Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
Home and Religion
Owning Things Without Being Owned: The 100 Thing Challenge

Owning Things Without Being Owned: The 100 Thing Challenge

Last updated on: June 24, 2026 at 10:11 pm by Jeff McLain

0 Comments

Owning Things Without Being Owned: The 100 Thing Challenge 2026-06-24T22:11:52-04:00 Jeff McLain

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The 100 Thing Challenge. Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash.

It could be argued that the disposability of products produced in this era has made us wasteful consumers. Products are produced cheaply, making it easier to buy a new item than to repair it or replace a broken part. Fast-food wrappers in throwaway paper, recyclable coffee cups, and nonbiodegradable plastics are overflowing our landfills. As a result, we have not cultivated good stewardship practices and have come to see most things as disposable —a way of thinking that has affected every area of our lives—from relationships to our relationship with our things.

The Need for The 100 Thing Challenge

I believe the current wave of retail practices has also trained us to be blind and wasteful consumers, constantly consuming not only disposable paper products but also items sold with the promise that the latest product will be the promised provision and the promised land we crave. I have been wrestling with my own approach to stewardship, “having,” and letting go of what I have, when Dr. James Donovan at Point University recommended The 100 Thing Challenge by Dave Bruno (HarperCollins, 2010). In The 100 Thing Challenge, Dave Bruno echoes many of these same ideas and comments that “The crux of American-style consumerism is that our common lives lack provision. Somehow, we have come to believe that there is always a purchase that will transform what is ridiculously amazing into what is perfect.” We live in an endless cycle of wanting to want no longer, wanting only more things we are told to want.

Maybe we need to deconstruct our relationship with stuff.

This is perhaps why this book arrived at such an appropriate time. Over the past year, I have been selling books, giving away possessions, and asking harder questions about what I actually need. I was less interested in becoming a minimalist than in becoming a better steward.

I am grateful to have read this book by Dave Bruno. There was much fodder for the conversation, and a transparent authenticity and honesty at play in Bruno’s words. As consumers, we have been led to believe that what we need is always attainable in our next purchase. He poignantly nails the coffin shut with this statement: “We buy things year after year, over and over again, in our pursuit of contentment. It has been my impression that these days, replacement is emblematic of our dreams more than ownership.” Ironically, consumerism is a lie; it is always “beyond the stretch of our human hands,” as Bruno comments. He adds that we buy things “trusting that something will make some other thing better.” However, there is always a new product promising nirvana or a new bliss. The other reality is that we often are purchasing in relation to something we wish we had in another season of life. Bruno confesses, “I want to buy a product to ensure that I get what I wanted back then. But the past is what it is, and no store on earth is going to settle my past accounts.” Americans are largely trapped in a weird relationship with the things we have collected and consumed.

Reading The 100 Thing Challenge on vacation.

Consumerism and the Loss of Community

Consumerism has convinced us that having and consuming are part of our identity or an external metric of success. We often compare ourselves to others, what they have, what access and liberties they can pursue, and we believe anything less is less than. This endless cycle of compare and consume, collect and accumulate, has conditioned us like Pavlov’s dogs to pursue the ringing bells of retail’s promises. Now, as habitual shoppers, we display our collections of throwaway products to cast impressive shadows of our perceived success. Again, I appreciated Bruno’s words, “Habitual shopping has become the measure of affluence for individuals…Prosperity must be displayed, or else it will be in doubt.” As a result of believing we need stuff for our own contentment and perceived value, we have become overrun by our stuff. The things we needed a few years ago are lost under the products we have stored in bins from this year.

As a pastor, I have also noticed that conversations about simplicity rarely begin with possessions. They begin with exhaustion. We accumulate, but items rarely give us the life we imagine, only to discover they often leave us with less margin instead of more.

Bruno leans into an older definition of consumerism, which may be better. A definition that is unadulterated by the way we allowed it to be redefined, we had the lure of price tags over our eyes. Bruno started his journey to less by sharing that he:

“found it insightful to reach for the dictionary definition of the word “consumer.” Today, it has mostly benign connotations. We are, as shoppers and buyers, consumers. We talk about consumers’ rights. The word is pretty much synonymous with someone who buys something.”

In this case, the consumer does not feel that negative. There is a natural approach to consuming that we all do. However, Bruno shares that “The original definition was quite different. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first meaning of “consumer” is “He who or that which consumes, wastes, squanders, or destroys.” That means one of the earliest meanings for this world was more negative than positive, it spoke to our problems with the consumption and dispoaability we wrestle through now, it means to be a “squanderer.” I appreciated the straightness of his words: “It is true to say that much of what we casually consume (that is, buy) we actually consume (or destroy).” This has had more than just an effect on the space in our basements and garages, and on our pocketbooks and wallets; it has also affected how we respond to each other. The more we have, the more selfish we become, the more we squander, the more we defend rather than share. Though the consumption of others inspires us, and therefore it is a shared activity, Bruno says that “American-style consumerism has created a mob of people rushing to acquire ever more stuff. But the riffraff in the crowd do not seem to notice each other.” The Black Friday sales of the nineties and early two-thousands were evidence of this. I worked in a toy store during this era, which left me doubting humanity’s compassionate side. Bruno mentions the words of Bill McKibben, who says, “The very act of acquiring so much stuff has turned us ever more into individuals and ever less into members of a community, isolating us in a way that runs contrary to our most basic instincts.” Our squandered consumption is affecting us, each other, and the created world around us.

Learning to Say “Stop”

At some point, we must be willing to say stop. This is the point I am at, and it is a timely time to read the words of Dave Bruno, who had a similar journey. Bruno confesses what I think many of us could: “Without intervention, I will not stop trying to achieve satisfaction by way of purchase or way of work. It is my own natural inclination to go after satisfaction. However, there is no way I can get the fulfillment I want. I go after more and more unless I decide to rest, contented in what joys can be mine. And at a certain point, that’s what I did: I said stop.” Bruno’s book, The 100 Thing Challenge, is the way Bruno came to an end of this endlessly contagious cycle. For a whole year, he decided to get rid of all that he had collected and gathered, and he lived with way fewer things and freed himself of his “stuff,” trimming significantly to a small list of items he graciously calls 100 Things (though readers will see that is a gracious number). This book follows Bruno’s journey through trimming and maintaining fewer items. At the end of the experiment, Bruno says, “I ended the year no longer a slave to my stuff. Abundance didn’t clutter my perception of myself.” For this reason, the book was a great read that should prompt our own wrestling with how we view our collections and the items we have gathered.

A Personal Story Rather Than an Academic Treatise

Readers will find Dave Bruno to be a creative, poignant, and confessional writer. The book is not academically rigorous or groundbreaking, but it succeeds because it is honest, practical, and deeply reflective. It is not overly earthshattering, academic, or research-based. Readers should not think this is an honest reflection and a story of a man’s journey. It follows a general structure: first, it outlines his thoughts leading up to the challenge, then explores the wrestling during the challenge, and finally walks readers through his thoughts after the challenge. Sometimes it feels like his ideas are scattered, and much of the material in the appendices could have been incorporated into earlier chapters and probably would have made for a stronger read overall. At the same time, this book is a prophetic challenge, a pioneer’s example, and a trellis for the next movement away from consumerism.

The Rules of the 100 Thing Challenge

Bruno chose one hundred items because it is an easy number to consider, not too extreme, a number to get your mind around, but still a risky challenge for those of us who have way more than one hundred things. At the start of the challenge, he also made eight rules for himself. Any good challenge needs rules to know how it should operate. I think anyone participating in the challenge will need to make their own rules, but I do think Dave Bruno gives us eight rules that should be part of such a challenge. First, Dave challenged that it was just his challenge. His family was not part of it, outside of the consequences of “living with another family member.” The second rule was that these were just personal things, things completely his. This is not family-shared or household items (plates, cups, furniture, etc). The third rule allowed for a small box of memorabilia outside of the challenge, but he shared, “It turned out that I don’t have much.” The fourth rule is where many people probably find Dave’s rules gracious. As a pastor with a library collection, I have recently reduced it from over 3,000 books to roughly 600. Dave allowed himself to keep his books as “one library.” As someone whose identity has long been wrapped up in books, I found myself lingering over Bruno’s decision to count an entire library as one item. Part of me appreciated the grace; another part wondered whether my attachment to books deserves the same scrutiny I often reserve for more obviously consumeristic habits. The fifth rule was that some items were counted in groups (such as “underwear, undershirts (not T-shirts), and socks.” The sixth rule was that certain household tools did not count: “hammer, screwdriver, tape measure, etc…” I think that is fair and makes sense. Next, the seventh rule said that when he received a birthday or Christmas gift, or other blessings, he “had seven days to figure out what to do with it before it counted toward my 100 Thing Challenge.” Lastly, the eighth rule was that he could buy new things, but the old things had to be thrown out before he got the new ones. The goal was always to stay under one hundred things.

What I Learned from Bruno’s Experiment

I appreciated the reflections on Dave Bruno’s journey. As someone who is stripping down everything they own, he was inspirational. Strikingly, he remarks that “two percent of my personal possessions I hadn’t used, and fourteen percent I had used every day.” About the rest of his items, he says that “I used ninety-eight percent of my personal possessions every three months at the very least.” Through this, he seemed surprised to find that “it only took fourteen things to get through most days,” but this was enough to prove that he (and others) can, in fact, live with fewer than 100 items. Where to start? Bruno suggests we all should start in our closets and “check off the number of things that are yours that you have not used in at least a year.” This feels like a good recommendation. That which we will steward well is the thing we come to use most; the things we do not use have consumed us.

Bruno walks us smartly into a conversation that helps us to see that “Consumerism is one of those topics that we all directly experience, whether we have so much stuff that we feel weighted down by our things or whether we have almost no things at all and we wish we had more.” Bruno is not calling for minimalism. He is calling for a wya in which we have not bowed to the gods of culture, the pressures of retail, and become consumed by our collections. This is not a call to detachment. Rather, Bruno suggests, “Becoming free from the confining nature of American-style consumerism wasn’t a way for me to free myself from everything. It was a route for me to bond with what is more properly my place in this world. My place was not within the walls of the shopping mall, where for more than three decades I had purchased things that allegedly would aid my escape from a dull life.” Bruno’s journey ended with him no longer being a slave to his stauff, and “Abundance didn’t clutter [his] perception of [himself].” Though he may not choose to continue to live this way, he feels it was a win, because he testifies that “I am no longer a participant in the reckless and hopeless cycle of American-style consumerism.”

What makes The 100 Thing Challenge compelling is not that Bruno persuades readers to own exactly one hundred things. In fact, most readers will likely conclude that the specific number is less important than the questions and wrestlings that the journey raises. Bruno invites us to examine our relationship with possessions, consumption, contentment, and stewardship. The book is at its best when it is used reflectively, exposing the false promises attached to our purchases and challenging the assumption that satisfaction can be bought.

My Own Next Steps

After reading this book, my next steps are easy. After selling off and giving away almost two-thirds of my book and vinyl collection, I have more to do. Maybe next is my wardrobe. That is not where I would naturally start. Bruno comments, “I think it’s best to start with clothes for two reasons. First, most people I’ve met believe that their wardrobe is what would hold them back from doing the 100 Thing Challenge….So my recommendation is to prove yourself wrong from day one…Second, everyone who thinks about doing The 100 Thing Challenge has too many clothes. And I mean everyone. All those clothes are a distraction.”

The part I feel most challenged, or perhaps threatened by, is Bruno in his conversations on television. To clarify, we do not have cable television and have not for years. We have a few streaming services for family movie night and to make sure I do not miss a Phillies game. Overall, I watch very little television, but the idea of sacrificing the ability ot watch a movie or game together feels scary. Towards the end of the book, Dave Bruno says, “Get rid of your television! We’ve gone almost fourteen years without a television.” He suggests that “there’s no need to have a television, unless you have a need for hundreds of millionaires to spend billions of dollars to try to get you to buy thousands of things.” He is not wrong, but I am not convinced he is right yet either.

Bruno is forcing me to distinguish between entertainment as a habit and entertainment as hospitality. Family movie nights have become part of our rhythm together, and watching a Phillies game is less about passive consumption and more about shared enjoyment. I’m not convinced the television itself is the problem. The question Bruno leaves me with is whether the screen serves our family or, over time, our family begins to serve the screen.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, I do not think this book is about owning fewer things. I think it is about becoming the kind of person who can own things without being owned by them.

As a follower of Jesus, I found myself repeatedly reflecting on themes of simplicity, contentment, and faithful stewardship throughout this read. Bruno’s challenge is not merely about decluttering a home; it is about reclaiming freedom from the grip of consumerism. While not every reader will adopt their approach, few will finish the book without taking a fresh look at their relationship with the stuff in their closets, garages, and storage bins, and at their shopping habits. For this reason, I would recommend reading The 100 Thing Challenge by Dave Bruno (HarperCollins, 2010) to anyone wrestling with how simplicity, stewardship, minimalism, or the endless cycle of consumption characterizes modern life. Bruno’s experiment may seem extreme, but the questions it raises are timely, necessary, and deeply relevant for those seeking a more intentional way of life, perhaps more now than even when he released this book in 2010.

You can buy this book on Amazon and read my highlights.

If this post resonated, subscribe for future reflections, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. You can learn more about his journey to recover a rooted Christian way of life through the Lord’s Prayer, ancient habits, leading a quiet life, and simple Jesus communities online at JeffMcLain.com, the Lead a Quiet Life blog on Patheos, or the Discovering God Podcast.

General Christian

Home and Religion

Family, Parenting and Religion

Reading in the Trenches

Dave Bruno

Deconstruction

Evangelical

The 100 Thing Challenge

About Jeff McLain

Jeff McLain is a Doctor of Ministry Student on the Lord’s Prayer at Kairos University, Director of Pastoral Ministries at Water Street Mission, and a pastor at River Corner Church. Mobilized by 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12, Jeff blogs about recovering a rooted Christian way of life through the Lord’s Prayer, ancient habits, leading a quiet life, and simple Jesus communities. You can read more about the author here.

Previous Post

June 17, 2026

Dirt Talking to Dirt About God

Next Post

July 3, 2026 Psalm 23: A Poem for the Pilgrimage

In John 6:35, Jesus said, "I am the ______."

Select your answer to see how you score.

Light of the World True Vine Bread of Life Good Shepherd