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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> 5 places she kept her stuff

Storage unit rental, now that's a means of preying on people who can't let go and/or move often.

(It strikes me that there might be startup value in "home inventory management", although it would have to be made as frictionless as possible - wave a camera round your kitchen, inside all the cupboards, get a list of everything you own. Snoop your Amazon webpages so it can remind you not to buy things you already have.)

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You say preying, but I'm glad I was able to rent out space to store some things when I moved cities and told myself I'd move back. Turns out I didn't move back, and only went back to pick up a few things and give away the rest. I doubt I would have been able to detach from those things if I took them with me.

Were the rental costs a waste? I suppose I would have saved a few hundred dollars if I could have just gotten rid of the stuff earlier, but it would have felt like a personal loss instead of a natural detachment.

Loss aversion is actually significantly powerful and difficult to overcome, but think about why, it's only very recently that humanity can easily procure anything it needs for survival with relative ease in most countries. While getting something new is exciting losing something is far harder when you never know when/if your going to be able to gain it again. It's helped humans survive throughout our history, so I wouldn't be hard on yourself that it wasn't easy to detach, you were just practicing a survival skill.

Fortunately(?) I have a fair bit of storage space at home. It's definitely a battle to pull out and get rid of stuff in storage after I haven't looked or used it for a few years. It's really tempting to throw things in storage rather than make the decision to get rid of them--especially when there's some effort associated with disposing of an item.

Sortly[0] might do what you're suggesting though not as simply as you described.

[0] sortly.com

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