What Will You Bring on the Journey?

In a few days, my shipping container will leave the New York port and head across the ocean to Constanța, Romania. It holds my books, my instruments, family heirlooms, spiritual items, keepsakes, and some furniture — a twenty-foot container packed with the material record of a life I am moving across an ocean. Everyone, it turns out, has an opinion about this.

And there is a particular opinion that echoes, over and over. Did you really need to bring all of that? And the meaning underneath is unmistakable: the ideal version of this move would have been lighter. The ideal version of me would want less.

I want to push back on that, not because the logistics don't matter, but because I disagree with the philosophy driving the advice about what objects are and what attachment means. This is not a post about how to pack. It is about why the question of what to carry deserves more honest thinking than the minimalists have given it.

Objects Are Not Passive

Human beings have always used material things to hold what matters. Memory, ritual, relationship, the recognition that some things deserve not to be forgotten. This is not sentiment or consumer pathology. It is one of the oldest cognitive practices in the archaeological record.

Grave goods appear in burials stretching back tens of thousands of years across multiple continents. These objects were deemed worth sending forward because they were understood as extensions of identity, repositories of relationship, carriers of something that mattered. Household shrines, a near-universal form across cultures, worked similarly: condensing the presence of ancestors and valued relationships into something touchable and witnessed. The object was a tool for keeping connection present. Evidence of what was meaningful. That is not weakness. That is an expression of love.

I believe this not only as a person, but as someone who loves history. What can be studied depends on the choices people made to keep things. When those choices weren't made, the gaps in the record are real and often unrecoverable. I am grateful, professionally and personally, every time someone in the past decided something was worth holding onto. Telling people to let go more easily is not neutral advice. From where I stand, it costs continuity and memory.

Where Minimalism Came From

The instruction to let go has a history worth knowing before accepting the advice.

Thoreau's experiment at Walden Pond is the most cited origin story of voluntary simplicity. What is less often cited is that his simplicity was underwritten by Emerson's land, his mother's proximity, and his position as an educated man who could choose poverty temporarily as a philosophical exercise. He was not poor. He was performing poverty in order to write about it. The freedom that made the experiment possible was his class position, and that structure has never changed. Contemporary minimalism, from the decluttering industrial complex to the does it spark joy applied to an heirloom, is a philosophy produced by and for people who can afford to experiment with having less, secure in the knowledge that replacement is available. That freedom is not universal. Pretending it is, then shaming people who can't access it, is not wisdom. It's a sales pitch.

The Shaming

If objects are just objects, then keeping them is irrational. If attachment is pathology, then the person who won't sell her grandmother's china hasn't done the necessary interior work. The framework makes keeping a failure, and the desire to carry your material history across an ocean into evidence of spiritual immaturity.

This is punishing and false.

My objective is not to feel less attached to anything. I am not working toward non-attachment. I experience my attachment to people, objects, and memories as evidence of my capacity to care, to feel, and to recognize that everything is temporary.

Attachment is not a failure of wisdom. It is what wisdom looks like when it is actually paying attention. I believe it is healthy to care, and I have no interest in being talked out of that by a lifestyle brand.

The objects that remain when everything else changes are doing real work. They anchor you to a continuous self in the middle of substantial disruption. To shame someone out of that anchor in the name of enlightened simplicity is not helping them. It is asking them to be less human in a moment that requires them to be fully themselves.

How to Actually Decide

None of this means you should ship everything. The logistics deserve honest attention, just not the kind the minimalists are offering.

A practical note first: if you have enough to fill a container, it is often more cost-effective to reserve an entire twenty-foot container than to pay by volume. A full container is also safer. Your belongings travel sealed, without being consolidated with other shipments. The economics can work in your favor if you're willing to think about it that way.

The useful questions are not just does this spark joy. They are: what is this object doing? Is it holding a relationship, marking an era, giving you a sense of home that would be expensive to reconstruct? Is it irreplaceable — not because nothing similar exists, but because this particular one means something specific? What is the replacement cost, and do you want to pay it twice? For some things the answer will be no. For others, yes at almost any price. Both are legitimate. The goal is honesty about which is which, rather than letting someone else's ideology decide for you.

Before the Move

When I packed my books a year ago, my husband Carter watched and told me it was like watching me pack my heart in a box.

He was right. I grew up in a cult, homeschooled, without a high school diploma. Books were how I found my way out. How I learned to think past what I had been told to think, how I built the mind I now use as a graduate student. My library is not decorative. It is the material record of an education I had to fight for, accumulated one book at a time. Shipping it across an ocean was never a question. Those books are not my possessions. They are my evidence.

The minimalist advice came, as it always does, cheerful and certain. Travel light. Start fresh. Things are just things.

But that's not my experience.

Things are not just things. They are the material form of continuity, of relationship, of the self that persists across geography and time. I know what the historical record looks like when people didn't keep things — what becomes unrecoverable, what gaps can never be filled. So, I packed shamelessly, unafraid to care "too much."

Caring is not a design flaw. It is not immaturity or attachment to be condemned or evidence that you haven't done the work. It is the most human thing there is. It is the recognition that people, moments, and objects deserve to matter, and the refusal to pretend otherwise. You are allowed to care about what you carry. You are allowed to grieve what you leave behind. You are allowed to fill a container with the things that help you remember you who you are and ship it across an ocean.

Sources and further reading

Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Belk, Russell W. "Possessions and the Extended Self." Journal of Consumer Research 15, no. 2 (1988): 139–168.

Hahn, Hans Peter, and Hadas Weiss, eds. Mobility, Meaning and the Transformations of Things. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013.

Kondo, Marie. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Translated by Cathy Hirano. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2014.

Miller, Daniel. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010.

Miller, Daniel. The Comfort of Things. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008.

Pearce, Susan M. On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition. London: Routledge, 1995.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854.

Shi, David E. The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Whitaker, Jan. Service and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006.