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  "description": "I’ve collected so much stuff over the years. Objects, trinkets, ephemera, items, bits and bobs. Stuff. Tucked into drawers or plastic bins. Not organized. Just jumbled together in these little spaces. It’s okay to have stuff if you put it in a little space with a lid.\n\nI’ve carried some of these things with me from city to city. Home to home. Apartment to apartment. Year to year. Decade to… decade. Some of it came into my possession when I was a teen. I am no longer a teen. Why do I have it stil",
  "path": "/stuff/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-25T19:40:33.000Z",
  "site": "https://danhannigan.me",
  "textContent": "I’ve collected so much stuff over the years. Objects, trinkets, ephemera, items, bits and bobs. Stuff. Tucked into drawers or plastic bins. Not organized. Just jumbled together in these little spaces. It’s okay to have stuff if you put it in a little space with a lid.\n\nI’ve carried some of these things with me from city to city. Home to home. Apartment to apartment. Year to year. Decade to… decade. Some of it came into my possession when I was a teen. I am no longer a teen. Why do I have it still? What value does it provide? A time, a place. Time travel. But not really.\n\nA person. A representation of who I could be. An aspiration. Potential. Not admitting failure. Not admitting “I wasn’t good at this”. If I keep it, there’s always a chance I could be good at it. A chance I could learn about it. A chance I could master it. If I get rid of it I’m admitting that I couldn’t do it.\n\nI got rid of things this weekend. I pulled them out, boxed them up, and gave them to strangers. For free. I hope the strangers like the things they got. I hope they do something with them. I won’t know though. Did I fail?\n\nHave I closed the time travel loop? Did I dismantle the machine? Not one made of crystals and rods of fine metals but one made of plastic and cardboard, fantasy characters, ink on paper, tubes of color. Can I ever go back to that aspirational pre-teen? No. The time is gone. The times are now gone, too. And that’s okay. It’s unsettling but it’s okay.\n\nI remember where things are. I can visit a city years later and know how to drive in it without a map. Visit a store in that city and, assuming the layout hasn’t changed, remember exactly how to find what I need. I can find what I need in all of the drawers and plastic bins scattered around the house. I can picture it. I can do this for the thousands of little things in the house. There’s a physical inventory that I mirror in my own cerebral inventory. It’s so much. It’s a burden: to have stuff. It’s a joy to have stuff. A status, a comfort. There was a time when I didn’t have stuff. I couldn’t have stuff. Time. Resources. Money. All of it prevented me. Now I can. What a privilege! To have stuff! What a burden.\n\nI got rid of things this weekend. They have been removed physically but they haven’t been removed mentally. They’re still there in the gray matter. What are they in there? Electricity? Atoms? I never learned how the mind stores things. How do physical things also become intangible things in the mind? In that squishy flesh. How do they get stored?\n\nI feel positive about getting rid of those things. They were in boxes. Entombed and untouched, not serving their purpose or providing any value other than being a physical lookup device for those memories stored in the folds of my brain. The memory is still there. Maybe it will fade now that the physical objects are gone. Maybe not. That’s a little scary, but that’s life.\n\nI buy things. So many things that I don’t need. I form an ideal version of me that could be if I just had a few more things. The hobbies I loved as a kid. The hobbies I made happen and enjoyable with limited resources and access to things. I took my younger self to the store and said “get whatever you want”. It felt good. We were both happy. But the hobbies didn’t get better. I didn’t improve. Why did I get all those things, then? Why did I need to? To get better at a hobby or to heal the pride(?) I never had as a child. To say “look now, you can get all of the things you want. They’re so accessible and ready. You don’t need to want for anything!” But the wanting was the thing. Meaning came from wanting. Having things removed that meaning. Watered it down. Faded its color.\n\nI gave some things away this weekend. I pulled them out and put them in cardboard boxes and handed them to strangers and said “have fun”. Things I’ve owned since I was a teen. I can say that was “decades” ago now. That’s a weird feeling. I didn’t give the things much thought. I realized they were just things. Cardboard and plastic and ink. Things that I thought represented my desire (and ability) to be creative, my desire to spend hours with friends (to have friends who want I spend hours with me), my desire to escape the world for what it is (my desire for a better world). I can still do all of those things. The modality is different. But the intent can always shift.\n\nDid I think this much about things as a child? Probably. Undoubtedly. I thought about owning things. Wanting things. Getting things. I can do all of that now. Is the child within me healed? And is that why I can let go? Did I take them on enough shopping trips, impulsive purchases, gifts received, that now they feel content. They feel overwhelmed with the stuff. They feel confused. Disappointed maybe. The stuff exists, but the skills didn’t appear. The time with friends didn’t manifest. But the **things** are there. The magic material objects that, when gathered and arranged just so, would alter reality. They didn’t work. The magic wasn’t in them. The missing components: effort, time, energy, availability, passion, focus. The intangible components. How do you get those? How do you hoard those? You can’t. You have to spend them, as soon as you get them. They’re finite and rare and fleeting.",
  "title": "Stuff.",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-25T21:40:33.691Z"
}