If you own something but never think of it, you don’t really own it. Until you remember it and use it, you don’t truly possess it. In reality, you don’t truly own anything; you only own your attention. You can indeed buy something and place it somewhere, allowing only yourself or those you permit to use it. Legally, you own it, but even during its use, all you gain is your attention and the meaning you project onto it.

We don’t need so many things, especially expensive ones. We often want to buy nice things, thinking they will bring us great happiness, completely ignoring the problems they bring: reduced savings, increasing financial pressure, a cluttered home, more effort needed for cleaning, and perhaps the need to buy more complementary items. At the moment of purchase, we are happy, maybe for a few days, but soon we forget about it, take it for granted, and inexplicably add some psychological burden.

If you can realize that all your desires are merely attention, then you actually have everything from the start. You own the most expensive mansion by watching videos; you can learn about many luxurious homes around the world, and you can visit the Louvre or other palaces that even the wealthiest cannot buy. You own the most expensive cars by attending car shows where you can see the most exquisite and coolest sports cars. You can view all expensive spectacles.

Is there really a difference between owning and visiting? Perhaps when you don’t actually own something, you experience more feelings, a slight joy of getting closer, a passion for pursuit, a feast of attention. On the contrary, after owning, you might quickly lose interest. Moreover, what you get after truly owning something may not match your imagination, with both good and bad aspects, but certainly not enough to fulfill your life.

Does not getting what you seek cause you pain? You can constantly remind yourself that you already have everything. Whatever you notice, you own. Simply moving an item from a store to your home doesn’t make it better; admiring and touching it at home isn’t more wonderful than doing the same in the store. The extra you gain from purchasing it isn’t as much as you imagine, only the urgency to prove spending so much money was worth it, and the reasons you reluctantly find, or the recognition of some selling points that merchants rack their brains to come up with. Humans have an obsessive understanding of degrees; people are amazed that Bolt can run 9.58 seconds, 0.16 seconds faster than the second-place sprinter at 9.74 seconds! But is there really such a big difference, a 1.6% difference, when an ostrich runs twice as fast? Is buying something really much happier than occasionally admiring it in a store, by 1.6%? We can completely immerse ourselves in this 1.6% of wonderful feeling as society tells us, but if you think it’s nothing, and eating an orange makes you happier, then you can completely spend $1.6 or less to eat an orange.

When you have enough money to buy something without any burden, then buy it, to keep this beautiful thing for humanity and contribute a little to economic prosperity.

This article seems a bit clickbait, borrowing the title of an epic paper in the AI field, but the world is full of fascinating fractals, and the dominant role of attention is applicable in all dimensions. Attention, or the mechanism of filtering, selecting, screening, and refining, is the core of all complex systems, including consciousness and psychological mechanisms.