I envy everything until he opens up

Yesterday I was invited for the first time to the house of a recent friend of mine. 
A smart guy who works as a software engineer, very brilliant, and passionate about video games, TTGs and TTRPGs.

He invites me for a TTRPG night, with a very simple and fun game. We spent a few hours laughing, eating watermelons (to be fair, the watermelon disappeared in less than five minutes).

The only thing that distracted me from the night was the huge number of things (games, PC, guitars, action figures, books, Legos and so on) all around me in his "mancave". I envied those things all night, and don't get me wrong, I consider myself a minimalist, so the thing that I envied was the amount of money he could save. But on the other hand, I remember myself as a child, and the fact that my parents would never pay for such things. At times, I suffered, but it turned out well for me.

The things changed when he said that when he moved back from abroad, he had the chance to notice how many things he possessed. And after that, he candidly underlined that he bought those things mainly because he felt alone. And this, I think, is one of the biggest traps we need to avoid. 

Numbing our inner world with compulsive shopping has never changed anything.

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