91–100 of 461 posts
After having to deal with all the stuff my parents left behind I swore to myself that I would not do the same thing to my kids. It's easy to say "just throw it out" but so many items have nostalgia and memories attached. Yet if I hadn't had to sort through it all, I never would have missed that stuff. I need to get on it. I'm not getting younger.
I watched a friend have to deal with this. There’s just so much to sort through or get rid of. My grandfather left dozens of model airplanes behind. No one in the family flies them. Most of the people he used to fly them with died before he did. Fortunately, my grandmother is still alive and we’ve found people who would appreciate the planes. We could have just burned everything but we have emotional ties to these th…
If you are in a niche, plan to get rid of it BEFORE you get old. Please, there are collectors, and stuff! I just got four new to me toolboxes, from my neighbor who was a diesel mechanic. Perfectly good after a bit of sanding and oiling. They're awesome, from the 80s, well made, and they'll keep me going for a long time. My father, a prodigious collector of oddities has done several wholsale removals of collections. O…
Gotta feel sorry for curators.
Curators wish to save things in museums and are surely the epitome of hoarders, for whom almost anything can be valuable, but however who can’t even accept extremely valuable collections because the museum is already bursting at the seams. And proper curation takes, time, effort and resources.
Imagine turning down the collection of someone and rending a hole in their heart and putting tears in their eyes: decades of a collector’s loving care for their particular interest, for a bunch of stuff the museum just can’t accept.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live out of a carry on bag mostly. My stuff is pretty minimal but the heaviest things I own are the books. I have some really weird old ones too, like one for learning german from 1939 and another on how to survive an atomic bomb from 1946. Just weird shit that's hard to find and hard to let go of. I tend to like doing book trades though so it pays off on my travels.
Oh, I hate moving my books. And they'd fit on a 8 meter shelf.
This article makes me sad. Is this all what it remains when someone passes away? A headache, an unpleasant chore? What about memories? Do people have no feelings? Are they so selfish?
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I had a similar pile but went through it and tried to pick: - Only one of each type of thing - Only the highest quality/safest power bricks - And items that punched above their weight in terms of utility (like an adapter that at least one end was not obsolete) This reduced my pile by about 75% . I find that I subconsciously keep a map of things that I encounter on my search for other items and this is actually a burd…
I have a similar method: I keep all cables in a set of small boxes. All USB cables go into one box, networking into another etc. I don't allow the boxes to overflow. This does three things: 1. Makes it easy to find the right cable or to establish definitively that I don't have one. 2. Limits the volume of cables I keep. Say some gadget comes with a micro-USB cable, but the USB box is full. I either already know that…
I've started doing this in my life: I take pictures of items that have emotional meaning to me, and then throw away the item. I care about the meaning to me, what memories it gives me, not the physical item. It's really really hard though. But my kids will just have a Google Photos album to keep rather than a house full of stuff.
I love getting rid of stuff. I've just packed up my apartment again, and my wife and I have under 5m3 of stuff, and that includes a couple of larger pieces of furniture, 7-8 framed pieces of art, a decently-sized toolbox, and a big TV. Most of the time we're away from our homebase anyway, so living out of two suitcases. It really means that our treasured items are treasured, as most have undergone several iterations…
I can remember photographs or something being held onto that after the 3rd move I just said "it's not worth keeping this thing around" and so it went. But it first traveled through this diminishing trajectory that was interesting to observe this incremental detachment to the object like shedding a skin I had now outgrown.
Seems like a weird comment given the possessions were already in a property in the first place, and the death of the parents will normally result in one of the children inheriting it too. Unless the parents were renting, in which case I doubt they had much space or money to accumulate too much stuff (this will more likely be my generations problem, since homeownership is soo far out of reach for most of us).