Introduction

Loosing your phone, loosing money, having someone else eat your food, loosing sight over time, loosing a limb or having a family member die - even though these examples have different levels of severity and derive from different circumstances and sources, they all share one thing: they are about loosing something we claim some level of ownership over. But is the anger, pain and distress we experience over loosing these things really justifiable and does it do us any good? In this post, I share with you my perspective on why I neither give myself nor anyone else the right to claim ownership over anything at all and how I am using it to help me find balance and peace. Let me explain.

This post covers...

🥔 Why you own nothing
🙏🏼 How owning nothing is a good thing
🏔️ Conclusion

Why you own nothing

The statement that you own nothing and have no right to claim anything yours is understandably a bold statement with which many would probably disagree saying things like: "But I signed a contract! And how dare you attempt to take away my ownership over my own body!"

What needs to be understood here is the fundamental difference between real and fictional ownership.

Contracts and the legal right to claim ownership over possessions (even ideas in the form of patents) within our societies are forms of fictional ownership. This type of ownership is enforced and backed by government institutions and only upholds its existence that way.

But fundamentally, by nature, we truly don't own anything. Whether or not you loose your limb, you loose your physical belongings or you loose your family, nature does not intervene. Everything that is owned is always owned merely temporarily. Although your body may clearly seem like your own property, the body, too, you eventually have to return it to nature who lended it to you in the first place.

This idea of considering things we currently have in our lives (wealth, objects, people, power, ...) as merely temporarily lended possessions that we will sooner or later have to return is a concept developed by the greek philosopher school of the stoics. And despite the somewhat devastating realization that nothing is truly ours, this way of thinking actually has significant benefits...

How owning nothing is a good thing

As ridiculously simple and flat as it might sound, owning nothing also means nothing can get lost. Whatever it is you have in your life and then loose it, it is not x thing lost anymore, but x thing given back to who or whatever gave it to you in the first place (by godly intention or by cold, random distribution, whatever suits your imagination of the universe).

Although it takes practice and is easy to forget since most people in society claim ownership over pretty much anything and take the loss of even the smallest things very personally, learning to appreciate the things we have as temporary gifts instead of possessions allows us to move on more swiftly from moments of loss and thus not waste time on longing for things we don't have much control over or having to deal with ongoing residual attachment to the thing we lost.

This of course does not mean allowing others to take advantage of our stoic mindset or letting everything go without a second thought. But it is an orientation for freeing your mind from attachment that leads to no good.

Conclusion

Loosing anything, especially things or people that are close to you sucks. And most people make no attempt to hide this fact. They get angry, they get depressed and even atheists can be caught facing the sky in a scream of despair when they accidentally get the side of their car scratched.

The ancient school of the stoics didn't believe in this type of dependency on outer circumstances though. And regarding the question of ownership, they considered it more useful to regard anything they had as something merely lended to them, not owned by them.

This way of thinking can be helpful to not let ourselves get crushed by even the most devastating losses and to instead move on lightly, without any anger or pain or feelings of: "But I didn't deserve this!", making the most of the very limited time we have in our lives even when things don't go perfectly to plan.