Stuff

Lately, I’ve been thinking deeply about stuff. The big stuff, the little stuff, all of it.

Stuff, according to Oxford Languages, is:

Noun
Matter, material, articles, or activities of a specified or indeterminate kind.
The basic constituents or characteristics of something.

Verb
To fill something tightly.
To dismiss something as unimportant.

That covers the technical stuff, but I’ve been thinking about it from a different angle. If you take those definitions and layer them over everyday life, stuff starts to look a lot like our routines, our pastimes, and our careers. It becomes the filler, the background noise of a life that feels full but isn’t always meaningful.

Or rather, it is meaningful, just not in the way we might hope.

We are very good at stuff. We’re raised for it, trained for it, and pushed through systems that value efficiency and output above almost everything else. Like a production line, we’re shaped to produce, consume, repeat. And we do, relentlessly.

We make stuff to be sold, stuff to be watched, stuff to be eaten, and stuff to sit untouched on the vanity in the third bathroom of a new renovation. Whether we need it, or whether it matters, rarely enters the equation. We’ve got stuff to do, and that’s enough.

The problem is that doing so much stuff leaves little room for anything else, for the important stuff. It fills the day so completely that we don’t have to think about bigger questions. We don’t have to ask whether what we’re doing is necessary, or why we’re doing it at all. And we definitely don’t have to follow that thread to where it becomes uncomfortable, where it starts to unravel into questions about meaning, purpose, and whether any of it is worth the time we’re giving it.

That’s where it gets dangerous.

Most of us don’t want to go there. It’s far easier to keep moving, producing, consuming, and comparing our stuff with everyone else’s. Busyness becomes a substitute for importance, and output becomes a stand-in for value.

It’s not really about the stuff. It’s about us, and whether we feel useful, seen, and relevant in a world that constantly, but subtly, demands we justify our place in it. In the end, we revert to the comfort of stuff not because it matters, but because it reassures us that we do.

To be fair, I don’t blame us. We’re not malicious, we’re conditioned. We’re coping.

This is what we’ve been shaped to do by our workplaces, our institutions, and our culture. We exist inside systems that reward activity over reflection and completion over consideration, where the question isn’t whether the stuff is necessary, but whether it’s been done, whether it can be sold, for how much, and what that allows us to get next.

But what if something is shifting?

There’s a growing undercurrent that the stuff isn’t working. That a life filled with meaningless activity isn’t enough, and that being busy isn’t the same as being alive. When we pause, even briefly, it exposes how much of what we were doing doesn’t actually need to exist.

That leaves us with a tension between the push for more and a growing number of people who aren’t buying it. People who can’t quite shake the feeling that normal isn’t satisfying, that we’ve built lives around filling time rather than using it.

So the question isn’t whether we can keep doing stuff. We can, easily. The question is whether we should keep measuring ourselves by it. If what we own is the metric, if busyness, being needed, and meeting deadlines define a life, then we’ve set the bar outrageously low.

Maybe that’s the real issue. Not that we do stuff, but that we’ve confused it for something that matters.

So maybe I haven’t really been thinking about stuff at all. Maybe it’s about whether we have the individual and collective capacity to see beyond the material and the fill, and to recognise something equally tangible but far less mediocre. Whether we have the will to want something more than what’s immediately in front of us, and to realise that meaning sits just beyond the things we keep reaching for.

And we have to do that now. Because if we keep going like this, we’re stuffed.