside expectations dictate how I spent my time, money, and attention. I wish I would have realized that alone in an empty room, each of us is already a whole person, and the role of everything else is only to augment, enhance, or amplify our lives, not get in the way.

BY REMOVING THE PHYSICAL DISTRACTIONS AROUND US, WE’RE ABLE TO LOOK INSIDE OURSELVES AND BEGIN THE PROCESS OF MENTAL, EMOTIONAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL, AND SPIRITUAL DECLUTTERING.

Without dwelling on the past. Without worrying about the future. Be on the mountain. Just. Be.

The consequences of every shortcut are greater than its temporary benefit.

Have you ever seen a school of barracudas attack an object on the surface of the water? It’s an incredible sight. They see something shiny and they simply react—just like all the barracudas around them. Barracudas don’t have values; they just lunge toward the next shiny object. And we humans tend to do the same. We follow trends, go into debt, apply for jobs we hate just so we can afford the new car that will take us to that same job. We lie, cheat, and steal. We build a life on a foundation of compromises. But if we’re willing to compromise anything, eventually we’ll compromise everything. Even our values.

Don’t continue poor spending and saving habits. Don’t take on financial burdens you can’t afford. Don’t talk yourself into going into debt. Don’t deprive yourself permanently of “nonessentials” that add value to your life. You can bring them into your life by budgeting and saving for them appropriately. Don’t forsake your long-term financial health for short-term gains—you don’t want to sacrifice future security for momentary pleasure.

Have you, at any point, stopped to consider why we strive for virality? Is there a reason we try to create the viral video, the overshared blog post, the retweeted tweet? Or are we all just Pavlov’s dogs, drooling on command for a morsel of attention?

It might sound scary at first, but it’s actually empowering. No more excuses, no more waiting around to be selected, no more blaming failure on someone else. You are in charge of your quality, your design, your distribution, your destiny. You must create, and then you must find your own audience, because no one else is going to do it for you.

You can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you.

For years, I didn’t grasp my own penchant for solitude, so I let societal norms dictate my interactions. Although I’m an extreme introvert, my behavior throughout my teens and twenties was that of an extrovert. The career I chose forced me to be a “people person,” spending nearly all of my waking hours actively engaged with others in meetings, on phone calls, and on the sales floor. The only time I had to myself was in the bathroom—door locked and hiding from the chaotic world, if just for a moment. To make matters worse, I’m socially competent, which people tend to mistake for extroversion. This is so common that there was even a period of time I talked myself into thinking I was, indeed, an extrovert. But that’s like an Alaskan salmon talking himself into being a German shepherd—even with the nicest dog collar, that fish isn’t going to bark. It’s not in his nature, just like extroversion isn’t in mine. Consequently, I felt drained by the ceaseless interactions.

Unfortunately, we tend to prioritize relationships out of proximity and convenience. Which means we end up spending most of our precious time with people in our peripheral group. These aren’t “bad” people necessarily, but we have only twenty-four hours in a day, and if we spend most of those hours with coworkers and acquaintances, we forsake the people closest to us, which isn’t fair to them and, ultimately, isn’t fulfilling to us.

“Toxic people defy logic,” according to Emotional Intelligence 2.0 coauthor Travis Bradberry. “Some are blissfully unaware of the negative impact that they have on those around them, and others seem to derive satisfaction from creating chaos and pushing other people’s buttons. Either way, they create unnecessary complexity, strife, and worst of all stress.” Like Marta Ortiz, we’ve all held on to a relationship that didn’t deserve to be in our lives, and most of us are still involved with people who continually drain us: People who don’t add value. People who aren’t supportive. People who take and take and take without giving back. People who contribute little and prevent us from growing. People who constantly play the victim. In time, people who play victim become victimizers. That’s when the relationship grows dangerous. Victimizers keep us from feeling fulfilled and from living purpose-driven lives. And, over time, these toxic relationships become part of our identity.

Letting go of someone does not mean that you don’t love that person; it means only that their behavior won’t allow you to participate in the relationship anymore. It doesn’t make you bad or evil or negligent to walk away. You’re making room for a better life. A life of discourse, not dispute. A life of quality, not quarrels. A life of caring, not clashing. When you graduate from a toxic relationship, you’re not quitting—you’re beginning again.

While love is heavy and demanding and enigmatic, our biggest challenge isn’t love itself—it’s how we’ve conflated excitement, lust, and attraction with love. Nowhere is this more evident than in our relationship to our material possessions. We say we love our televisions, our cars, our cosmetics, but we’re confused, blinded by the propaganda that tells us the things in our homes are just as essential as the people in our lives. It’s easy to see the absurdity of this manufactured love when we extend it to less enticing items. No one I know “loves” their toilet-paper dispenser, their mailbox, their key ring. Yet we use these things just as much as, if not more than, the things we think we love. When we realize this—that we can use things without loving them, that we can treat our iPhone the way we treat our lip balm, as useful but not worthy of our love—then we are better able to understand real love, a love that is reserved for people, not the things that get in the way. It is possible to love people and use things, because the opposite never works.