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The great junk transfer is coming

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Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#331

Post by michaelcampbell »

dijit wrote: post #283
jahewson wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes, we had a few of these accumulators on my wife's side of the family. It's like the depression created an entire generation that couldn't bear to throw anything away. Five giant boxes of rags. Every tax return back to 1942. Every disposable coffee cup sleeve. Presents, never opened. Dresses, last worn in the 1980s. Every little white table-shaped thing that comes in a takeaway pizza box. 20 of the same wrench,…

Poverty does that to the brain, if you weren't aware. I have the same hoarding mentality, despite being extremely wealthy by my parents standards. My mum still keeps everything she gets her hands on, part of the reason is because reacquiring once discarded may not be possible. So better to be safe. While you get pretty good at using things to fix other things, these days everything seems to be single-use molded plast…

Some hoarding tendencies seem to be genetic, too. My father was a medium grade hoarder. He lived through the depression (born in 1922), but lived on a farm and said he didn't want for much. He was "poor" by urban standards, but didn't know it. Never went hungry, had enough money to buy what they didn't grow.

His garage when he died was packed to the gills with ... stuff. Mostly tools (he was a mechanic) and things he dabbled with, but almost none of it quality in any sense. Enough to where he built a little outbuilding/shed and kept shit there too.

I'm not to outbuilding level, but I have the same tendencies, and I'm very well off by most standards. I'm working on it, and now that I've gone through my father's death and had to deal with that, am focusing on not having my son have to do it.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#332

Post by eropple »

klyrs wrote: post #49
ryandrake wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I truly don’t understand people that fill up their homes with stuff. I almost replied this way, too, but then I remember the junk drawer I have full of DB9 serial cables, Firewire cables, PCI SCSI cards, 256MB RAM chips, 2GB spinning hard disk drives, three prong computer power cables, mice, webcams, power strips, power bricks, and a fully functional Dell OptiPlex GX620 with a screaming Pentium D 3.2GHz CPU. I keep…

I had such a collection. It spent a decade in storage during a transient period of my life, and I emptied my storage when I got a house. I made a decision that I was going to empty every single box, whether or not I'd go on to repack them. I saved a miniscule fraction of the computer stuff, in the face of the evidence that I had not needed it for an entire decade and had no plans to open a computing museum.

I just did the same thing last weekend, from boxes that had been kicking around a few moves, which is where most of my "buildup of crap" came from personally. I'd lived in a series of apartments with more storage space than actively usable space, then I'd met a girl, she owned a house so moved in there, we bought a house together, COVID hit so we sold that house for another with a yard for us and for the dogs, then we split up and I kept this house because she had her eye on one not far away.

Five years after some of these boxes were packed, I finally went through them. I found a few things to keep, like the thank-yous from charity events I've run, but I don't need a monitor stand for a monitor I don't have anymore or all those VGA cables.

My studio and my wood shop are pretty well-organized now. Aiming to keep them that way. The rest of the house--I dunno, I live pretty lightly outside of those two areas.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#334

Post by pnutjam »

robocat wrote: post #142
robocat wrote: post #70

Cleaning up after your parents is a gift you give to them: look at it like them paying it forward for all the times the cleaned up after you as a child. Psychologically, mentally, and physically, parents can have difficulty tidying up their stuff. My friend’s parents came from very poor backgrounds and had a lot of trash. The father had a shed full of stuff that was useful to him - he knew what was in it and how to u…

And an altruistic gift for friends and family: take away their useless rubbish. Tell your aunt you need some wires from that old Pentium computer she has, and take it to be recycled. “Drop in” at your friends on the way to the dump with half a trailer full of rubbish, and ask if they want to fill up the other half for free. When there is a book market on, visit your friends and take away their old books to go to the…

Yup, I never turn down leftovers or anything my parents want to give me even though at least 3/4th of it goes right in the trash or recycle. They need help letting go and I'm here to take it off their hands.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#335

Post by eropple »

_delirium wrote: post #56
irjustin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is the population growth differences that accounts for the premise of the article. The 1950's parents for the first time had extra stuff more so than previous generations with the rise of consumerism, but they also had larger families where the parents of the 1980's took stuff off their parents hands. Garage sales for sure. Today, the trend is smaller families while the things of the 80's tend not to transfer…

This will be very regional I feel. I have tried to stock my house with used furniture everywhere I've lived. This was very successful when I moved to Cornwall (UK). If you weren't too picky about the styles, there were many options, all at huge discounts over original price. But in contrast to that, in large U.S. urban areas, used furniture shops are not worth your time, with no good deals. I assume this relates, som…

The difficulties in finding decent used furniture, and not wanting to buy More Particleboard as I've settled in a house I plan to stay in for a good long while, has got me going the other way and building my own furniture.

Articles like this do gently nudge that my personal tastes in styles aren't universal, though, and it will be worth a think at some point as to whether the stuff I'm making is future waste, too.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#337

Post by [deleted] »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #186
robocat wrote: post #70

Cleaning up after your parents is a gift you give to them: look at it like them paying it forward for all the times the cleaned up after you as a child. Psychologically, mentally, and physically, parents can have difficulty tidying up their stuff. My friend’s parents came from very poor backgrounds and had a lot of trash. The father had a shed full of stuff that was useful to him - he knew what was in it and how to u…

You don't have to be old to experience this problem. This was my take on techno-clutter from a few months back: https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/techno-clutter-farnell... A more funny story: Back in school, when we were about 17 years old, another kid told me that his Great Uncle had died, and caused him much stress. He'd never met this distant relative, so I enquired, why was he worried? Great Uncle Ben-Ali had…

[deleted]

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#338

Post by HollowEyes »

I have silly items of zero value, that my partner would throw in a heartbeat. I have wires and gadgets rarely used. And books they are not I inerested in. If I dropped tomorrow, my cooking pans and teddy bear would be all that remained!

We had seven days to clear my Dad's which was our family home. Not even enough time to review trinkets and resurface memories. A few useful items went to charity. The rest the scrap heap. And I was limited as to what I could take. I took a multimeter and, a drill, and a barometer. Could have done with some furniture, plants and other stuff, but it was just too bulky to deal with.

My Mum sits on a pile of organised rubbish. And shortly after she shuffles off, the lot will go in the bin.

But then, my family and I have nothing of value. Which does at least save on any squabbling.

Both my parents have and had loads and loads of stuff. My Dad had about five car carcasses. Three sheds of wood. And other junk. It's pretty selfish leaving others to deal with your shit. I know that sounds cold, but it ruins people.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#339

Post by tomc1985 »

robocat wrote: post #70

Cleaning up after your parents is a gift you give to them: look at it like them paying it forward for all the times the cleaned up after you as a child. Psychologically, mentally, and physically, parents can have difficulty tidying up their stuff. My friend’s parents came from very poor backgrounds and had a lot of trash. The father had a shed full of stuff that was useful to him - he knew what was in it and how to u…

One of my parents is a hoarder and has filled up a 2500+sqft house with junk. It is so bad that there are aisles carved through the house so that they can get through it.

My siblings and I have been begging and pleading with them to sort this out for the past 20 years. We have offered to help. But they haven't, as said parent is "throw themselves in front of the car if we try to leave with anything" emotionally attached to this stuff and somehow maintains an inventory of everything, including how they bought it and how it made them feel.

Now they are getting old and infirm and are barely able to afford the house that they are renting, let alone put in the effort to clean it up. My siblings and I are going to be stuck with a quagmire where they only solution is to pay a professional to come over and clean out the house, and that will not be cheap.

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