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The great junk transfer is coming
- DonBarredora 4y agoThis is the most first world problem I've ever seen.
- chaostheory 4y agoI feel with Millennials not being able to buy normal sized homes and the rise of minimalism with trends like Marie Kondo, this traditional junk transfer may end with Gen X.
- astrange 4y agoI wonder how far back these traditions go? People didn’t have the ability to generate junk until recently. Even the concept of generations is post-WW2.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoThis only exists because of industrialization and the creation of a middle class who had disposable income to buy surplus stuff. Before that, inherited items were truly precious.
- _carbyau_ 4y agoI see it as a % game. A larger % the currently dying generation may have a bunch of useless stuff. The next generation will likely have a lesser %. But it's probably not a big difference in %. This is just humans being humans.
- heurisko 4y agoI think there is also a generational divide in not wanting to collect figurines, ornaments etc.
- thebigspacefuck 4y agoMillennials will inherit the houses along with the junk.
- trgn 4y agoThe great junk transfer is the flipside of the great wealth transfer. It's going to be massive, and only just starting.
- andsoitis 4y ago> Kevin Cameron, whose father died last year and whose mother is in a nursing home, must now decide what to keep or toss from their cluttered home in Shelburne, N.S. this doesn't seem like a difficult decision.
- tclancy 4y agoI don’t think you read the whole thing. Dealing with these issues after the loss of a parent (and the even more traumatizing loss of a live parent to dementia) can be totally paralyzing. There’s so much fear that you won’t ever remember them attached to everything.
- andsoitis 4y agoI understand. Perhaps it is a "clear" decision from a Vulkan perspective, but I recognize that it can be difficult, in practice, for any human. Reminds me of a scene out of Labyrinth where a character tries to convince the protagonist to put more and more stuff on her back. She at first gives in, but then a spark illuminates in her mind and she realizes the stuff she's putting on her back will be like an anchor, not just a barnacle. So she breaks free. This was one of the most important lessons I learned when I was 6.
- ahmedalsudani 4y agoGetting acquainted with Swedish death cleaning is not a terrible idea. Less really is more. https://youtu.be/yv6fBOZlMgE https://youtu.be/yv6fBOZlMgE
- kayodelycaon 4y agoI love the idea of having boxes labeled to throw away, because those things aren’t useful to anyone but yourself.
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- kayodelycaon 4y agoI 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 things.
- jamal-kumar 4y agoAround a decade ago I saw an old guy flying one of those (some biplane replica) off of a racetrack for the runway in a school field and asked him what he thought of these newfangled drones and his reply was "I'll shoot them down!"
- calvinmorrison 4y agoIf 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. One comes to mind in parcticular - every single novel, novella, newspaper clipping and piece of paper of "E Phillip Oppenheim", a turn of the century paperback novelist who wrote hundreds of books and stories. Some guy drove out, gave him a nominal amount (a pittance for all the work done), but another avid collector. Somewhere Indiana Jones of the paperback detective world is screaming "This belongs in a museum!"
- jahewson 4y ago> "This belongs in a museum!" Does it? A museum for who?
- vintermann 4y agoI've gone to my share of oddball museums.
- sircastor 4y agoI had to deal with my Dad’s possessions when he passed a few years ago. We still have quite a lot of it in our garage. He had a lot of technology that is long since obsolete. A lot of books and toys and things that were important to him. It’s had a profound effect on me and how much stuff I am willing to keep, understanding that it will be burdening someone else some day.
- flybrand 4y agoWhen FiL passed away there were multiple buildings on their 50 acres full of stuff. Both he and MiL were only children. Everything over 200 yrs had flowed to them. “Priceless heirlooms” weren’t of interest to anyone. Auctions led to junk dealers. There is a hopelessness in realizing that lifetimes of activity were of little value, that nobody even knew what many objects were. I felt like the girl in the movie Labyrinth when they weigh her down w worldly possessions. There’s no way to train for it. It’s like the Kipple of Philip K Dick.
- astrange 4y ago> “Priceless heirlooms” weren’t of interest to anyone. Well, it's true. They are priceless, as in worthless. Those are usually things like furniture that could be valuable to someone in the area, but the cost of moving them is enough to make it worthless.
- HFguy 4y agoThis is a bit of a random comment, but what you wrote was very evocative of similar experiences I've had.
- danielodievich 4y agoNice use of "kipple" in a sentence. Props and respect!!!
- flybrand 4y agoLabyrinth and Kipple in same post; my recall of hoarding tropes is complete.
- jahewson 4y agoOh 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, all rusty. The old front door knob, long since replaced. Unopened, in-box power tools from the 1960s. Boxes of their own parents' stuff they never sorted through. 72 boxes of piano sheet music. All in a tiny post-war 3 bed family house. It took us 2 years to get through it all.
- SoftTalker 4y agoAfter 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.
- calvinmorrison 4y agoWhat's hit me the most are a few keepsake items. I have a watch handed down, worthless. I have a old cigar tray from Cuba. I have some fine dishware we pull out at christmas and i say "this is from your grandmother when she lived in Cuba". However, I sold my grandfathers STHL chainsaw, and that guy still uses it.
- mod 4y agoI'm not that guy, but I own some very old tools that belonged to a stranger. I don't know anything about the man but his profession, and that he bought good tools. But I often think of him when I use them.
- bentcorner 4y agoMy dad is getting older and even though he doesn't say it I can tell he's contemplating his own mortality. He recently asked me if I'd like to take the old Vic-20, C-64 and Apple 2e off his hands. We have a lot of very fond memories we made together with that technology and it played a part of who I am today. But frankly I don't have the room nor do I have the time to do anything with that stuff. It'd just sit in a box in my garage.
- warning26 4y agoYou’d be surprised at how much that stuff will sell for on eBay — people will even pay the massive shipping costs. Retro computing is really popular.
- 4y ago
- irrational 4y agoI’ve already told my wife that when her parents die we are just going to burn the house down. I’m just half joking. I truly don’t understand people that fill up their homes with stuff. You can’t take it with you. And I have no intention of sorting through it. It’s all going straight to the landfill.
- ta988 4y agoDon't throw things, get specialists that can sell and redistribute it. You can negotiate to not get money back and they can even take care of what's really trash.
- djbusby 4y agoYes. Well, this process takes months. Do you want the empty house to sell or use? Or would you rather wait 6+ months while stuff slowly clears out? Edit: for the replies: that works in populated areas. Rural MO, WS not so much. Edit2: also, arguing with kinfolk about stuff or waiting for probate (in the absence of a Will)
- bseidensticker 4y agoThere are definitely people who will move every single thing out of a house in a weekend for free. That's how storage unit auctions are done, and buyers even pay for it.
- Cerium 4y agoExactly, if you want a house empty you can make it empty just about as soon as you would like. The only question is who pays and how much. As you say - if it is junk you will pay some, if there are some things of obvious value you can come out ahead.
- 1123581321 4y agoShouldn’t take nearly that long. Get another quote from a professional with a warehouse so they can work from there. Or schedule an estate sale as soon as legally able.
- tmountain 4y agoIt doesn't have to be this way. Synopsis of "The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning" by Margareta Magnusson. In Sweden there is a kind of decluttering called döstädning, dö meaning “death” and städning meaning “cleaning.” This surprising and invigorating process of clearing out unnecessary belongings can be undertaken at any age or life stage but should be done sooner than later, before others have to do it for you. In The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, artist Margareta Magnusson, with Scandinavian humor and wisdom, instructs readers to embrace minimalism. Her radical and joyous method for putting things in order helps families broach sensitive conversations, and makes the process uplifting rather than overwhelming. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Gentle-Art-of-Swedish-Death-Cleaning/Margareta-Magnusson/9781501173240 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Gentle-Art-of-Swe...
- shakezula 4y agoThis feels like the anti-hero to Kondoesque sparks-joy cleaning.
- astrange 4y agoBtw, “sparks joy” was invented for the English translation. The Japanese was IIRC “tokimeki”, so I’d say that is a clever localization but is too specific about the kind of emotion sparked. Kondo’s Japanese books also have a lot more specific advice about trash disposal in Japan, which can be difficult, leading to hoarding because you don’t want to figure out how to do it. Japan has some high productivity systems for sure, but in things like trash and childcare they’ve instead chosen to have very complicated processes you have to get just right, and instead of improving them they just have all of society shame you if you ever get any of it wrong.
- SenHeng 4y agoI've often seen that when old houses get torn down, everything inside gets dumped into a skip that later goes to a magical place that does magical things with it. I'm quite sure similar services can also be used by the average person. You simply google for these magical words '産廃業者 $CITY'. Most* things can and will be handled by your local 'industrial waste' disposal person. Industrial here stands for non-consumer, not stuff-in-factories. * Except hazardous materials like asbestos, used paint and assorted chemicals which require another kind of disposal service that the city council can point one to.
- themadturk 4y agoWe went through this ten years ago with my wife's dad. He had a lot of stuff, but he had a lot of hobbies...there was relatively little "junk," and he used a lot of it until just a year or two before he passed. Some of it went to fellow hobbyists. Some went into storage. The stuff we just couldn't deal with were sold, along with the house, to a professional flipper who conducted an estate sale, hauled the rest away, and remodeled and sold the house. My mom was smart, for the most part. My parents weren't really big into accumulating stuff, beyond what people without many hobbies accumulate over the years. Twenty years after my dad passed, my mom downsized before she sold the house and moved into and independent living community. We got professional help downsizing further when she moved from independent living to assisted living, and finally got rid of almost everything else when she went into memory care. As much as she'd gotten rid of, she still had an amazing amount of stuff. It was a little easier doing it in stages, I suppose.
- FunnyBadger 4y agoIt will be handled the exact same way it always has: 90% of the time it's off-loaded at a garage sale, at Goodwill, on E-bay or otherwise sold - almost always below market value because the survivors can't be bothered - they just want it gone. This is the very basis of yard sales and antiquing. It's how I get a 1999 BMW Z3 with 20K miles back in 2008 for $5K bundled with a Mac Cube and several $K of other goodies from a widow of a former Apple employee. She just wanted it gone. I didn't even "hardball" her - I gave her what she asked for all of it! I got a vast stamp and coin collection from my father: my sibs who live within 50 miles of my mother wanted nothing to do with it; she's getting on and needed to deal with it - I was willing to come across the country to take it all. Now I have quite a collection of both valuable stamps and a ton of gold and silver. It's how you get cheap Ham radio gear, machine tools and furniture also - estate sales. The article is ignorant of all of this apparently. Never had anyone close to them actually die perhaps. The "problem" will solve itself and no one will notice it ever was a problem!
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- dehrmann 4y agoThis is all true, but "cheap" is a tricky term because you have to actively look for it. People picking over stuff to catalog and resell is a valuable service. Like you said, families just want it gone, but even if they wanted top dollar, parting out a collection take a lot of time.
- irjustin 4y agoMy 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 as well. This trend will likely continue to be even worse as fast consumerism + innovation makes many items not last more than a few years.
- pessimizer 4y agoI get this if one of your parents was a bad painter and filled the house with huge framed canvases. Otherwise, I'm just looking for stuff I want, and anything that I know was meant for posterity and few people would care about (my father updates a family tree, for example.) After that, call a professional and sell the lot to them i.e. the thing that these people mention not doing. You may "lose" your parents if you don't have all of their stuff (I'm not sure what that means, but the article keeps saying it), but luckily, the odds are you won't have to live without them for more than another 20-30 years. If that stuff outlived your parents, that means that it served its purpose well. Let somebody else buy it off ebay from an estate liquidator so it will create more happiness in the world, rather than hoarding it, which is the impulse I really suspect these situations are feeding. I have brought up in hypotheticals to anyone who might be lumbered with them after my untimely passing the best ways to liquidate a lot of board games without getting pennies on the dollar. My only actual worry about my (physical) estate is that my heirs may get ripped off while dumping it.
- ars 4y agoYou have no items in your parents home that reminds you of something you did as a child? Nothing?
- mackrevinack 4y agoi usually just take photos of that type of thing. they take up much less physical space
- JKCalhoun 4y agoYes, this is the solution. I have done the same with my own keepsakes. Take a photo and then toss the keepsake. The cloud, my backups, are really my only physical "treasure".
- girvo 4y agoI don't. We moved too much. Aside from computers and video games, there wasn't really any "stuff" that survived all those moves. Even less survived 13 years after moving out. My parents were always pretty ruthless about culling things.
- motohagiography 4y agoMy grandparents and great grandparents are dead, so they don't have to live with the embarrassment of having their descendent reduced to being "the sort of person who buys his own furniture," but that's progress. I am keeping some of it, and we all do a purge every few years just in case, but I find it's the photographs that are the hardest to destroy. Something that meant so much to someone else. Like tears in rain, I suppose.
- sk55 4y agoI digitize all of the photos so they’re preserved and organized. That way you can feel a little better about getting rid of the prints.
- gevz 4y agoI wonder if digitized objects will hold same sentimental value as real ones. What if taking a picture of a vase or a postcard, or even 3D scan of a toy you cherished as a kid, will help with keeping memories and not agonizing on the decision to junk it.
- lmm 4y agoI stumbled across some digital photos from about 25 years ago while going through my "library". The experience felt very similar to finding some old analogue photos in a box, though unlike with physical photos you'd be unlikely to find them while looking for something that wasn't photos.
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- laurieg 4y agoI feel like these days, stuff is incredibly cheap and therefore it's very easy to accumulate a huge amount of it. Sure, we have out sentimental items and useful tools we use everyday. But a huge amount goes un-used, sitting in boxes, closets, attics and garages waiting to be thrown away. I try to "live small". My apartment is relatively small. I'm still wearing clothes from high-school. I still the knife, fork and spoon I bought when I moved out on my own. When something breaks I mend it, replace it or turn it into something new. I'm not a hardcore minimalist, far from it. But there is great joy in having enough.
- olivermarks 4y agoThe difference here is that until recently things used to be well made and built to last. It's easy to buy a bunch of junky tools etc that might last a few years but it sometimes amazes me how people don't understand that owning a few good quality tools that will last forever is vastly preferable to giving them away. Same is true with a lot of other things, but of course this is only relevant if you're going to use them.
- SoftTalker 4y agoDon't overlook survivorship bias. There was plenty of cheap junk being sold 50 years ago.
- antisthenes 4y agoAlso, good things still exist, they are just marketed as commercial/industrial and carry the corresponding price tag. But they will easily last 20-30+ years with good maintenance.
- prmoustache 4y agoYes. Alao furnitures. Though they are out of style I would totally accept the well made furniture my parents own than the shit we tend to buy nowadays at ikea and similar that don't last 2 moves. Problem is partner would probably not accept it.
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- ars 4y agoI'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.
- sixstringtheory 4y agoI like to draw them or write about them in my journal. I find that the intense focus required helps remember them very well.
- thakoppno 4y agohow do you archive your journals?
- sixstringtheory 4y agoNothing beyond just keeping them around, currently. Maybe one day I’ll try to digitize/ocr them.
- jjav 4y ago> But my kids will just have a Google Photos album If google doesn't lock out your account at some point between now and death. Seriously, relying on something like google as the repository of all memories seems extremely risky when we know how often they lock accounts for no reason and there is no recourse.
- eddy_chan 4y agoWhere I live we have 'council clean-up' days. It's a designated day once per year you can leave a reasonable amount of rubbish outside your house including old furniture, tools, utensils etc etc. The good thing is it's widely advertised and if you sort your stuff out properly and lay it out in an organised manner, lots of amateur collectors will come and take it away to re-sell or re-use leaving only a small amount of true rubbish for the council to actually pick up (3 days later than the advertised day).
- bruce511 4y agoI am fortunate to live in a country where there are lots of people below me on the totem pole. There is a delighted recipient for literally everything we have outgrown. Pretty much everyday is council day here - you can leave whatever you like, whenever you like, by the kerb and it'll be gone by lunchtime. While it's painful to see so much need, it's gratifying that everything finds a new home where it will be used. [broken stuff is especially in demand - it can be fixed and reused - there's an active trade in collecting broken appliances. Large stuff, like furniture will be collected by charity organisations.]
- maerF0x0 4y ago> you can leave whatever you like, whenever you like, by the kerb and it'll be gone by lunchtime. I used to live in the SF bay area, and a good amount of items would be gone as you described. Items I couldnt sell on CL likely ended up on someone else's CL account who had more time to sell (I was moving) .
- robocat 4y agoI suspect a surprising amount of stuff put on the street ends up with hoarders. If I am putting stuff on the street, I try to trickle it out over the day, to spread the love, and hopefully avoid it all going to one person. The best is when it goes to someone who obviously needs it: perhaps a recent refugee immigrant, or a broke-arse single mum. Picking up “valuable” stuff is a vice, so I try to only collect what is immediately useful to me or friends. It is however surprising the junk that people will take.
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- obnauticus 4y agoThis is what I think of when all of these headlines about boomer-to-millineal wealth transfers come out every few months. How is this a good thing? How does this wealth transfer help decentralize the wealth in the US? The only thing I’m probably being left is a vintage collection of HGTV Magazines and piles of depreciating assets.
- synu 4y agoI’m not being left anything either, but there is a lot of wealth in assets held by that generation in aggregate, and that’s the wealth transfer they are reporting on. Not just the junk in hoarders houses.
- beckingz 4y agoThe chair I'm sitting in cost me $20 at an estate sale a few houses down from where my parents live, because the wife died and the husband wanted to move to florida. I do not look forward to the day my parents die because we have a history of accumulating material possessions and there will be a lot of cleaning.
- silisili 4y agoI'm not looking forward to dealing with my parents stuff, a major reason(other than their death) being that taste seems largely generational. They both seem to love giant wooden cabinets...for everything. They both have monstrosities of a TV stand/console/shelf, etc. It's actually nice quality, but nobody I know my age or younger really likes stuff like that. I can't imagine I ever will.
- Gigachad 4y agoDoesn't sound very hard. Walk through and grab the stuff you like, and then have an open inspection to sell off all the stuff you don't want at a price just worth making it for your time. Perhaps gather the common items like kitchen stuff and dump it at an op shop / charity.
- robocat 4y ago> being that taste seems largely generational Some things have a bathtub curve of desirability: they go out of fashion but many decades later the good stuff becomes stylish again — retro or antique. Think ugly 50s Formica kitchen table and chairs, 70s cookware and fondue sets, or 80s children’s toys. There is a public database[1] of registered car models by year in the UK going back decades: if you look at the data for say a super crappy Vauxhall Chevette station wagon, numbers drop sharply followed by a longer slow decline, and finally a ducktail uptick when they become collectable by mental enthusiasts e.g. one acquaintance I know with an original hatchback[2] “I would rather drive my Chevette into the sea - I will never sell it”, gotta agree . . . [1] which I can’t find at the moment [2] example https://www.adrianflux.co.uk/cult-classics/vauxhall-chevette/ https://www.adrianflux.co.uk/cult-classics/vauxhall-chevette...
- petesergeant 4y agoI 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 of this slimming process. It's not for everyone, and I'm not trying to make some larger moral point, but for me it always feels so cathartic to strip down the stuff and just be left with items that you actually really like
- jxramos 4y agoThere's something very pressing about moves that pares down the true sentimental value of some belonging. If the item survived multiple moves it either concentrated in value or waned in value and will soon have skeptical eyes glancing over its continued presence in one's life. 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.
- jseban 4y agoIf you are always travelling then yeah, I guess it makes sense. The problem I have with minimalism is that it also minimises the activities you can do. Any sport and hobby requires stuff, the more stuff you have, the more activities you can do. Painting, playing music, going swimming, skateboarding, playing tennis, running, picnic/barbecue, hiking etc etc. If you don't have any stuff, you can't be active. I just get bored to death when the only thing I do in my free time, is looking at things and eating/drinking.
- petesergeant 4y agoSome hobbies certainly require a lot of gear, but I think it's also possible to massively overdo the stuff-to-fun ratio. We go for four-hour hikes with our trainers, our badminton rackets weigh almost nothing and take up almost no space, and so on. > If you don't have any stuff, you can't be active This is simply false. We're currently on a little island and there are boats and stand-up paddle-boards to rent, we have a scooter and helmets we've rented and go for long drives, there are lots of multi-hour walks we've done in our sneakers, lots of scuba and snorkleing optins, there's kilometers and kilometers of beach to walk along. My only concession to this is travelling with a rash-vest for being in the sun, plus most of my shorts are very happy to get wet / be in the water
- slyall 4y agoThe book "Inheriting Clutter: How to Calm the Chaos Your Parents Leave Behind" by Julie Hall is a fairly good guide to how to handle this situation. Would recommend reading it before you need it.
- danielodievich 4y agoA friend of mine has a dad who is known in certain circles (name withheld) and I quote "Mr XYX, the owner of the largest collection of non-running Triumph coupes in the USA". He got a lot of sh*t for what is essentially a junk yard from his city. His house is filled to the brim with model train cars, in the bozes still, and all the EBay printouts of the auctions he won and lost. I do not know what my friend's plans are for all of this when his dad kicks it but I am betting on a lot of hassles around rusted hulks. Although they are strangely photogenic, we took some incredible photos...
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y agoThose Triumphs are junk; it's not like they're MGs or anything. :) I kid, of course. On a serious note, when the time comes, contact the local British car club (yes, there is one). They'll help.
- Symbiote 4y agoThe eBay printouts are very useful. You can see which of the models was worth €10, and which were worth €200. The value will change over time. Probably down, unless there are some very rare models. But it will give your friend some idea (and some terms to search for) when he contacts a local model railway dealer and asks for a quote. (Or lists everything on eBay himself.)
- robocat 4y agoCleaning 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 use it. When the father died, the stuff in the shed was mostly junk to be sorted into scrap metal or put in the skip. A very few useful tools, a bunch of valueless obsolete tools, and a little antique/collectable stuff. The mother’s stuff was useful or precious to her, mementoes and knick-knacks. Plus some hoarder mentality that made sense given her background. Mostly valueless stuff to anyone else. What value is a drawer of your smalls? I want my parents to pass their problem down to me and my siblings. I think forcing parents to tidy up or downsize can be cruel. Why be selfish and needlessly make my parents sad?
- calylex 4y ago
- RaoulP 4y agoWonderful perspective, I appreciate it.
- Eextra953 4y agoThank you for this perspective. I agree, my parents have a lot of bad habits one of which is holding on to things that may be of value at some point for way too long. I help get rid of extra things occasionally but whenever I push too hard I can see the stress and anxiety it causes them. They've been through a lot, if having more things than they need soothes them, so be it!
- debbiedowner 4y agoWhat are some examples of the obsolete tools? I can imagine a manual hand drill...
- nlnn 4y agoSome woodworkers still use manual drills (I own two, along with a brace and bit). They're useful for very exact/delicate work, quiet drilling, and for getting into awkward places where an electric drill doesn't fit.
- gumby 4y agoMy mother in law was born and died in the same room of her house, which had been her mother’s (father went to war and was KIA; he’d been born in that house). On of my sisters in law moved in while her mother was dying; she was moving out of her husband’s home (he’d grown up there; his father had too). When her mother died, SIL simply kept living there. I’d sometimes go into the attic and find weird old stuff. It appeared that stuff was discarded when house was renovated or repaired, but otherwise simply accreted.
- ChuckMcM 4y agoCleaning out a parent's house is a singular ritual. For me it reminded me that most of the stuff I "value" my kids will not care about, I've worked on putting disposal suggestions into my trust documents so that not only can they efficiently get rid of the stuff, they will do so knowing that it is what I want them to do. It is the last bit that was hard for me, wondering if my parents would be "okay" with me giving this stuff to a person who is clearly just interested in making a buck of reselling it rather than cherishing it as they did.
- peter303 4y agoPBS has an interesting way of decluttering in the Legacy List series. The service asks for 5-10 mementos to (find and) keep. Everything else goes to resellers, charity, or garbage. They often choose large estates that have been in the family for a century.
- a9h74j 4y agoOne bit of advice I took from an old decluttering book: You can only sentimentalize a limited number of things, so any mementos of yours beyond what are displayed on a single set of shelves should be stored/rotated or discarded.
- smm11 4y agoI'm planning on burning my house down.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoMy dad was born at the beginning of the Great Depression. He told me once about being unable to buy thread, not because they didn't have the money, but because there was no thread to buy - all the thread factories had closed. You had to re-use thread. Now imagine that that was all you had known for your entire life up to that point. And you had no idea that it would ever be different. That would shape you. My dad was a hoarder, at least partly because of that. When he saw something that he could possibly use in some way, he kept it. My dad died earlier this month. I'm getting to clean up the mess. It's not fun. I don't like it. I find it rather depressing that he spent so much effort collecting so much that has so little value. But I can understand why he did.
- MandieD 4y agoI wonder what effect the narrow, intermittent shortages of the past 2+ years is going to have on what had been the minimalizing generations. Before 2020: having more than a few rolls of toilet paper and an extra bottle of cooking and olive oil seemed excessive - I have three grocery stores within walking distance! Now: we always have two month's worth of toilet paper, and are currently glad that we started stocking cooking oil, because the cheapest available is 5 EUR/liter. Plus all the little-to-major electronics/amateur radio parts that have been really hard to get the last year or so...
- MerelyMortal 4y agoI wonder how the next 10 years is going to effect people. Our supply chain is crazy complex, and things won't get better as companies shut down due to the economies.
- vulcan1964 4y agoWhat will happen to the heaps of digital junk stored on flash drives, hard drives, forgotten online accounts? I get overwhelmed thinking about organizing my own electronics files… wonder what my kids will do with it all.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y agoI've gone through things like digital photo collections with mine and sent whatever they wanted (mostly pictures from their childhoods etc). They seem to prefer storing it all in their phones (w. cloud backup), but I have it all available through a NAS if they ever want it. I suspect that when the missus and I are gone, the physical digital stuff like drives and computers will simply be sent to recycling.
- wonderbore 4y ago> wonder what my kids will do with it all. The good part about digital content is that you don't have to do absolutely anything with it. Keep documents and photos accessible, forget the rest. As we approach multi-generational widespread digital content "cloud" services, we'll see more and more companies allowing content to be easily passed over to the next generation — but just for reference. I don't need my father’s iCloud photos, but it'd be nice to take a scroll in 20 years.
- smolder 4y agoThe cloud services of big tech cos can be counted on to store things cheaply or for free long term, for now. I do not trust them to hold onto anything or preserve access to it for 50 or 100 years. IMHO, people should be their own digital archivists for the really important stuff on those timescales, to avoid the risk of important data being discarded or held hostage by profit motivated companies at some point down the line we can't see coming yet. "The cloud" is young in terms of human life, and the rules we live by are volatile on that scale, shifting with transfers of power and depletion (or discovery) of important resources.
- jodrellblank 4y agoYou won't need grandma's YouTube either, but one of these days the videos from your ancestors' early lives will still be there in the hundreds of hours of high quality full colour. The idea that old people's lives were small black and white portraits once or twice per decade and that the past is a long way away, will totally collapse in the next 25-100 years. I keep wondering if that's going to be a big change to society or not.
- DeathArrow 4y agoThis 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?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shp0ngle 4y agoThat’s literally what the article is about?
- tediousdemise 4y agoI think that's the point they were trying to make. I can see things from their perspective: it is pretty antisocial and callous to focus solely on material things when the fact of the matter is that somebody has passed away.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yardstick 4y ago> And, even if they did want them, this Great Intergenerational Dump is happening just as millennials are facing a housing crisis, which will leave many of them either renting or living in much smaller homes. Grandma’s massive china cabinet is not going to fit. 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).
- HideousKojima 4y agoIf there is more than one child then the house will likely be sold and the proceeds split.
- prmoustache 4y agoAs said above, if there is more than one child the most common is that the no child can afford or is willing to pay his siblings their share of the existing house and it ends up split. Also most people have their own life/home, often far enough from their parents place to want to relocate there.
- salawat 4y agoIronically, investment grade housing ensures that for multi-child households, the price of a home is generally too high to afford the buyout of other family members, so the "family home" is more likely to bubble up to someone wealthy enough to buy it as a rental. Just another way the market perversely guides capital toward a centralized population due to the quirks of estate management.
- jmspring 4y agoMy father has been doing a decent job decluttering from things my mother accumulated. She is still alive, but not all there. He has a safe that has multiple locks that I need to make sure I have the code(s) for. I don’t accumulate stuff and already told my sister when it comes to that time, she can grab what she wants. The rest goes to donation/dump.
- r2_pilot 4y agoRegarding the lock, hurry and do that. My family lost the combination to our safe when my dad passed away, and it was a long time before we regained access (found the note eventually).
- mikehain 4y agoFor years I've been engaged in an enormous decluttering project in the house I grew up in. Aside from filling a few huge dumpsters, I went on countless trips to scrap yards to recycle metal stuff, to Best Buy for electronics recycling, to auto parts stores to get rid of old motor oil, to thrift stores to donate useful things, and to a hazardous materials disposal facility where I had to pay nearly $700 to responsibly dispose of fertilizers, antifreeze, old paint, and so on. I also spent entire days digitizing huge amounts of photos and documents. It has been a very time-consuming project. My piece of advice to help prevent this kind of situation is to keep a big "thrift store donation bin" beside your trash and recycling bins.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoGenerational differences in tastes will take its toll on some of this more than other bits. I don't know anyone under the age of 40 who cares one bit about fine china and china cabinets. As more and more people who collected china die off, there's a bigger glut of it. Collections that took a lifetime and thousands of dollars to accumulate end up going for pennies at estate sales while the cabinets end up in a landfill. Pianos seem to be going the same way. Probably grandfather clocks too. There are some younger folks who are interested in these things but not enough to sop up the ever increasing supply coming in from estates.
- henrikschroder 4y agoOh no, this reminds me that I have a box in my basement with my grandparents' wedding china that they got in the 1940's or something. My dad gave me the box, and I'm not allowed to throw the thing away as long as he lives. But it's completely useless. It's pretty, but you can't ever use it. It's not dishwasher safe, it's extremely fragile, and I cannot imagine ever hosting some kind of event where it would be appropriate to bust it out. Hell, I don't even know if my grandparents ever used it, or if it was just a thing that you "should" collect, and therefore they collected it. It feels like a waste to just throw it out, but I realize you're right, there's not gonna be a market for things like this ten, twenty, years from now.
- dcminter 4y ago> ...there's not gonna be a market for things like this ten, twenty, years from now. You never know. Vintage fans are a thing, after all (1940s and 1950s are quite popular). When the time comes, ask around - there might be someone keen. Worth checking with family too - there might be someone who'll love and use it just for that connection.
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoIt will move down market until supply and demand equalize. There's a plethora of china cabinets and hutches right now. They'll be used as storage. And when the supply dries up (because 90% of them will have been thrown away or destroyed in hard use) people who want one will spend $50 on them. Metal cabinets that held various sizes of card stock went through the same thing starting a couple decades ago.
- helsinkiandrew 4y agoI thinking it was the Canadian sitcom "Kims Convenience" that had the excellent line from the father when he was cleaning out his basement with his son: "We're putting things into two piles, one we're throwing away now and the other you throw away when your mother and I have died."
- thedailymail 4y agoThanks - that made me laugh!
- accountofme 4y agoI'm just curious how boomers lived through the great depression.....
- bontaq 4y agoThe article says, "The parents of baby boomers, the oldest generation alive today, were savers, having learned in the lean times of war and the Great Depression to treasure what they owned."
- accountofme 4y agoYes but boomers were born after World war 2 (1945) ... The great depression was 1929 - 1939... Before WW2.
- accountofme 4y agoNow I see it. I misead.
- nasmorn 4y agoIn my twenties I was cleaning out my apartment if some old stuff and my in laws who had a cat said they would take the boxes to the dump. Turns out they kept the stuff and I had to get rid of it again when my FIL died.
- johnsanders 4y agoI got it when i saw that dirty green Coleman flashlight. Who'd keep that? But ours was red, we used it at night on our farm and I vividly remember how that button felt and sounded when you clicked it on or off.
- sitkack 4y agohttps://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/V94AAOSwmL9f8vwL/s-l300.jpg https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/V94AAOSwmL9f8vwL/s-l300.jpg one of these?
- danielovichdk 4y agoStay away, as much as possible, from physical items. They will serve as a pair of handcuffs and make your life harder to move around in. If you feel comfort in things you should try to get out more and experience what else life can give you. Sell it all or give it away. It's fake comfort and it comes with a different cost than what you paid for it in the first place.
- tyiz 4y agoWasn’t this the case with every generation? This is not boomer specific at all.
- eropple 4y agoArguably not in the way it is today, with the advent of consumer industrialization making it way easier to have stuff.
- spinaltap 4y agoFortunately, I like to collect digital things while being minimalistic with physical things. When I die, I'll just tell my children to bury my hard drives with me.
- jokoon 4y agoI guess somebody will come up with an app to sort all this out so that a few of those objects can find new users. The amazon of used stuff. Not to mention the recycling of things people nobody wants.
- aurea 4y agoWhat would be the added value of that app compared to already existing options? Where I live (Switzerland) there are already several nation-wide websites where you can publish ads for things you want to sell or give away. And it is absolutely free. Furthermore, as already mentioned in the thread, many charities can clean up a home if needed.
- femto 4y agoFirst thing I did was take a bunch of photos. One of the things that had meaning wasn't the individual items, but the assemblage of the whole: the choices made in the arrangement of tools in the workshop, projects being worked on, the "look and feel" of the house. After that I felt I could "disassemble" things without losing too much: in the process getting rid of cruft and keeping other stuff. A big part of the job was "reverse engineering" the things the deceased knew but I didn't, and I could no longer ask about. That random key? Can it go out, or is it irreplaceable and belongs to something that matters? In my mind the best thing a person can do to ease the clean up is leave current documentation. Little things like labeling keys and making sure documents have dates. The things in your head that others can't know.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoThe article itself illustrates the photo-aspect of it. There are some very touching photos of personal items in the article. No doubt the photos themselves (especially artfully shot) will give some of the same emotional fulfillment.
- maerF0x0 4y ago> Can it go out, or is it irreplaceable and belongs to something that matters? I wonder if there is such a thing as digitizing said keys? Like maybe a 3d scanner could archive it incase you find a mysterious locked box later?
- Tade0 4y agoI hail from a long line of hoarders - it so happens that the three previous generations all experienced war and associated loss of all possessions. I know what to do with the mass-produced stuff like furniture, souvenirs and electronics, but I'm going to have a hard time parting with with things my parents made themselves. Myself, I include the cost of space occupied by each item I'm considering buying. With the real estate prices being what they are it's a great way to limit the amount of new stuff pouring in.
- ramazanpolat 4y agoHere comes another post to promote "own nothing" era.
- eropple 4y agoThis isn't what the article says at all.
- iamben 4y agoMy mother is very pragmatic about this. She took me and my brother aside and (to paraphrase) said "You don't need sentimental a attachment to these things. Keep a few bits if you want, get rid of everything else. But this, this and this are valuable and you should get them properly appraised and then use the money for something you need. The rest shift as you want." As someone who's fairly minimal (and definitely doesn't like clutter) it was lovely to hear and has (somewhat!) relaxed me. I'm definitely the kind of person who would have felt guilty about shifting the things she has chosen to surround herself with otherwise.
- s1mon 4y agoBe careful with appraisers. They essentially make money by making you feel like your collection of stuff is worth something and worth insuring. If you get things appraised multiple times over many years, you better believe that they will come up with higher values each year, otherwise you won't feel good about continuing to use that appraiser in the future. Then when you actually try to sell the item(s), you will discover that they are only worth what someone will pay you for them (minus the time it takes to find the buyer and manage the transaction). The "good china" that they got for their wedding with the fancy pattern - no younger people want it, especially if it's not in great condition and complete. The silverware is only worth something if they are solid silver - for their value to melt down - not as cutlery or a collectable (and those knives - the handles are hollow).
- einpoklum 4y agoSomehow I am not very moved by people who have inherited houses having to go to the bother of sorting through yet more stuff they've inherited along with real-estate. For many younger people in the US (perhaps even most of them?) buying a house is either a pipe dream or a life-long debt-servicing endeavor.
- lnauta 4y agoWhen my grandma died we found something similar. We were getting more and more aggressive with shoving stuff into garbage bags, when my mom and aunt opened the closet and found clothes of my deceased grandfather. He had died ten years before my birth. Most of it was falling apart, except for a tuxedo that fitted me nicely! A good catch for a day of clearing out this apartment.
- adenozine 4y agoHoarding is a revolting, serious antisocial behavior. If your loved ones do this, there are counselors and therapists that can address this, if the person(s) are ready to accept responsibility and change their behaviors. It’s easy to dismiss it as quirky and harmless but it can get out of control if there’s a significant trauma or some other trigger.
- basisword 4y agoIs it just me or is that article written by, and this thread full of, assholes? Your parents are dead and you’re complaining about having to sort through their stuff and deal with their horrible taste in furniture? If you don’t want to deal with it have it all collected and sent to landfill and get on with your life. I’m genuinely surprised at how miserable and selfish sounding a lot (not all) of the people in this thread are.
- MafellUser 4y agoIt's a bit of a cognitive dissonance yes but I do not think they are assholes as you said. They were clearly attached to the items and in essence they people those items once shared the connection. Having strong emotions is not a bad thing, you need to see over the petty complaining. Quote from the article: "Sons and daughters who have faced the chore describe wrestling with how to do it properly, respectfully and fairly (also cheaply and quickly) while ghosts hover. The whole process shakes awake buried sorrows, sibling rivalries, family dysfunction. It is never just about the the stuff."
- zrail 4y agoThis is accurate in my experience. It's not about the stuff directly, it's all the things that the stuff represents to the family left behind.
- FooHentai 4y agoI found out overnight my dad passed away. Here's the thing - I might come here and post some thoughts about the big clutter horde at his place that'll need to be sorted out. I'm certainly not coming here to talk about how I feel about my dad passing away. Because.. why would I do that? Who are you people to me? Who am I, or my dad, to any of you? It would be pretty weird to do the latter, not the former. One is a shareable likely relateable situation with the potential for insight and interesting discussion. The other is a personal matter that doesnt belong on a generic online commenting platform. I think most people understand this.
- 4y ago
- Beltiras 4y agoOh gods I can relate to this article. I am moving from Iceland to Tenerife in the next 2-3 years (just made up my mind last month) and I have a 163 sqm house full of "stuff" I need to reduce to 4 large suitcases in less than 24 months. I dread it but a bonus is that I won't leave a pile of garbage for my kids to clean up once I kick the bucket.
- zokier 4y agoOne thing I don't see discussed is how increased longevity means that the inheritors are also older. This means that they have more and more of their own junk to deal with. Even the grandchildren are getting relatively old these days; it is different situation to receive stuff from grandparents when you are just getting your own home set up vs really already having everything you possibly could want
- maffydub 4y agoMy grandmother died about 8 years ago. One of the things I took when helping clear out her house was a white plastic chopping board - it was probably pretty cheap to buy, but I just hadn't got one at the time. I still use it almost every day... and remember her.
- cameron_b 4y agoI think this is the spot-on critique of the attitude in the article. I was in college when my mother's parents died a few years apart. They had all kinds of stuff, but I actually appreciated getting some of their kitchen utensils. Not the flatware, but the knives ( not great ones, just okay ), the slotted spoons, the mixing bowls, hand mixer, things like that. I didn't have any of that stuff. It isn't worth much money, but when you don't have that stuff it is non-negligible to buy especially with the decision cost. I still use two of the knives for the rougher work in the kitchen and camping. It brings to mind the story of Jesus talking to the "Rich young ruler" [0] Where they guy is dismayed at confronting the idea - as we might translate here in this discussion - that his possessions are a great burden and not at all as valuable to anyone as they feel to him. Jesus' instructions seem economically wrong ( Wouldn't some of the stuff convey more value if simply given away instead of sold and given as money? ) but that seems to be the point being made for this individual. ( something of "you think you know what's right, what's valuable, but it's all just a mess" ) [0] - https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2010%3A17-27&version=NASB https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2010%3A17-...
- roflyear 4y agoI was too young to care about those things, but I wish I was able to get some of my grandparents cast iron.
- pfdietz 4y agoWe moved across the country a few years ago after living in one place, raising kids, for more than two decades. The experience of disposing of accumulated junk was very cathartic, and has led us to both reduce accumulation of more junk and look critically at what we still have. We're not close to death (I hope!) but we've left things in a much tidier state for the kids when we do go.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ransom1538 4y agoI went to a storage shed once with my wife. Her father put a bunch of stuff in a shed including hers. The storage shed manager: "Yep. Parents store a bunch of shit the kids don't want. The parents die off, then the kids empty it, then add a bunch of shit their kids don't want into it. The cycle continues. "
- llamajams 4y agoJeez, At least y'all have someone giving. You could have noone and nothing and have to do it all from scratch by yourself.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoRecently had this experience. It helped me to consider it this way: An old stage theatre has finally closed, after nearly a century in operation. I had the task of emptying the prop room. Going through it, I found very recognizable things from shows I knew and loved. Also some things I maybe remembered, but not sure what script it supported. And lots of stuff, no idea why it was there or what show it was in. Anyway, it's just props. The actors have done their lines, the shows long finished their runs, the audiences come and gone. The important part, the only part that really stays with us is the memory of the performances and how that changes us. So sure, keep a prop or two if they are particularly commemerative. But don't worry about the rest. They can move on to another performance in another theatre elsewhere, or even the bonfire if that's their fate. Others should have them if they find them useful for their audiences. Thinking about that helped frame it for me.
- randomsearch 4y agoThanks, that really helped. Perhaps a good framing for life and episodes within it too.
- buzzert 4y agoVery beautifully said!
- jakedata 4y agoI collect phonograph records, generally from thrift/charity shops. It is always an interesting glimpse into someone's life when an entire record collection (minus anything actually valuable of course) ends up there after a house cleanout. Sometimes a bit of the personality shines through, and if there is a name I can often get more context. I recently discovered an acetate home recording from the 1940s that had a name on it. I discovered that the family still lived in the area and a little research let me reach out to one of the children to return it to them. They had no idea of the recording's existence, it just went out with all the other stuff. It's probably a great premise for an extreme cold case murder mystery.
- havblue 4y agoRealizing that someone has too much junk that you're going to inherit is easy. Convincing them to do something about it is hard. I'm unfortunately going to have to face this scenario with my in-laws and I'm not looking forward to the arguments in the future about a whole storage building of junk that we're going to inherit soon. Rusted cars. Art from the eighties nobody wants. Furniture. Medical records. Lots of planned projects that will never be realized.
- angst_ridden 4y agoMy father's family lost everything in the Great Depression. His earliest memories were of moving out of the mansion into successively smaller houses. My mom is the daughter of refugees who often went hungry in their early years in the US. When I was growing up in the 80s, we lived in relatively wealth, but I thought we were poor. We had economizing rituals that are laughable in retrospect: we'd save everything including used tin cans, we would share a single teabag for making tea at breakfast, nothing ever got replaced if it could be fixed (Dad still keeps an 1980s-era microwave working, although over the years he's had to replace half the components on the main board). My parents' house is now probably worth millions. They had careers and have savings and are living out a very comfortable retirement. There's a house full of stuff that I'll have to deal with one day. It will be hard, but I will try to look at it as a meditation on the challeneges they went through and how they coped. I expect one of the hardest parts to be books. I was raised to think of books as practically sacred. Every inch of the house is stacked deep in books: art books, science books, old books, mass market books ... Libraries might want 1% of them, but they'd sell the others at fundraisers for a nickel or maybe just send them off to be pulped. There's also my dad's old computer stuff. I think there's a PDP-11 rotting in the garage. When I was a kid, there was a big old analog computer out there. I suspect these will be re-homable.
- madengr 4y ago
- bityard 4y agoWhy is everyone acting like this is not already a solved problem? Heirs are not forced to spend hundreds of hours sifting through their parents stuff... If that is too much of a burden, just call up the nearest estate sale company. They will do it all for you.
- eropple 4y agoSome people feel obligations that you do not. Empathy matters.
- bityard 4y agoThey feel obligated to suffer? Regarding the empathy jab, nice try, but I went through all of this myself when my father died. His affairs were relatively simple and still took almost a full year to resolve. I took a week off from work to drive way up north and go through all of his property and belongings followed by a weekend-long estate sale. It was one of the most physically and emotionally draining things I have ever done. What I am pointing out is that it doesn't _have_ to be that way, especially if the deceased has lots of belongings. You can go in and keep the things that have sentimental or monetary value and then let the estate liquidation company take care of the rest and keep your sanity. And it just seems like everyone in the thread forgot about this option.
- eropple 4y agoI'm sorry for your loss. My mother had nothing to go through of note, sentimental or otherwise, when she died. It may seem odd to you, but I wish she did. A lot of things I would have wanted disappeared over the years, and I think I would have given quite a lot to deal with that problem.
- 1970-01-01 4y agoI have hundreds of computer and service manuals for electronics that I will never see again. Part of me wants to give it away, part of me wants to retire and open a vintage repair shop. Everyone under 30 sees it as a pile of trash. Worst case scenario: they can all be thrown into the recycle bin.
- sterwill 4y agoIf you have the time, you might consider scanning some of those manuals and uploading them to a site like http://bitsavers.org http://bitsavers.org
- beej71 4y agoI'm fortunate that Mom and Dad have been considering this and have been actively thinning their possessions as they age. For about the last 10 years, their "birthday presents" to us kids have been things from the house. (Us kids are old and don't need typical presents. The nostalgic stuff is better now, anyway.)
- RickJWagner 4y agoMy mother died last year at 92. She was a very wise woman. One of the 'gifts' she gave her children was to intentionally de-clutter several times. She'd offer us her possessions periodically and would refuse material gifts for holidays or birthdays. At the end, she lived in a small apartment with sparse furnishings. She also managed her own funeral, making arrangements for all the necessary processes. Her passing was very difficult, but much, much less than it could have been. I hope to do the same for my children one day.
- HollowEyes 4y agoI 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- possiblydrunk 4y agoOne of the hardest things in life is knowing when to cash in your chips. Most wait too long.
- MerelyMortal 4y agoMy dad collects things that only people his age collect. I've told him that my and my siblings don't want them when he dies, and they're only valuable while other people his age are still alive, thus if he wants to extract value from them, he needs to sell them immediately yesterday. He's a hoarder though, so someone lucky will buy the very valuable things today for a fraction of a penny on the dollar five years from now, assuming I can find a buyer if the economy is in a depression.
- tediousdemise 4y agoGeorge Carlin wasn't wrong when he said houses are just a place to put our stuff. Why are we all so attached to stuff? I've found myself slowly letting go of material things, and with that comes a feeling of tranquility.
- walnutclosefarm 4y agoMy parents lived on the same farm for 70 years, a mile from where my father's parents had lived since 1905. If you think a suburban home can fill up, just imagine a place with all kinds of outbuildings, and two adults who having grown up dirt poor in the depression, could see potential value in almost anything. But when my father became too incapacitated by age to maintain the place, they bought a new townhouse in the small prairie town 7 miles from the farm, selected the things that they needed and wanted to occupy that space, including a few things they thought they should pass on to their children. Then they sold everything else, including the homestead, at auction. Us kids were permitted to buy anything we wanted personally, of course, but at the auction. Costs for us could come from our eventual inheritance, if necessary (in the end, nothing that valuable went to any of us). A week preparing for the auction, and a morning, and it was all gone. Now in my own retirement, I have been thinking a lot about what happens to our own homestead, and the tools and detritus of a lifetime that it contains. I've been diligently culling things that I know I won't be able to use in the next 20 years (which is probably the most I've got here), either through Craigslist or the like where an item is still of use to someone, or to by disassembling them and recycling the materials (where feasible), or hauling to the landfill (where recycling is not feasible) for those things that are no longer likely to be useful to anyone. But that will still leave a lot of stuff. Multiple looms, spinning wheels and associated equipment and fiber material from my wife; innumerable tools and machines that I still use regularly in the orchard, woods, garden, and wood and metal shops; a library of thousands of volumes. We have a neighbor 15 years older than us who, faced with this problem and no children who wanted their homestead, which they, like us, had built up from bare land over 40 years, found a much smaller place, moved what they wanted there, and sold the homestead, furnishing included. to a younger couple wanting to start a rural life. I like that idea ... make it someone else's problem, but also boon. My own kids will get and have enough that we can afford to sell at a discount if someone who really values the place and supporting materials comes along.
- at_a_remove 4y agoHere is the hard one: photos, report cards, all of the "familial documentation." I am a technically-only child and will have no children myself. What will I do with these photos of my mother as a young girl? I've no-one to pass them onto.
- maerF0x0 4y agoOne says "junk transfer" another sees opportunities. Jewelry likely can be smelted, stones reset in modern settings. Tools can be refurbished and/or moved into 3rd world markets where things are often repaired. Ok, trinkets and doilies really are junk, perhaps a handful for movie sets? Hopefully some bright and hustle style entrepreneurs can find ways to upgrade this junk into the hands that rightfully could use them. The part I'm particularly hopeful about is more homes coming on the market. Yes they may want for a renovation/updating but think of the multibedrom family homes that grandma is living in housing 1-2 ppl and soon could house a whole family? That's going to be helpful to those currently priced out of the market.
- kodah 4y agoMy dad had a brief encounter with a coma and it really brought the mountain of his belongings to the forefront of my mind. Books, comics, baseball cards, knives, guns, and other collectibles. Where he stores all this is a giant building that looks like a barn. After his coma I talked to him about my fears of dealing with this and the issues I had trying to reverse engineer his finances from QuickBooks. He was actually very receptive, and it was an opportunity for him to share his thoughts on life and death with me. Since then he's earmarked or given away a lot of things, and the building is much more organized. If you find yourself in a situation like the article, don't wait until someone died to deal with those things. In my dad's coma, I observed my own mental state; everything I saw was a collection of memories of my dad, I couldn't fathom if he passed what to do with all of it (and my mother would need to move). I had no hierarchy that correlated things that remind me of him and things that were valuable to him. Those things were impossible to know without a conversation.
- Merad 4y ago> If you find yourself in a situation like the article, don't wait until someone died to deal with those things. You may not have a choice in the matter. My own dad is 75, my mom passed away two years ago. I've tried several times to nudge him in the direction of dealing with some of his stuff, but he's not interested at all. He's not willing to part with any of mom's things because I think he feels like that would be some kind of betrayal of her memory. I hope he'll get better about that with time, but there are still plenty of things that are "his" that he doesn't want to let go of. We had a debate just a few weeks ago about a push mower that's been used maybe twice in the last decade. I told him that he should sell it or give it away while it can still be useful to someone, he insisted that he might need it someday. He won't... he has a riding mower and weed eater for maintaining his yard, and he's almost at the point where he can't use them. My parents weren't hoarders by any means, but they both grew up poor in the 1950s which left its mark on them, and living in the same home for nearly 50 years gives you the chance to accumulate a lot of stuff.
- waynesonfire 4y agonot surprised, the cheap crap we buy from china isn't worth keeping.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoRecently had to do something like this. Here is how I wrapped my mind around it: Get a large number of identical plastic storage boxes, take a quick picture of everything as you put it in a box, fill the box, put a number on it, take a picture of the box - done. Repeat. This helped me bypass the physical organization stage of sorting, because before you pack everything, you don’t know what exists yet. Once everything is boxed up and documented, all you have to do is make an excel sheet of what is in each box, and then search through that instead of searching through a physical box. Tl;dr > replace physical sorting with digital sorting.
- deanCommie 4y agoAlmost 400 comments, and noone seems to be getting to the crux of the issue: This is about mortality, legacy, and humanity's fundamental inability to effectively deal with death. The "junk" is memories. A lifetime of memories of people important to us - important to them - a record of their accomplishments. It was the best they could do. Not everyone gets a library wing, a mausoleum, or a wikipedia page. But for a brief moment maybe you have your stuff - and stuff triggers memories that your life actually happened and had meaning. And then you're gone, and it all becomes a useless burden. Yes, it's frustrating. But it's more existential than that. When you clean out your parents' junk, you have to confront with the reality that in some years someone else will be cleaning out yours. And the memories you're making of the rich and powerful experiences you had will also disappear into the aether. That is disturbing and upsetting to most humans. I'm impressed so many commenters here can be completely detached from it.
- ghaff 4y ago>An exponential growth in storage lockers that are never emptied. Based on a couple of relatively recent experiences, you probably shouldn't get a storage locker unless it's to bridge some specific short-term need. Otherwise, you're paying monthly rent, mostly kicking the can down the road, and potentially creating an unnecessary chore when someone--who may not even live locally--has to clean out the unit.
- MerelyMortal 4y agoAssuming they even know about the locker in time to go through it before the payments lapse and it goes to auction.
- black_13 4y ago
- dangan 4y agoMy father in law dumped 6 giant totes of my wife's childhood belongings on us right before we moved into our new home. It was a 1000 mile move so basically we had to pay hundreds of dollars for a bunch of crap she didn't even remember having.
- ThinkBeat 4y agoThis is also about a change from living in houses with some real estate to living in small boxes stacked on top of each other in a dense city. Depending on your family history and where you live maybe this transition was done a generation before, or even longer, but for many who have parents and grand parents this is the shift from houses in more rural areas, or houses with a garden and some space to dense urban living. People in small, stacked boxes do not like stuff because there is little space for stuff. They are trained to rent everything. Box, music, movies, games, car, bike, scooter, sports equipment, tools, a space for parties, coffee, cooking, books, photo albums, Less common: furniture, clothing Perhaps in a few decades what a new generation will leave behind is nothing. Some will say that is great. People in small, stacked boxes more than others. I think it is a tragedy. There is real wealth that is transferred, but there is so much more. A mosaic of how your parents lived, their culture, what they learned, and what they treasured. My father's rich record collection. From a different time and place. A time capsule. Books, some have been handed down in generations. Most now impossible to buy. Tools of all sorts. Some have old and well used and still working and great to own if you have a house with some property. All is stuff and stuff is junk now. Your grandchildren will have no idea about how you lived and what you experienced. There will be no record collection, books, tools. I do live in a small, stacked box myself and these things I find tragic. Others will find freedom.
- lbschenkel 4y agoI think that emigrating killed any hoarding tendencies I may have had. I went to live in another country with two suitcases as my possessions, and left everything else behind. Although scary, I don't miss any of those things and it was one of the most liberating things I have ever done because it thought me that the objects we accumulate are not really that important.