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> Finding the gems takes an active effort, which author found daunting. Who knows what are gems are what are not? I scan tons of stuff related to my children's

> Finding the gems takes an active effort, which author found daunting. Who knows what are gems are what are not? I scan tons of stuff related to my children's school/activities etc. One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them and find some things they will call gems and lots of other junk. Or maybe they will consider it all junk and just get rid of it. But I can't be the judge of that now, I can only be the custodian.

manmal 1y ago
You are perfectly describing the issue when sorting out a hoarder‘s stuff. There‘s no way of knowing what‘s precious and what not for most of the things. There might be some obvious things (wooden furniture / ISO documents that are still relevant), but the rest goes in the trash usually. > One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them My mother used to say the same thing. But I‘m not looking at that old stuff, ever. Maybe your kids will. It’s your decision whether it’s worse to be false negative or false positive here. If the stuff is not taking up too much space, it’s probably a good idea to keep it. Hoarding is something else though.
- noisy_boy 1y ago
  I'll take my chances on the off chance that my child will see their primary 2 report card scan after many years and say "oh my god I can't believe it..."
  - sanswork 1y ago
    My mom kept everything like that. The structured stuff like baby books and photo albums with labels and stories are great. The boxes of report cards from when I was 7 were a momentary amusement before they were recycled. The school work and random other things were just annoying to have to sort through.
    - noisy_boy 1y ago
      I would have been stoked to see the evidence of her sentimentality if that was my mother (my dad kept my stuff and I liked that very much). I guess we are all different people will different emotional reactions. Also I know nothing about you or your life so maybe your reaction is totally warranted.
      - astura 1y ago
        Of course you would have been m stoked, hoarders enjoy hoards. It's a tautology. What you fail to understand is the vast majority of people are not hoarders and don't enjoy hoards.
        kaashif 1y ago
        I would enjoy a digital hoard of stuff like that, but not a physical hoard. I have since digitized all of the stuff my parents hoarded and got rid of a lot of the physical items. It doesn't really cost me anything on an ongoing basis to have this huge digital dump of files sitting around. It was a one time effort to scan everything. If my parents had done that and just left a huge archive of digital files, that would be fine. If people feel neutrally about digital hoards, that makes sense.
        noisy_boy 1y ago
        It is amazing how things can be interpreted that differently. How heartless you have to be to not even spare a kind thought about the moments she lovingly put away the things for her loved child. If the person is a hoarder, they will do that for each and everything, not just for things that remind one of the memories of the loved ones. Just wow.
        achierius 1y ago
        What you fail to understand is that the vast majority of non-hoarders are still happy to get those "brief moments" of joy, memory, nostalgia -- connections to the past that could otherwise be totally gone. The cost is so low, the benefits -- perhaps not life-changing, but of a particular and hard-to-replicate quality that I think makes them worth it nevertheless.
  - latexr 1y ago
    If it were me, I would indeed think “oh my god I can't believe it”, followed immediately by “why did my parents save this worthless junk? I have no interest in this. How much more garbage is in here? I’m definitely not going to look through it all to find two important things buried in hundreds of trivialities. And now I have to go through the trouble of throwing it away myself. I’d rather be doing anything else”. Maybe your kids will enjoy it, though. But that feeling is far from universal.
    - noisy_boy 1y ago
      > If it were me, I would indeed think “oh my god I can't believe it”, followed immediately by “why did my parents save this worthless junk? I have no interest in this. How much more garbage is in here? I’m definitely not going to look through it all to find two important things buried in hundreds of trivialities. And now I have to go through the trouble of throwing it away myself. I’d rather be doing anything else”. Sure, we are all different people. I was super happy to find my childhood class photo and marksheets that my dad had saved - it just underlined what I already knew, that he cared. I shared it with my children and we bonded over the exams where I didn't fare well. > But that feeling is far from universal. I know that the level of sentimentality isn't a universal thing. I'm not going to hold them to cherishing this stuff and ask them to explain themselves if they just delete it. I just want them to have a chance at looking at small parts of their childhood. It is done without expecting gratitude or reciprocal emotions in return, which I guess, is part of being a parent.
    - account42 1y ago
      Ok, but so what? It doesn't cost much to store and isn't really that much effort to throw away later if the kid doesn't want it anymore. No reason to deny the potential to relieve some memories just because there is a chance they won't care.
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  It's a hundred times easier to search a digital hoard and you can fit a very big one inside a single hard drive. So the idea that most of it is worthless is far far less justification to toss the entire pile. The cost to benefit ratio is shifted by more than 1000x. And even then, while cleaning out a physical hoard you'll take time to look through things.
  - manmal 1y ago
    Discarding the hoard has mainly psychological upsides in this case.
    - raindropm 1y ago
      I think hoarding is humanity's default mode of operation, and that why I see lots of comments resist not hoarding. I live and hoard long enough to know I rarely look back to stuff I've saved, things that I hope it will spark my creativity someday, never arrives (except for some really rare case, which is like 'hey, I remember this...,cool', you relish the nostalgia for a bit and then you move on eventually) I agree with you that even digital stuff took toll on your mind. I remember the sadness but then big relief when my old HDD gone, along with stuffs. The thought that I don't have to worry about it anymore is a plus in itself.
dist-epoch 1y ago
Realistically they will use an AI to find the gems.
- noisy_boy 1y ago
  I'll be happy if they atleast try, AI or no AI :) And if they don't, thats ok too!
michaelt 1y ago
> Who knows what are gems are what are not? In this case, the author wrote the notes. If they say it has no value, they probably know what they’re talking about.
- diggan 1y ago
  > In this case, the author wrote the notes. If they say it has no value, they probably know what they’re talking about. Well, yeah, if they say it has no value, then obviously it has no value to them, no one could claim otherwise. I guess the context in this thread kind of shifted to it might still be valuable to someone, even if it isn't valuable to them. There been a lot of cases in history where very smart people judged their own journals to not be very valuable (to them) so they think nothing of it, then 100 years later someone discovers the journal together with a ton of valuable (to the world) nuggets in it.
- account42 1y ago
  Will their future self agree with that assessment though?
al_borland 1y ago
You can ask your kids what those gems are. My dad ask me this a few months ago. I brought up some knick knacks he had in his office when I was growing up. I'm not sure if he still has them or not, but if he does, if he ever goes through his hoard, he'll know to send those my way instead of getting rid of them.
- noisy_boy 1y ago
  > You can ask your kids what those gems are. My dad ask me this a few months ago. I brought up some knick knacks he had in his office when I was growing up. I'm not sure if he still has them or not, but if he does, if he ever goes through his hoard, he'll know to send those my way instead of getting rid of them. He can't give them to you if he threw it away. Also, he can ask that question to you because your choices and preferences are, to a large extent, set. The same stuff, that my child would throw away without hesitation few years ago, is now "precious memories" and not to be disturbed. The emotional value of things doesn't follow much logic and has massive volatility until adulthood. I mean I totally understand that me keeping bunch of stuff isn't a guarantee that they will find what they value at that point of time. Maybe the lego-shaped eraser would be the most interesting piece of stationary they will remember; doesn't mean I can hoard every piece of stationary. Digital stuff is different though - my SSD doesn't bulge just because I'm putting more files holding snippets of life on it.
  - al_borland 1y ago
    My dad has kept a lot of stuff. If he kept what I mentioned, I don’t know. But I do hope he goes through his stuff and pairs down before he passes, and if he does, I’m glad he asked. But you’re right, they the kids need to be grown before that question becomes valuable. I’ve known several people who had to go through their parent’s entire lifetime of accumulated stuff and it was quite the job. Dumpsters were rented. It was a big burden to leave the kids. Digital stuff will also be a lot to go through. My dad has hundreds of thousands of photos, backed up in triplicate. I was helping him clean the basement once and found 5 1/4 inch floppy disks labeled “backup” from the 80s. He’s kept all digital files. Many of them are locked into various proprietary apps as well. So I’ll likely need to spend months going through it all, while everything is still working, to see what is worth saving, and migrating it into a format I can manage. It will be a massive project, on top of the physical stuff. I’m hoping I can talk the rest of the family into an estate sale for the physical stuff, but the digital stuff is arguably the bigger job, with no way to outsource it. There is also the question of corruption, or simply being able to read older files. I grabbed some documents I had saved on his computer back in high school about 15 years later. I had saved them as rtf files at the time so they would be more portable. I tried off and on for a week or two to read them in more modern times and it was a no-go. I could get sections, but not the whole thing. I don’t know if the rtf standard changed or the files were simply corrupt, but they were basically trash. I’m sure I’ll run into a lot of that as well.
astura 1y ago
OMG, this is so dumb, your children don't want your hoard; at least admit your hoarding for yourself, not them.
- noisy_boy 1y ago
  Speak for yourself and stop projecting your opinions on others. You don't speak for me or my children.
- achierius 1y ago
  I want my parent's hoard :) Does that make me a... vicarious hoarder? What point are you trying to make? If you keep knick-knacks for the sake of others, you're a hoarder and should admit it's actually just for yourself -- if you enjoy someone else's knick-knacks which they saved for you, you're also a hoarder?
- account42 1y ago
  You don't know what your children will want. Not everyone is as disinterested as you are.
sotix 1y ago
> I scan tons of stuff related to my children's school/activities etc. One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them and find some things they will call gems and lots of other junk. My sister and I have an agreement to trash my mom’s hoard of our school stuff she refuses to get rid of that we don’t want. All it does is bring us stress. If they made physical art like clay pots in a kiln, keep it for yourself if they don’t want it. If it’s something you can scan, I doubt it’s worth keeping and makes it much harder to find signal in the noise when too much is scanned.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  When my mother passed and we had to clean out my parent's house, she had boxes of the same kinds of things. Old report cards, drawings and school work from 40+ years ago. It was nice to see that she cared to save it but it was of no interest beyond that. And it was pretty clear that she herself never looked at it, as the boxes were packed away in closets and obviously hadn't been touched since they were put there. Stuff causes stress. It's really true. Even if it's mostly out of the way, every time you see it it will cause some stress about whether it should be moved, reorganized, saved, or thrown away. The house I grew up in was always cluttered and I'm bad about it myself. Every once in a while I will order a roll-off dumpster to the house and get rid of things that have accumulated over the past 10 years or so. It's a relief but then it starts over again. If there's one habit I wish I had it would be to regularly and ruthlessly get rid of stuff that I don't use anymore.
  - ikr678 1y ago
    I'm no contact with the parent that has my childhood home. As a result of this I've become very unsentimental, after a few painful years of trying to retrieve the few items I cared about, only for that parent to realise they had value to me and use them for leverage. I have given up on stuff in general. I am not exactly a minimalist, but I freely give away and loan things to people who might get more value put of them, it's enabled me to move across the country multiple times for good opportunities at very little notice.

manmal 1y ago

You are perfectly describing the issue when sorting out a hoarder‘s stuff. There‘s no way of knowing what‘s precious and what not for most of the things. There might be some obvious things (wooden furniture / ISO documents that are still relevant), but the rest goes in the trash usually. > One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them My mother used to say the same thing. But I‘m not looking at that old stuff, ever. Maybe your kids will. It’s your decision whether it’s worse to be false negative or false positive here. If the stuff is not taking up too much space, it’s probably a good idea to keep it. Hoarding is something else though.

noisy_boy 1y ago
I'll take my chances on the off chance that my child will see their primary 2 report card scan after many years and say "oh my god I can't believe it..."
- sanswork 1y ago
  My mom kept everything like that. The structured stuff like baby books and photo albums with labels and stories are great. The boxes of report cards from when I was 7 were a momentary amusement before they were recycled. The school work and random other things were just annoying to have to sort through.
  - noisy_boy 1y ago
    I would have been stoked to see the evidence of her sentimentality if that was my mother (my dad kept my stuff and I liked that very much). I guess we are all different people will different emotional reactions. Also I know nothing about you or your life so maybe your reaction is totally warranted.
    - astura 1y ago
      Of course you would have been m stoked, hoarders enjoy hoards. It's a tautology. What you fail to understand is the vast majority of people are not hoarders and don't enjoy hoards.
      - kaashif 1y ago
        I would enjoy a digital hoard of stuff like that, but not a physical hoard. I have since digitized all of the stuff my parents hoarded and got rid of a lot of the physical items. It doesn't really cost me anything on an ongoing basis to have this huge digital dump of files sitting around. It was a one time effort to scan everything. If my parents had done that and just left a huge archive of digital files, that would be fine. If people feel neutrally about digital hoards, that makes sense.
      - noisy_boy 1y ago
        It is amazing how things can be interpreted that differently. How heartless you have to be to not even spare a kind thought about the moments she lovingly put away the things for her loved child. If the person is a hoarder, they will do that for each and everything, not just for things that remind one of the memories of the loved ones. Just wow.
      - achierius 1y ago
        What you fail to understand is that the vast majority of non-hoarders are still happy to get those "brief moments" of joy, memory, nostalgia -- connections to the past that could otherwise be totally gone. The cost is so low, the benefits -- perhaps not life-changing, but of a particular and hard-to-replicate quality that I think makes them worth it nevertheless.
- latexr 1y ago
  If it were me, I would indeed think “oh my god I can't believe it”, followed immediately by “why did my parents save this worthless junk? I have no interest in this. How much more garbage is in here? I’m definitely not going to look through it all to find two important things buried in hundreds of trivialities. And now I have to go through the trouble of throwing it away myself. I’d rather be doing anything else”. Maybe your kids will enjoy it, though. But that feeling is far from universal.
  - noisy_boy 1y ago
    > If it were me, I would indeed think “oh my god I can't believe it”, followed immediately by “why did my parents save this worthless junk? I have no interest in this. How much more garbage is in here? I’m definitely not going to look through it all to find two important things buried in hundreds of trivialities. And now I have to go through the trouble of throwing it away myself. I’d rather be doing anything else”. Sure, we are all different people. I was super happy to find my childhood class photo and marksheets that my dad had saved - it just underlined what I already knew, that he cared. I shared it with my children and we bonded over the exams where I didn't fare well. > But that feeling is far from universal. I know that the level of sentimentality isn't a universal thing. I'm not going to hold them to cherishing this stuff and ask them to explain themselves if they just delete it. I just want them to have a chance at looking at small parts of their childhood. It is done without expecting gratitude or reciprocal emotions in return, which I guess, is part of being a parent.
  - account42 1y ago
    Ok, but so what? It doesn't cost much to store and isn't really that much effort to throw away later if the kid doesn't want it anymore. No reason to deny the potential to relieve some memories just because there is a chance they won't care.
Dylan16807 1y ago
It's a hundred times easier to search a digital hoard and you can fit a very big one inside a single hard drive. So the idea that most of it is worthless is far far less justification to toss the entire pile. The cost to benefit ratio is shifted by more than 1000x. And even then, while cleaning out a physical hoard you'll take time to look through things.
- manmal 1y ago
  Discarding the hoard has mainly psychological upsides in this case.
  - raindropm 1y ago
    I think hoarding is humanity's default mode of operation, and that why I see lots of comments resist not hoarding. I live and hoard long enough to know I rarely look back to stuff I've saved, things that I hope it will spark my creativity someday, never arrives (except for some really rare case, which is like 'hey, I remember this...,cool', you relish the nostalgia for a bit and then you move on eventually) I agree with you that even digital stuff took toll on your mind. I remember the sadness but then big relief when my old HDD gone, along with stuffs. The thought that I don't have to worry about it anymore is a plus in itself.

dist-epoch 1y ago

Realistically they will use an AI to find the gems.

noisy_boy 1y ago
I'll be happy if they atleast try, AI or no AI :) And if they don't, thats ok too!

michaelt 1y ago

> Who knows what are gems are what are not? In this case, the author wrote the notes. If they say it has no value, they probably know what they’re talking about.

diggan 1y ago
> In this case, the author wrote the notes. If they say it has no value, they probably know what they’re talking about. Well, yeah, if they say it has no value, then obviously it has no value to them, no one could claim otherwise. I guess the context in this thread kind of shifted to it might still be valuable to someone, even if it isn't valuable to them. There been a lot of cases in history where very smart people judged their own journals to not be very valuable (to them) so they think nothing of it, then 100 years later someone discovers the journal together with a ton of valuable (to the world) nuggets in it.
account42 1y ago
Will their future self agree with that assessment though?

al_borland 1y ago

You can ask your kids what those gems are. My dad ask me this a few months ago. I brought up some knick knacks he had in his office when I was growing up. I'm not sure if he still has them or not, but if he does, if he ever goes through his hoard, he'll know to send those my way instead of getting rid of them.

noisy_boy 1y ago
> You can ask your kids what those gems are. My dad ask me this a few months ago. I brought up some knick knacks he had in his office when I was growing up. I'm not sure if he still has them or not, but if he does, if he ever goes through his hoard, he'll know to send those my way instead of getting rid of them. He can't give them to you if he threw it away. Also, he can ask that question to you because your choices and preferences are, to a large extent, set. The same stuff, that my child would throw away without hesitation few years ago, is now "precious memories" and not to be disturbed. The emotional value of things doesn't follow much logic and has massive volatility until adulthood. I mean I totally understand that me keeping bunch of stuff isn't a guarantee that they will find what they value at that point of time. Maybe the lego-shaped eraser would be the most interesting piece of stationary they will remember; doesn't mean I can hoard every piece of stationary. Digital stuff is different though - my SSD doesn't bulge just because I'm putting more files holding snippets of life on it.
- al_borland 1y ago
  My dad has kept a lot of stuff. If he kept what I mentioned, I don’t know. But I do hope he goes through his stuff and pairs down before he passes, and if he does, I’m glad he asked. But you’re right, they the kids need to be grown before that question becomes valuable. I’ve known several people who had to go through their parent’s entire lifetime of accumulated stuff and it was quite the job. Dumpsters were rented. It was a big burden to leave the kids. Digital stuff will also be a lot to go through. My dad has hundreds of thousands of photos, backed up in triplicate. I was helping him clean the basement once and found 5 1/4 inch floppy disks labeled “backup” from the 80s. He’s kept all digital files. Many of them are locked into various proprietary apps as well. So I’ll likely need to spend months going through it all, while everything is still working, to see what is worth saving, and migrating it into a format I can manage. It will be a massive project, on top of the physical stuff. I’m hoping I can talk the rest of the family into an estate sale for the physical stuff, but the digital stuff is arguably the bigger job, with no way to outsource it. There is also the question of corruption, or simply being able to read older files. I grabbed some documents I had saved on his computer back in high school about 15 years later. I had saved them as rtf files at the time so they would be more portable. I tried off and on for a week or two to read them in more modern times and it was a no-go. I could get sections, but not the whole thing. I don’t know if the rtf standard changed or the files were simply corrupt, but they were basically trash. I’m sure I’ll run into a lot of that as well.

astura 1y ago

OMG, this is so dumb, your children don't want your hoard; at least admit your hoarding for yourself, not them.

noisy_boy 1y ago
Speak for yourself and stop projecting your opinions on others. You don't speak for me or my children.
achierius 1y ago
I want my parent's hoard :) Does that make me a... vicarious hoarder? What point are you trying to make? If you keep knick-knacks for the sake of others, you're a hoarder and should admit it's actually just for yourself -- if you enjoy someone else's knick-knacks which they saved for you, you're also a hoarder?
account42 1y ago
You don't know what your children will want. Not everyone is as disinterested as you are.

sotix 1y ago

> I scan tons of stuff related to my children's school/activities etc. One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them and find some things they will call gems and lots of other junk. My sister and I have an agreement to trash my mom’s hoard of our school stuff she refuses to get rid of that we don’t want. All it does is bring us stress. If they made physical art like clay pots in a kiln, keep it for yourself if they don’t want it. If it’s something you can scan, I doubt it’s worth keeping and makes it much harder to find signal in the noise when too much is scanned.

SoftTalker 1y ago
When my mother passed and we had to clean out my parent's house, she had boxes of the same kinds of things. Old report cards, drawings and school work from 40+ years ago. It was nice to see that she cared to save it but it was of no interest beyond that. And it was pretty clear that she herself never looked at it, as the boxes were packed away in closets and obviously hadn't been touched since they were put there. Stuff causes stress. It's really true. Even if it's mostly out of the way, every time you see it it will cause some stress about whether it should be moved, reorganized, saved, or thrown away. The house I grew up in was always cluttered and I'm bad about it myself. Every once in a while I will order a roll-off dumpster to the house and get rid of things that have accumulated over the past 10 years or so. It's a relief but then it starts over again. If there's one habit I wish I had it would be to regularly and ruthlessly get rid of stuff that I don't use anymore.
- ikr678 1y ago
  I'm no contact with the parent that has my childhood home. As a result of this I've become very unsentimental, after a few painful years of trying to retrieve the few items I cared about, only for that parent to realise they had value to me and use them for leverage. I have given up on stuff in general. I am not exactly a minimalist, but I freely give away and loan things to people who might get more value put of them, it's enabled me to move across the country multiple times for good opportunities at very little notice.