I’m always moving out of one place or another and into someplace else. Every time I move, I’m always astonished by how much stuff I’ve accumulated. I have whole boxes of paper and mail, tons of stupid decorations, too many nails and knickknacks, a lot of donated kitchen supplies, the list could go on and on. But it’s funny how you don’t notice the way that you accumulate possessions when you’re actually living somewhere. We become kind of immune to it, but it’s hard to ignore when you’re leaving a place and have to pack it all away.

My last move made me reconsider a minimalist movement that I’d heard about, but had never seriously contemplated before. A man named Dave Bruno was sick of his consumerist lifestyle, so he reduced the number of things that he owned to 100. He wrote a blog called A Guy Named Dave and subsequently published a book The 100 Thing Challenge: How I Got Rid of Almost Everything, Remade My Life and Regained My Soul.

The purpose of the book and blog is to chronicle how Bruno rid his life of stuff, and to encourage his readership to do the same. Bruno’s suggested lifestyle change is summed up in three words: reduce, refuse and rejigger. The first step is limiting your stuff to 100 items. The second step is refusing to buy more unnecessary stuff. The final step is to rejigger, or rearrange, your life’s priorities outside of the constraint to make enough money to buy more stuff.

Bruno makes a great point about a consumerist society’s necessity to remedy our failings with a purchased alternative. We buy clothes and makeup and shoes because we feel ugly, he says. We buy nice, big cars because we feel unsuccessful, he posits.

To some extent, I think this is very true. But this type of feel better consumerism isn’t necessarily completely remedied by limiting our stuff. We go out to dinner because we want to feel glamorous. But we also don’t want to cook, and we want to experience a new kind of cuisine. We take a trip because we want to feel successful enough to afford it. But we also want to become global citizens and learn about other cultures. While Bruno is persuasive in his methods of simplifying one’s life, his idea seems a bit too simple in that there are a huge number of wants, needs and pathos tied up in all types of consumerism, not only material consumerism.

Completely eliminating stuff and experience that requires money would be extremely difficult—and would we really want it?