What is it to Have

I once wrote an essay on "What is it to have?"

I reasoned on the meaning of having objects, even having ourselves. What is it to have? To have it in the same room? In the same house? Nearby? Now if you have something then how do you exercise your possession, by holding it frequently, looking at it, and showing it to friends?

Now they want to have AI possibly get us more stuff. Now once the AI makes more stuff isn't it going to be hectic to have all this stuff? I mean it's crazy now that we have all the knowledge humanity ever had in our hands, we have the Earth and the skies, even skies that are billions and billions of light years away.

We have an awful amount of stuff and need to make an AI tell us how to get rid of some of it.

Once I had a large leather couch I purchased from Macy's for $5,000. I really loved that couch.

When the first set of movers came to the house they couldn't get it on the second floor so I had to call a second set of movers.

We had a great time on the couch, it was beautiful and comfortable. We sat around, had guests over, and played video games.

When we divorced I got the couch. I had it moved to another place in a beautiful apartment in the Marina district of San Francisco. I had sex on it with a lover there.

But I wanted to move to New York and it turned out to fit everything in the moving cube I had to get rid of most of my stuff. And then I went to Japan and when I came back I realized I had a Nirvana there and got slowly terrified of all the stuff I owned.

In Japan, I sat on a tatami on a wooden floor and I looked around and I felt I had everything I ever wanted at that exact moment. I had a sturdy floor beneath me, and a beautiful garden to look at.

I sat in another garden in Japan, it was a famous rock and sand garden in Kyoto. I spent time there just sitting on the wooden floor looking at it. And that process of looking made me realize that I couldn't think of anything else I needed, a place to sit and something to look at. I didn't need a soft cushion or a cold drink.

Eventually, I sold the couch to a gay couple who appreciated how nice it looked. When I looked back and calculated the amount of effort I put into that couch, the life energy, the hours I worked to get it, hours I spent on the phone, putting ads on Craigslist and having people come to see it I realized it took many life hours out of my life. 

I have long thought about the use cases of having things. For example, in New York, people have million-dollar penthouses, and there are objects there that are also millions of dollars. I asked myself - how is the person in the penthouse experiencing the dwelling and the objects inside compared to me? I get on the subway for two bucks and I go to the Metropolitan Museum and roam around the most priceless treasures of the world, mummies and such, for several dollars.

Did I have the mummies and the priceless paintings of Van Gogh? Not really, but I was near them sufficiently that I didn't want to keep looking at them. Would I want to have them in my house? To look at them for example more frequently? I don't want to get into that, to be honest. Having custody of priceless artifacts is a monumental headache, I will probably need to get a townhouse with tight security.

Many collectors give their priceless collections to museums anyway and the only reason to have them physically on the premises is to show them off to friends. I reasoned it probably gets lonely in a big house with mummies and such great artworks - you need to entertain a lot.

A friend and I once went to the Met, she brought edibles and we had a great time roaming the priceless collections of the Met and the greatest masterpieces the world possesses. We had dinner at the cafe and hours of entertainment.

I can have for 3 bucks what someone spent 30 million to have, as long as I continue to have a working shower and a toilet in my place.

Recently I discovered that the latest science cannot objectively tell where my human hand ends and another object begins. We are not a mixed bag, we are a kind of soup. Remove the collision boxes around objects in a video game and all objects start penetrating each other.

My favorite line from a book I read from an Oxford physicist and hadron collider worker with the latest in the world of particle physics is: "Since there is only one electron field, only one up quark field, and only one down quark field, you and I, dear reader, are connected to each other. Each of our atoms is a ripple in the same cosmic ocean. We are one with each other, and with all of creation" (Harry Cliff)