I agree that he needs to deal with his emotional issues separately from his material possessions. You can’t sell your memories. Unfortunately you need to take the good with the bad.

I have a feeling the $300K +/- he received for his life isn’t going to take him very far for very long. I also heard that he was selling his life story on his website. A pretty boring tome at that (according to a number of reviews that I read from people who had actually paid for the download). So…the question remains….what was he really selling? I think he was trying to sell his name and story for a quick and easy buck – and unfortunately has now got to live with the results…and the pain remains.

There’s a lot going on in the connection between a person and their “stuff,” George Carlin (RIP) made right-on fun of it. Still, even animals get attached to their dens and some even decorate them. My mother’s dog ran upstairs and hid in her closet for a long time after her body was taken from the house. Sometimes I joined her. We’d sit there in the dark, smelling Mum, feeling our past, somehow comforted in that painful space where only her “stuff” still lived.

Sometimes we hang onto “stuff” because we don’t yet know how futile it is to live with memories instead of real people. We are animals and we react naturally to operant conditioning. We hit that pleasure bar for years with cups of coffee in the morning, a daily hug, shared experiences and conversations at a particular dining table, next to a particular window, listening to the same toast pop-up noise.

At some level, we know it will all someday end but it’s not real until our noses are rubbed in it. An actual death, an actual divorce, an actual betrayal or disappointment or shock or loss or nervous bloody breakdown and long term anguish. People respond differently to that pain.

Beware of discounting how important stuff-mediated pain can be. The growing movement to love all the horrible things that happen to us can analyze love to death. To death.