“Always Collect”, screams one collector card advertisement. “Every time you swipe your card you collect valuable reward points,” says another ad at a gas station. “Make your dream vacation come true sooner with our miles card’ beacons the bill board at the intersection. Then this ‘this week only offer’ from another chain store “Swap your in-store loyalty points with your collector card points or the other”. “Open a new bank account or switch to another for 500 or 1000 points on your collector card,” is an enticing offer from a bank! Never mind you have money in neither.


My wallet is bulging and is heavy not with cash but with umpteen cards that reward my loyalty to this product or that service. Those are in addition to the numerous credit cards in my wallet; to buy on credit, such products and services, just so I can collect some points.

There was a time when I was an avid collector of points, stamps etc to cross out one item off my wish list and to proceed to the next. All that has changed now. While I have not become old enough to preach, “We are not our possessions”, I am getting a little wiser to suggest that the journey is more pleasant if we travel light in our life. Imagine our difficulty in letting go of things we collected in the past when we move our place of dwelling. I should know, for I have moved to a new country nearly 7,800 miles away from my home town.

This blog is an offshoot of what I read in another titled “Shedding Possessions“. Though it is lengthy, it is worthwhile to read it to the end.

Every time I move, I ponder such questions as, “Do I take this with me or leave behind? What if I need it at some later date? Oh, I love this one, can’t I take this with me?, Imagine the difficulty I went through collecting this” and so on. Luckily time and space constraints put an end to our agony. We move on with whatever we think are valuable at that point of time, only to find those to be excess baggage at a later date.

Even so some businesses dangle this ‘1$/month storage for the first 6 months’ offer enticing us to move our stuff to their ‘climate controlled’ storage shelves. Does it make sense to move our excess baggage to some self storage facility 10 miles away from home or perhaps in another city? What are the chances of our needing them if we can keep them that far away?

If I have not convinced you against collecting things as a maniac, I suggest you listen to George Carlin’s stand up comedy on ‘stuff’. I assure you, even if you don’t become a convert, you will have a good time listening to him.