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Paul Graham wrote an essay that is very anti-stuff. I grew heartbroken as I read it. I’ll be honest, stuff is pretty much the closest thing I have to a religion. I guess that would make Engadget my bible. I felt, as I read the article, the way a Christian might if Jesus wrote “God doesn’t exist” on his blog.

If it wasn’t for stuff, I’d just sit in bed and cry all day. It’s stuff that makes me instead get up and take a shower. It’s stuff that makes me start website after website, in the feeble hopes that I’ll make a little more money with which to buy a little more stuff. Stuff, how I love thee.

One of my favorite things in the world is Amazon Prime. You pay $80 a year, and then whenever you buy stuff there, it comes to you in 2 days and you don’t have to pay any extra. If that’s not stuff nirvana, I don’t know what is. I use it so much that I get a personally signed Christmas card from Jeff Bezos.

I do own, for the most part, a relatively narrow range of stuff, namely gadgets. And I’ve never picked up anything from a curb. The thought of a yard sale makes me want to vomit. And I have an honest to goodness phobia of used bookstores.

And I’ve certainly never defined anything as “perfectly good.” Quite the opposite in fact, I’m usually saying something more like “hmm, this portable video player has 60 gigabytes, but the new model has 62. Oh man, they even increased the battery life from 5 hours to 5 hours and 17 minutes. I better upgrade.”

One of the best things that ever happened to me was eBay. Not because I’d ever buy any stuff there. It would be previously used, and that’s gross. No, eBay is great because when I get new stuff to replace the old stuff, I can sell the old stuff to some sucker who doesn’t know that stuff used by someone else is disgusting. And what do I do with the money I got from selling the old stuff? Buy more new stuff, of course, which then causes me to sell the old. It’s a beautiful cycle.

And, in fairness, a lot of the stuff I buy allows me to decrease my Total Stuff Owned (TSO). For instance my Logitech Harmony 880 remote. That sucker replaced 4 cheap remotes (and tons of button pushing) thus reducing my TSO by 3. Ditto for my Moto Q, which replaces a PDA and iPod nano. True, I didn’t have either a PDA or an iPod nano, but I might have bought them, so it counts.

Also, a lot of stuff requires other stuff to work, so they really just count as one stuff. For instance, Guitar Hero (definitely among my favorite of stuffs) requires an Xbox 360, otherwise you could have mine. And who wants to play any game on a screen less than 42″ and not in high def? Only a moron. So the guitar, the game DVD, the Xbox, and the television really only count as one, since I never use any them separately. I guess I do have 2 guitars, but still, it’s a relatively low TSO.

I don’t really feel beholden to my stuff. I feel empowered by it. When I’m looking to move I don’t need to find a bigger house to put all of my stuff in. I want to buy a bigger house so I’ll have more room for new stuff I haven’t even bought yet.

Also, we can’t neglect the fact that stuff has been known on occasion to save lives. EKG machines are stuff. Hmm, I don’t have one of those, better check Amazon real quick. Anyway, hospitals are full of stuff. Therefore stuff must be good. QED.