“Enough is abundance to the wise.”
—Euripides
“It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.”
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Obviously, we all need some amount of money and stuff to get along in life. This is especially true as the world becomes less and less of one in which you can live completely off the grid. While clothing and shelter have always been material necessities for the human animal, we now live in a society where not being able to access the internet can make you essentially a second-class citizen. That may be fine if you choose to live such a life, but those who want to be more in touch with society are more or less obliged to have possessions that go beyond what is necessary for bare survival.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with this, though. Bare survival is not nearly the same thing as living well, and I think just about everyone wants to live well rather than just live. Nor do I think there is any great virtue in poverty for poverty’s sake. Living without can certainly teach you some important lessons, and making do with less is great when you’re a resource hog, but I wouldn’t wish a life of desperate poverty on anyone.
So to answer your questions, material possessions are less and less important to me all the time. There was certainly a time when I thought of life in checklist terms: get these things and you’ll be all set! I started growing out of it in my late teens and early twenties, however, and finally got over it when I found myself in actual poverty and recognized that my situation was still better than that of so many others. So now just about all of the stuff I have is a holdover from the past.
I’m trying more and more to live by the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry quote above and rid myself of the things I don’t need while buying only replacements for things that have fallen apart. This isn’t always possible. There are books I need that aren’t in any of the libraries to which I have access, and sometimes technology is just too useful to pass up. And beyond that, sometimes new things allow you to get rid of a greater number of old things. My computer and scanner have allowed me to get rid of all sorts of old notes that I had in hard copy only. So I try not to get into the mindset where minimalism means shunning newness.
But I do still own a lot of swords.