Not the GP, or the author of TFA, but my take on it is pretty simple: the problem is attachment. It's not our things that are the problem, but our attachment to

Not the GP, or the author of TFA, but my take on it is pretty simple: the problem is attachment. It's not our things that are the problem, but our attachment to them — the thing has somehow come to define us, or, more correctly: we've come to define ourselves, in however small a way, in terms of the thing. "I have a nice TV, so I'm somehow better", on some imaginary scale of better-ness. The fact of the matter is, you have a TV. Period. Any notion of better-ness you have is a story you're telling yourself. There's no better or worse here. Stop telling yourself the story, or at least learn to recognize it as a story — let the TV be a TV — and you'll be amazed at how much you can simply enjoy watching TV when that's what you want to do, and walk away from it when you don't. TFA is right in that experiences are what make us happy, but where he gets it wrong is by defining himself in antithesis to things. That's just as much a story, and just as much an external definition of self as, "I'm an awesome person because I have a really nice car," or, "I'm cool because I'm an Apple fanboi," or any other thing or set of things. He's become attached to, and identifies with, the absence of things; he's over-corrected. Once you get over attachment, you can have things, or not have things, or whatever else you might want to do with them, without having some kind of complex about it — without that external thing somehow becoming definitive of who you are as a person. You realize that they're just things, and like everything else in this life, they're transient. Now, be careful, and don't make the novice mistake of conflating "attachment" and "liking". I like my TV and my car and my computers and my books and all the rest of the crap I schlep along with me through this life quite a bit; I wouldn't have bought them if I didn't. But if I lost them tomorrow, it wouldn't change my identity — it wouldn't change me — a whit. I'm still exactly and only me, whatever that happens to be. It's life, and my experiences therein, that change me, and that can happen with or without things.