Everybody used to be naked, all the time. Naked at birth, naked at death, naked while sitting around with people, naked while meeting strangers, naked while preparing and serving food.

This condition is hard to imagine, because everybody you’ve ever met has been in the habit of wrapping themselves in woven fibres. Coating our bodies with textiles is such a useful thing to do that everybody does it now. But the technology to do that had to be invented, and many people lived their whole lives before that happened.

In fact, many people lived and died before any material goods had been invented — at least anything more complex than sharpened sticks or stones. Biologically, those people were basically the same as us. They still had to stay warm, they had to keep their kids safe, and they had to eat. Just with no stuff.

Mother Nature gives all human beings the same raw deal: with a gun to your temple, she whispers, “Find 2000 calories today, for each member of your family, and you may live one more day. Don’t let your bodies get too hot or too cold, and don’t let anything puncture or break them. Good luck.” There is no negotiation, and no crying foul; you have to do this.

If a group of beings survives this arrangement for long enough, their children become old enough to do it themselves. We know some number of them succeeded, because we’re their descendants.

You could call that condition – naked, with no possessions – abject poverty. You really can’t have any less materially. This poorest state of human beings is our default state. It’s what we are, actually, before you add any accessories.

Wild animals all live in abject poverty, because they can’t invent any stuff to make it easier. Humans can improve their condition significantly by acquiring objects and knowledge. Anything useful we gain, on top of our basic no-stuff state, can be broadly called wealth. A bearskin is wealth. A sharp obsidian flake is wealth. A log placed across a stream is wealth. Knowing how to make twine is wealth.

Wealth For Sale – Cheap!

A few items of wealth can go a long way.

Imagine a group of pre-clothing, pre-stuff people, coming across a modern bag of kitchen garbage, left behind by careless time travelers. There are some food scraps in there, some balled-up cling wrap, some soiled rags and other useful materials, but the real prize is an empty jar of Kraft peanut butter. After eating the high-calorie remnants, they can use the screw-top container to carry a ration of water any distance without spilling it. Now they can go that much farther from the water source, to find more food and survey more terrain for other advantages.

That bag of garbage alone could elevate a small group of people to something slightly above the default no-stuff state, in terms of ease, maybe for a long time, if they can keep that peanut butter jar intact. The bag of garbage is wealth.

Imagine if instead of a bag of garbage, this group found the unsold stuff from a single American yard sale. Now we’re talking life-changing wealth. Enough clothing for six people. Containers galore. A stack of Danielle Steel novels, providing thousands of sheets of paper. A claw hammer and a hand saw. A screwdriver, and some screws. Forks and knives. Towels. A box of matchbooks. A bundle of ballpoint pens. Zoo animal figurines. A package of hair ties. A blue tarp and a four-man tent! Who could ever be so lucky? This group’s battle with the human condition is by no means solved, but it will be far easier than any of them thought was possible.

Now imagine they came across a modern landfill. What we might see as an embarrassing pit of refuse, they regard as a fertile mountain of food, tools, and inspiration. Just its ability to attract seagulls would be a boon they’d sing legends about. We may find it disgusting, but when compared to the absolute poverty that is our baseline condition, a landfill contains an unbelievable amount of wealth. Why do you think the seagulls and rats are always so excited about them?

Mountains Upon Mountains

We don’t regard landfills or unwanted yard sale stuff as wealth, because the life of even an ordinary modern human rests on far richer and more enormous piles of wealth – layers and layers and layers of wealth, which have elevated us so far beyond our base state that we’ve lost all perspective of what wealth even is, and how much of it we have.

Aside from all the cheap and free objects and tools that abound in the modern world, there’s such an abundance of food energy that even the least wealthy members of industrialized societies have to be careful not to consume dangerously excessive amounts of it.

Then there’s the wealth of countless institutions and systems that quietly deliver all sorts of ease, know-how, and services, directly or indirectly: libraries, maps, journalism, art, construction standards, computer networks, and ten thousand other layers of advantage.

Wealth levels vary greatly between individuals, which is inevitable when there’s so much wealth that has accumulated from so many sources. But even if you literally grew up in a garbage dump, you’ve probably always had access to an abundance of useful tools, helpful systems and infrastructure, accumulated human knowledge, and caloric energy galore — not everything you want, not everything others have, but much, much, more than zero.

Most of modernity’s wealth benefits us even when it’s owned or controlled by others. Living in a place where there are phones, even if you don’t have one, makes life far easier, and might even save your life. Simply existing within in a society with industries, courts, banks, hospitals, roads, electricity, professional expertise, and schools – even if you have no direct access to those things yourself — frees you from huge proportion of the survival burden Mother Nature still puts on every human being.

That stuff alone constitutes immense wealth, in the absolute sense. Virtually any random person from history would agree. The only person who wouldn’t is a contemporary person who’s measuring wealth not from zero but from how much some other person has.

Yet people somehow lived with none of this stuff. They had the same fragile bodies and the same propensity for suffering, and they presumably still experienced moments of connection, happiness, peace, and meaning in a zero-wealth condition.

True Value is Measured from Zero

Measuring wealth from zero is a different way to think about it than normal. What makes you wealthy, in the way the word is typically used, isn’t what you have, but what you have compared to the people near you in time, space, and culture.

It’s useful for politicians and pundits to describe wealth in this relative way — as a comparison to some arbitrary standard — because it allows them to exploit our capacity for envy and pity, and maybe convince us to blame society’s problems on their political enemies. Did you know you’re supposed to have a house and a car and an investment portfolio? If you don’t, guess who’s screwing you!

Humans are prone to seeing wealth in relative terms. Watch this 1-minute clip of a capuchin monkey getting caught up in the relative view. Mother Nature prods us to strive for more than we have, as a failsafe. A bit of burning covetousness now might help you survive a future drought or famine. But it can also make you miserable, even when you’re sitting on a centuries-deep mountain of advantages.

How to Measure from Zero

Getting new things feels exciting. Simply having the things you already have, even if those things are immensely valuable, doesn’t usually feel like anything. The relative view only allows new acquisitions to feel strongly rewarding for a brief time, before you fully assimilate your new identity as an iPad-haver or Blundstone-wearer.

Feeling the full wealth of what you’ve already got is possible only when you measure that wealth from zero. Then you can feel its absolute value, rather than its relative value.

The easiest way to feel the absolute value of something is to imagine, as vividly as possible, its disappearance.

Next time you go to bed, imagine the bed, the covers, the building and its contents, all disappearing from around you, dropping you naked onto the cold ground.

Pretend this is the new condition of your life. There you are, blowing in the wind. You’re still you, just with no stuff. You have to carry on with your life from here. Where do you go?

Your first impulse will probably be to rely on the abundant layers of wealth that still surround you – nearby structures to shelter in, available materials to wrap yourself in, phone systems, emergency services, friends and strangers and their piles of stuff.

Now — only if this surrounding stuff was gone would you actually have to contend with your real birthright: the base state of human beings.

But you don’t, and almost certainly never will. Now come back from this fantasy. Suddenly your ratty Wayfair duvet and noisy radiator feel like the riches they are.

Measuring from zero helps us keep perspective. I’ve often recommended a similar exercise, but in this version you make your friends disappear instead. You might know it already: when you’re with a loved one, imagine that they’re gone from your life and you’re not actually seeing them in the room with you, you’re just remembering what it was like when they were still here.

A moment later, when it clicks in your brain that they are still here, their true value – as measured against zero, not against some arbitrary status quo — becomes palpable. Who could ever be so lucky?

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Photos by Sarah Brown, Matthew Moloney, Luca Bravo, James Wainscoat, Robinson Grieg, Chris Tweten, Alex Hudson, Element5Digital, Chandler Cruttenden