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A noble man is someone who protects his world and fortress through conquest and helping the needy. He accumulates treasures, all the things that populate his memory of himself and keep the torch of his legacy lit for others to see. His achievements, his character, his inner beauty and his inevitable goodness all imbued in his possessions.
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Consumerism breaks down into three types: treasuring something, consuming fleeting goods and owning burdens. Fleeting goods are useful but there is no relationship between them and their owner. But you don’t need a relationship to your toothbrush anyway. Burdening stuff is even worse in that it’s useless and you don’t even care about it, but for some dog shit reason you still own it. Treasuring something though is different. A treasure, whether useful or useless, is something you have a personal relationship with that enriches your life. If you don’t care about your stuff, your life is shallow and meaningless and you might as well zap your brain with Neuralink wires and permanently live in a shitty Roblox tycoon game for the rest of your life because all your property might as well be little pixels and computer code.
What’s fun about caring about your stuff is that you can care about anything you want and it doesn’t matter if it’s useful or useless. But no matter what you own it will bog you down. To treasure something you have to acknowledge that this thing is truly something you even want to own. That’s the first step. Despite everything having the ability to be meaningful to you, not everything should.
The second step involves using some criteria to determine what should be meaningful to you. Sentimental value is a fickle highly individual thing, so it is best to avoid relying too much on it. Instead beauty, constitution and history are the three qualities that determine if an object should be meaningful to you or not. Beauty being the aesthetic quality of an object, constitution being the material and practical qualities of an object and history being the contextual qualities of an object. These all have to enrich your life.
All three qualities are quite ethereal because there is no strict definition of what class of beauty, constitution or history enrich someones life. However they do differ from sentimentality in that they are not subject to individual taste, but surrounding culture. That way, if you are reading this thinking “Writer, I don’t think you have a strong grasp on what the philosophy of beauty is, or that it even matters! Obviously everyone’s opinions of beauty is subjective and so you should consider a framework that . . .” don’t bother finishing your reductive bicker-bait and e-mail me your credit card details instead. And if your credit is too low to even possess a credit card, then I want you to go watch a video about how owning VALUABLE STUFF is EVIL. And then send me your debit card details instead.
Back to the point. To envision beauty think less about what an object ‘means’ in the way you’re taught in art class. Think less about what it does. Just use your eyes. Your eyes are the window to the soul, but it takes a pair of eyes to experience beauty, just as it takes a pair of eyes to present beauty. And once you’re done looking at something, ask your like-minded friends, the people you love and trust if they find the same object beautiful in the same way or in a different way and see how you can agree or disagree on just this aspect alone. I think that if you can all agree on something being beautiful then it has to be beautiful.The opinions of people like you with whom you have a relationship matter so much. Maybe not in the decisions you make in regards of concrete aspects of your life like money or business, but they matter because they enrich your life. And as such can help build a relationship between your possessions and you which will in return enrich your life further. Then you may repeat the same process with the qualities of constitution and history.
To elaborate on the consequences of ownership: ownership of something is not inherently evil, and whoever thinks or tells you that is probably a facade. It’s the relationship between the owner and the object that determines if there is even evil at all. Here evil in the context of ownership branches into two categories. Greed and abuse. Greed is the ownership of objects for the sake of owning them. Hoarding them for nothing. Through building relationships with your items, you no longer own them just to own them, rather you own them to enrich your life, or promptly discard it if it doesn’t. Abuse heavily relies on the quality of history. That’s because it arises when the creation or transfer of an object involves suffering. For example, a professional seamstress may put the same toil into creating something as a sweatshop worker, but the professional seamstress gets a sense of achievement and good reputation from making quality goods that enriches her life, while a sweatshop workers life is hardly enriched in any way from the same toil.
Buy American
Abuse is wholly avoided when Americans refuse to buy cheap goods made in far away factories by poverty stricken slave women and slave children. Instead commission more valuable goods to be made by Americans, stuff that you can care about and that is made with attention to beauty and function.
8/17/2025