Could you live with exactly 100 ‘things’?

How much stuff do we really need? Could we still have happy lives if we were allowed to possess only 100 things? A thousand things? Ten thousand things? What’s the bare minimum for contentment? Those were questions I never thought to ponder until I recently started reading a book called “Last Look.” (Admittedly, I’ve never been much of a ponderer.)

It’s a murder mystery, but also raises the issue of how many “things” we really need. The protagonist is a private detective who, because of a past misdeed, has self-sentenced himself to a hermitic existence, living alone in a primitive oneroom cabin and allowing himself to possess exactly 100 items. It’s a limit he takes almost pathologically; he owns just two changes of clothes and agonizes over whether a pair of socks constitutes one item or two.

The question of “needs” versus “wants” seems particularly pertinent in this season of earnestly acquiring more stuff. So the other evening my wife and I tried to make lists of the 100 things we really couldn’t do without.

Both lists began with health and hygiene items; hers started with a toothbrush and toothpaste, mine with eyeglasses and soap. We both picked cellphones as our third necessity.

Some of the choices were debatable. Only two sets of clothes might be doable, although that would make deodorant imperative. But I’d be willing to part with my collection of Cleveland Browns stuff if she’d agree to get rid of all but one of her purses. (Which not only would clear several dozen openings on the list but also but save countless hours of trying to locate her car keys).

We definitely could exist without a Keurig and an expresso machine. And having five televisions in a two-person condo clearly was excessive, although we couldn’t agree on whether to unplug the one in the bathroom or the one in the guest room.

I suggested we could rid ourselves of a whole lot of useless stuff by simply blowing up the garage, but that was tongue-in-cheek. Sorta.

Then there are our books, hundreds of them scattered throughout the house. Unfortunately, a lot of them are books that I wrote and nobody bought. But I’m reluctant to part with them because after I die maybe someone will decide I had been a terrific author and they’ll be highly coveted.

No matter how deeply we cut, though, we never came close to narrowing the list to 100. But maybe you could try. If you get it down to 99 and need one more item to make it an even 100, I’d be happy to sell you one of my books.