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I lost all my stuff I'd left in a US basement when I couldn't come back and my visa expired. The biggest loss were my college notebooks. It feels like I've lost part of my brain

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If it makes you feel any better. I kept that junk too for years (25+) after graduating (3 moves). They sat in a box doing nothing but taking up space in my home. On my last move I took what textbooks I could to the library (they did not want it, they already have 8 copies of that sort of thing). My notebooks I would open each one up and realize I had 0 idea what my notes meant. Like no clue. I could see oh this is a calculus class, but what the notes meant out of context of the class and where in the book it referred to? Nothing. I tossed them. I had forgotten they even existed until I opened the box up and sighed in a sarcastic way 'oh good more books that I never use'. The only ones I kept was some ideas I had for programs that were well fleshed out and documented nicely. Plus some nice books on algorithms and graphics. But most of that you can get on the net. Even now 25 years later? That is pretty much out of context of what I was thinking then. I would probably start completely over, notes and all.

I purged about half of my stuff a few years ago. I still have a huge pile of junk. On my next move more of it is 'going away'. It is in the way and takes up space.

It does make me feel better :-) My mind works in a way that when I see my hand-writing and specific note-taking style, ideas come back quickly. I'm the kind of person that uses 4 different colors to take notes and has special signs that only I understand everywhere (for example, I have a sign that means "continues in next second page") I also have terrible memory, so I instinctively take notes for almost everything. And I periodically review them. I do 1 week reviews, 1 month reviews, 1 year reviews, etc. All my notebooks are nicely stacked. I guess I kind of live in my notes

But you're probably right

I have almost all my college notebooks in the book shelf to my left. I don't think I've opened them once since graduating.

Fairly typically for an ex-academic, I had accumulated a lot of books over the years, and I moved a lot. After one international move I realized that my books cost more than $5k to move, including boxes that hadn't been opened since the previous move.

A cull happened before the next one, and pretty much every one since.

What is more funny for me is my parents. When I first moved out they 'helped me out'. Sure some of it I still use to this day. But a good portion of it was them getting rid of their stuff.

Another lesson I learned was not to be too quick to take other peoples left overs. I was really bad with computers for a bit on that one. A few trips to a local computer recycler later and that issue was cleared up. That is not even moving international that is this junk is in the way of things I do use. What was a little sad was one large stack of game magazines (2 decades worth). Like 2-3 weeks after I dumpstered the things someone on a forum was asking if anyone had them! doh! I am right now looking at a dumb period where I was buying lots of lego. What am I going to do with that? I have culled the 'easy' stuff. Now it is the 'what am I going to do with that' sort of items... When the reality is I do not really want to spend any more time at all on them. So that junk sits in boxes...

I threw away all of my college notebooks as soon as I graduated. But I can definitely understand some of your feelings here, too. I dutifully held onto them for four years, thinking there may be a time when I’d want to look back on them. At the end though, realizing I’d never looked back on them once, I just threw them away.

I’m sorry you never got to make that choice either way though. I can’t imagine how hard that is.

Thank you, I know this is a first world problem but I do get emotional about this. Especially every time I have to read something scientific and I realize I can't understand it without my notes/cheat sheets/calculator programs

I literally JUST donated the last of the textbooks I was keeping around. I looked up the prices on Amazon and some of these textbooks are still worth a lot of money (or at least offered for sale for a lot of money). This means I can document value for a nice tax break. One of the textbooks was listed for hundreds of dollars.

I kept a couple of the more interesting ones but overall I think I came out ahead with clearing out some dead weight and getting some value.

Donating an item is essentially a net of whatever the value of the item x your marginal tax rate. Definitely worth it over the hassle of selling it yourself, AND puts it into the hands of someone who needs it more.

Couldn't you ask someone to mail it to you?

At that time, I became homeless and had to get a job asap in a country where I had few ties. I did manage to transfer ownership of my US car to a friend. I felt more uncomfortable about my car sitting somewhere (which could result in legal problems) than my stuff getting lost, so that took priority. After a few years, I also exchanged my BS credits for an associate's degree. But my notebooks are forever gone

Scan everything asap

The problem with scanning is that many of us have a lot of paper most of which we will never look at again. It's probably different today when a lot of things are "born" digital. But for me to scan all the paper I have that I might want to glance at someday would be an enormous undertaking--yes, including school notebooks. In practice, you have to be very selective about what you scan.

On the plus side every A4 page is 2.5g you don't have to move/store. Does help if you have a double sided sheet feeding scanner

If the paper is all individual uniform sheets in good shape and you have access to a commercial feeding scanner, it's a lot easier. In my experience though, scanning old piles of paper is rarely like that.

I did. I never open the files again.

But at least you can throw the paper in the recycling now, instead of never looking at the paper again.

Then OCR it all and it'll appear in your local search results

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