You can never truly own is a judgment at the level of existence: nothing — including everything that is unambiguously yours in the legal sense — belongs to you completely. So-called owning has never been a state; it is a process with a beginning and an end, and what you actually hold is only “a span of time in which you enjoy the thing.” This is not a soft consolation urging you to let go; it is a hard proposition that stands up to item-by-item testing: take anything held in your name and ask of it, “can this be taken away?” — not one thing answers “no.”
To Own Is a Process, Not a State
You can never truly own anything. What you can own is only ever a process of enjoying it. Many people seem to understand this truth; in fact they do not.
The crux is the last clause — “seem to understand, in fact do not.” Nearly everyone can say the sentence; those who actually live by it are very few. Most people grant it with their mouths while the body goes on hoarding to the rule of “this is mine and will stay mine,” goes on using possession to prove itself. See owning as a process, and the center of gravity moves from “how much have I locked down” to “what am I living through right now.” Possession can be stripped, transferred, zeroed out; but the stretch of enjoying that has been lived has actually happened, and no one can take it back.
Legal Owning Is Not Owning Either
Someone will say: but this house, this money — legally they are mine.
It is exactly here that the proposition bares its edge: owning in the legal sense is only a convention guaranteed by structure. Title is a sheet of contract, and the force of the contract depends on a whole apparatus of external structures continuing to run — the state still standing, the courts still standing, the banks still standing, the registries still standing, other people still honoring the account. Not one of these structures is permanent. While the system runs as usual, “owning” looks solid; only in the moment the edifice collapses is the real strength of the possessive relation exposed:
No matter how much you trust an institution, when the “edifice collapses,” everything vanishes in an instant… Only what you actually hold truly belongs to you.
Deposits, equity, cloud accounts, platform points — their “belonging to you” is at bottom a creditor’s certificate, worth exactly as much as the counterparty’s continued existence and continued willingness to honor the account. This is the same fact as The Price of Technological Concentration: Your Data in the Cloud Is Not Yours: once the money is paid and the data is on the cloud, control has in fact already been handed over. Beneath it runs Overdrawing Social and National Credit: The Collapse of the Architecture of Trust — every mediated form of possession is perched on a structure of trust, and when trust gives way, the “mine” built upon it gives way with it. And even the physical thing gripped in the hand only raises the threshold of “being taken” by one tier: it dodges the collapse of the intermediaries, but it cannot dodge robbery, loss, ruin — or your own departure. The physical thing is the tier of possession closest to the bottom; but the bottom is not the absolute.
Do You Belong to You?
Push the interrogation to its end and you strike a harder question still: even “you” are not yours.
This body: its cells keep dying and being replaced without ever asking your consent; it will sicken, age, and stop, and at no point is your signature required. This personality is a molded product, pressed out layer by layer by family, school, and era (Growing Up Is Being Pressed Into Society’s Mold: Disenchantment Reveals Freedom). These memories are rewritten each time they are recalled. This “I” of thought following thought is only a phenomenon scoured out by a stream of cause and effect (I Am Merely a Causal Phenomenon: The Self Is Its Own Greatest Enemy). Possession requires a possessor — yet when you go looking for that “possessor,” what you find is only another heap of things you never chose and cannot keep.
If even the subject of possession cannot hold on to itself, then the act of “possessing” has hung in mid-air from the start.
What Deserves to Be Called “Truly Owning”
Give “truly owning” a definition worthy of the name: only what cannot possibly be taken from you counts as truly owned.
Measure item by item with this ruler: external things can be seized; the body will betray; name and relations hang on others; knowledge and memory drain away. Not one qualifies. The only two things that cannot be taken in any given present are these — the living-through itself (this moment’s enjoying has already happened, and no power can make it “never have happened”), and that which is watching (The Original Awaring: Ontological Consciousness vs. Ordinary Consciousness — though for it even the word “own” will not attach, because it is not an object anyone could possess; to say “I own the Original Awaring” is like saying “the flame owns its burning”).
And so the proposition walks to its own end: true owning does not exist inside the grammar of “possession.” Interrogated to the bottom, the very concept of “owning” comes loose — and in the moment the grammar of possession is set down, a person for the first time truly “has” the present. This is not loss; it is moving the weight from “keeping” onto “living through.” All the suffering of clinging comes from mistaking a process for a state.
The Projection Onto the Asset Layer
Projected downward onto the layer of money and assets, this judgment becomes the allocation logic of “the reliability of possession comes in tiers, the physical thing first” — that is its applied form in the proving ground of finance, unfolded on the sister site Z-Finance. Here is the root; there is the use.
Sources
- Manuscript — “You can never truly own anything. What you can own is only ever a process of enjoying it. Many people seem to understand this truth; in fact they do not.”
- Manuscript — same
- Manuscript — “When the edifice collapses everything vanishes in an instant… Only what you actually hold truly belongs to you.”
- Manuscript — value as a convention that can be cracked (this thread is unfolded in The Nature of Capital and Money: The Abstraction of Assets, the Concentration of Resources at the Core, and What Money Really Is)
See also
- I Am Merely a Causal Phenomenon: The Self Is Its Own Greatest Enemy
- The Original Awaring: Ontological Consciousness vs. Ordinary Consciousness
- Growing Up Is Being Pressed Into Society’s Mold: Disenchantment Reveals Freedom
- The Price of Technological Concentration: Your Data in the Cloud Is Not Yours
- Overdrawing Social and National Credit: The Collapse of the Architecture of Trust
- The Nature of Capital and Money: The Abstraction of Assets, the Concentration of Resources at the Core, and What Money Really Is