I've been going through some of this after inheriting all my parents stuff. I feel some guilt about tossing so many things that they hung on to so they must hav

I've been going through some of this after inheriting all my parents stuff. I feel some guilt about tossing so many things that they hung on to so they must have valued them (but I don't feel enough guilt to keep all this stuff). I think there is a third possible cause to add to your list: companies exploiting something that maybe used to be sort of true but our parents hadn't realized it no longer applied. Collectible things might have been expensive and slow to produce when they were hand painted in upstate new york, then they started to be machine stamped across the world for pennies and for a while they could still fetch the old price and sentimentality as the market was saturated and then some. I sometimes wonder if I'm going too far in the other direction and not sentimentality in at least a few things and preserving them. Maybe I'm setting up the pendulum swing in the other direction and my kids will have interest in collecting something when they grow up.