Your rental payments, like the storage units that clutter our landscape, go on and on forever.

One retired man had been collecting items from garage and estate sales, and he believed that his children’s inheritance was somewhere in his “collection.” Some day they would open his unit, pull out the junk, and find the treasures they’d inherited. Burglars had broken into the unit once, only to walk away empty-handed because the unit was too stuffed full of junk to bother robbing.

Another interview subject, a divorced mother, was storing a huge collection of stuffed animals. She said that she couldn’t throw away “anything with eyes.”

The movie was a fascinating commentary on how tightly we cling to our stuff. Once we’ve claimed something as ours, we have a hard time surrendering it, even if it’s no longer useful. Our desire to maintain ownership is so strong that we’re even willing to pay for it—we’ll rent a truck, spend a Saturday afternoon loading and unloading, and sign a rental contract with a hefty monthly fee that goes on to infinity. Isn’t that an awful lot to invest just to keep “anything with eyes”—or whatever it is that you can’t let go?

Storage may seem like a convenient way to defer the decision to let go, but do you want to keep things so much that you’re willing to pay for them again? Would you go back to Macy’s and make monthly payments to keep a dress that you already bought? Of course not! So why pay for a storage unit? Why not spend your time, energy, and money on the finite task of letting go of some things?

You can watch a trailer for Store on the movie’s web site. We’ll keep you posted when the documentary shows up in general release or becomes available for download.