The Worst
As different as these two attitudes are, I'll stick up for Dustin Curtis by pointing out one thing he expressed in his post: the pleasure of owning a <i>small</i> number of things.<p>If I keep a small number of possessions, and their total value is a small fraction of the money I have in savings, I don't need to be too concerned about preserving them. I can easily replace anything that is damaged, lost or stolen, so these occurrences don't have to be a huge source of stress.<p>I like the idea of being able to go through everything I have and organize, clean and maintain all of it, say, once a week. If that's too much of a burden, that's a sign that I have too many things. Thinking in these terms also makes it very easy to give away things to lighten this load.<p>This thinking is partly informed by my experience maintaining software. Running and writing software means constantly keeping it up to date. New standards and new versions of dependencies are constantly being published, and security flaws are constantly being found, as Moxie Marlinspike certainly knows. Code needs to be updated to keep up with these things in order to be considered well-maintained or secure. Minimizing that burden gives you a better chance of keeping the quality high.