I don't care too much for mansions. Mansions can't buy me love.

I'm watching the X-Factor in my hotel room, and in this episode, the contestants go to the judges' houses to perform for them.

Wait, did I say houses?  Because I meant ridiculously obscene mansions.  Epic estates in the most cliche of places (The Hamptons, Malibu, Paris), and I don't think I could ever build something like that using cheat codes on The Sims.

And as I sit in this hotel room I got at a huge discount that honestly not that much bigger than my bedroom back home, I realized something:  I wouldn't be any more content than I am now, sitting on an overpriced couch in one of those mansions as opposed to being in this hotel room.  I absolutely wouldn't.

Money, when it boils down to it, is meaningless.  And no one is going to believe that.  No one is going to believe that I believe that.  But I've spent the past five weeks living minimally in humble places that don't belong to me (and okay, I was technically in a mansion in Malibu for a month, but I was confined to just a singular, unfurnished room, so it was nothing like Nicole Scherzinger's pad that they're showing off on this episode), and it's just reiterate what I've kind of always know - true experience, true joy, true life is not found in what you have, as far as material possessions go.  It's Who you believe in, and what you do with that.

And it's such an interesting experience, to see these mansion on television and rather be in this hotel.