Love People, Use Things: Because the Opposite Never Works

by Joshua Fields Millburn

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.