The great junk transfer is coming
theglobeandmail.com
theglobeandmail.com
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?
I consider my petrol mower to be obsolete - but I can't justify replacing it with an electric/battery one when it functions fine.
https://youtu.be/3LB8wtA9LwU?t=265
He prefers 80+ year old American chisels due to quality of steal. "The older the better".
But anyway, just to confirm, I did an ebay search and top of the line Japanese chisel set is listed for $8.5k. I was thinking "highly prized" but wrote "highly priced", but I think it can stand.
They're useful for very exact/delicate work, quiet drilling, and for getting into awkward places where an electric drill doesn't fit.
The useless tools might have been a treasure trove to the right person.
I'd love to go through all those "useless" tools.
Oh no, Dad's old all-steel table saw that was designed and built to be repaired, and which has the same tolerances as a "precision tool" today, doesn't have bluetooth to pair with your iPhone? Guess you'll just have to toss it, then.
Although a riving knife — which I wish that I had known about when I was younger - shouldn’t be that hard to add.
A riving knife that doesn't go up and down with the blade is just a pain in the ass that gets removed the first time you aren't making a through cut and rarely gets reinstalled.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4CuchotcM_4 If you've never seen the inside of a Unisaw, there's a lot of parts in that video that weren't there when the saw left the Delta factory. Even if you mass-produced a kit, it would require reworking some of the original parts, possibly at machinist level tolerances.
I've inherited my share of obsolete tools, including but certainly not limited to the above examples.
On the other side, as long as it's something brand-name like Bosch, these things are built to last - and there are still shops around selling new battery packs for them (or you can replace the cells yourself - no fancy BMS required like with modern lithium batteries and no risk of things exploding or going up in blazes if you mess something up!). I'm still using power tools from my grandfather, meanwhile a friend recently complained to me that one of his "new" drills broke less than two weeks in his house renovation.
The thing is, what you can buy in construction stores these days is optimized to last for the two years warranty period aka six or seven times of being used. Keep that "old" stuff, it will likely outlast you. And if you go and buy lithium-based tools, please buy brand name (=Makita) and don't buy knock-off batteries. These are fire hazards.
ETA: The worst thing you can do with NiCd packs is using them while they are nearly empty or squeezing out that last bit of power. That will drive one of the cells into reverse charge and by then it's effectively forever toast [1].
[1] https://www.icmm.csic.es/jaalonso/velec/baterias/aboutn~1.ht...
This is probably better described as "not from an algorithmically generated name on Amazon", I think. Makita is great (I have their track saw, it's amazing)--but so are DeWalt, Milwaukee, Bosch, Festool, Metabo HPT (formerly Hitachi), and a bunch of others. Even the relatively "budget" flavors of those (Craftsman for DeWalt/SBD, Ridgid/AEG and Ryobi for Milwaukee/TTG) are solid tools these days; Ryobi still has its reputation from the days before they went neon green, but you'll see professionals using them these days because the battery compatibility guarantee is valuable. Even some of the more ancillary brands you'll see out there, like the new cordless Skil stuff (made by Chervon, who own the EGO line of garden power tools) are quite reliable; I have DeWalt and Makita stuff in my shop, but Skil's 12V tools live in the house and are fantastic.
More important than the brand name is usually the product tier, which is related but not distinct from the brand. Most of the brands above sell cheap tools, often as part of a set, and they're value-engineered until they scream. A bottom-tier DeWalt and a bottom-tier Makita and a low/mid-tier Ryobi probably aren't that different in terms of reliability, nor would the higher tiers of the above. (With some occasional exceptions; the DeWalt oscillating tool they currently sell is the best one I've ever used from any brand, with affordances that I appreciate more. Apparently they've sold particularly good ones for a while. But a drill's a drill, mostly.)
Power tools above the basement-tier have just all gotten really good in a relatively short period of time. Lemons exist for sure (though every time I hear about somebody breaking a drill during something as relatively easy as a house renovation I find myself asking whether they'd bought the cheapest one they could, as before), but overall? We're at a point where you can even make a decent argument for a Harbor Freight blue-flavored cordless set. I wouldn't, because old habits die hard, but you could. And whatever you buy is probably lasting two decades and not costing you a whole heck of a lot.
Agreed about the batteries, though. Don't buy cheap batteries.
I'm also still not totally sold on cordless tools. I've found corded tools generally much easier to repair. Extension cords are cheaper than batteries, and for my typical applications they're essentially interchangable.
There are few tools I wouldn't rather have cordless, though. Corded drills don't step to an impact driver for screw-driving (the only corded drill I have is a low-speed drill/mixer). Cords on an angle grinder or a jigsaw or the like get in the way more than they help. About the only corded hand tools I have are routers, and I wish my track saw was corded mostly so as to be able to pair the dust extractor with it (but I use the track saw outside a lot too, so it's a wash). All the corded tools in my shop have been retrofitted with either a Festool pigtail or a NEMA L5 locking connector to not have to deal with cords on the tool, and that helps, but it's still not great.
I like the connection to previous generations, and remembering these people by using 'obsolete' tools passed down to me.
Whitworth wrenches, sockets, taps, and dies. My dad had a British motorcycle shop around 1980 and I'm pretty sure there is still some of this in his tool boxes in the garage.
Homemade jigs whose purpose you can't even figure out.
I think the dominant category would just be extra or broken or cheap tools that aren't worth hanging on to. For some reason I have like four stubby Phillips #1 screwdrivers. Cheap hatchets with broken handles. Mushroomed lead mallets. A whole drawer of dull drill bits.
Those are one reason I've never yet had a British or German car, though I do have one with a British-derived engine and a German fuel injection system. (I'll have to remember to pass on all the custom tools when I get rid of the car. The chances are slim to none that I'll ever own another one.)
Every once in a while you spot a good one before someone else does (pincers, a good vintage cast-iron hacksaw frame for €5, a pristine sheet metal clamp for €1), but most of it is crap.
Which does make me wonder where all the good tools go.
Now I'm imagining tool companies sending people around to garage sales and estate sales to buy up good used tools to landfill them so that they can sell not so good new tools.
They also work in tighter spots than an electric drill. There's usually less bulk off the axis in at least one direction, generally opposite the crank. If you're in a corner, you're usually boned though.
The drills that are guaranteed to be trash in 20 years are the battery ones. I have a set and love them for when I need to drill more than a couple holes, but I have no illusions that I'll be passing them down to anybody because the batteries will be unavailable.
Found one of these cleaning an old science lab, was very confused by what it was initially.
Wonder what tools will look like in 1k years…
Lots of people never do it once in their whole life. There's a world of optimization levels between "randomly doing things" and "min-maxing life". There's a huge-ass chunk of people who never leave the 0-optimization level of randomly doing things.
When you fill your house with it, to the point where you're a hoarder and can't see your floors and walls, that's a health hazard that attracts dirt, rot, and pests.
My father hoarded all manner of stuff in the garage. It took me days of work to clear it out. And yet I basically understood why each thing was saved.
That chunk of metal was used to repair the car when the front quarter panel rusted from salt. That brass got brazed onto that fixture. Those were the washers for the kitchen sinks. That leather chunk repaired his briefcase. That stuff was used to fence in the garden. That stuff was used to stake the tomato plants. He held onto furniture from my room until I was out of grad school and needed it. etc.
We flat out didn't have the money when I was growing up to just buy stuff from a big box store (and they didn't really exist yet). If we didn't have the material, it didn't get fixed.
A lot of children didn't grow up like this. None of the younger generation in my family want any of the furniture. They have the disposable cash from their parents that they can buy something "new". I would have killed at their age for the stuff I now throw out. C'est la vie.
In the last few years of her life, she became very concerned with the work her children and grandchildren would have to undertake to clean out her house. She went through and added a note on a sticker on the backs of things for who she though should get them.
But in the end it was easy. My grandmother created an order of magnitude more grief for herself worrying about cleaning up after her than actually existed. And I wish that she hadn't had that burden on her.
Most of her children and grandchildren didn't have any sentimental connection to all of the things, and those of us that did went through and grabbed what we wanted. Once that was done, we called Goodwill and they came and cleaned out the rest.
Of course 80% of it is junk, but 80% of everything I save is junk too, so I can hardly blame them for it.
My dad recently threw out a lot of his old school stuff that we’d gone through and looked at a few times during various instances of cleanup over the course of my life, and I think I was more sad than him.
I imagine he has all that stuff somewhere inside his head still, but to me the only tangible remains of the time when my dad was a boy/young adult have disappeared.
My parents, when they were young and carefree and enjoying life, used to make mix tapes. Loads of them. There was something almost magical about being able to listen to them in my old car, and experience a little window into what they used to listen to etc.
Sadly my car went to the great scrapyard in the sky and now I hold onto a plethora of cassette tapes I'm unsure I'll ever listen to. Silly really.
My folks have a rack of VHS cassettes of their performances in plays, which they ripped to DVD at some point. I haven't started watching them but I'm lucky to have them.
The top-level article is unbelievably crass.
I have had to deal with this. Sorting through an entire lifetime's worth of knick-knacks, papers, Christmas cards, plaques commemorating achievements and milestones that probably wouldn't even make sense to a twenty-year-old, all of it.
Sure, it was hard. It takes time.
But so did changing my diapers. And dealing with infant-me crying through the night. And watching toddler-me be picky and waste food, which is a big deal when you get most of your groceries from a charity. All the scrounging and saving for Christmas presents, all the hours spent answering every question that I had as a boy, all the trips together to play in the snow during the winter...
Those things took time, too.
That sounds like a square deal to me.
What's unbelievably crass is the idea that children are obliged to respect and sift through gigantic heaps of stuff just because their parents had some emotional connection to some small parts of it - because most of it is guaranteed to be absolutely useless junk they did not actually value but merely couldn't bring themselves to throw away because of hoarding instincts.
The idea that this obligation is some kind of way to repay for what the parents did for the children is completely absurd and idiotic. It does nothing for your parents.
If you want to repay them, spend time with them. Do something for them which they actually experience.
When your parents are dead, sorting through their stuff out of a sense of obligation is basically self-castigating for your failure to do the above. Sure, if you enjoy it, if it helps you deal with the loss, do it. But not because you feel you have to.
Thank you for saying this. I can't believe the points people are making here. Your parents are already dead at this point. Of course it does nothing for them. Taking care of them while they're still alive does something for them, but once they're dead nothing can ever affect them again.
I think it's written as an ad for junk removal services. The goal is for the reader to see the task as an overwhelming burden to be outsourced.
When she died she left one small box and $90k. We did not have to do a thing.
Tell your aunt you need some wires from that old Pentium computer she has, and take it to be recycled.
“Drop in” at your friends on the way to the dump with half a trailer full of rubbish, and ask if they want to fill up the other half for free.
When there is a book market on, visit your friends and take away their old books to go to the market. Boxes of books they don’t really want but which are too “valuable” to throw out.
Tell your friends you are doing a metal recycling run, and does anyone have any old metal that they want gone?
One friend I took 3 or 4 trailer loads of stuff away, mess which was really depressing them, and it has really cheered them up over the long term.
A light dose of psychedelics does wonders for me in this regard. I’ll suddenly look at my place and see as if for the first time that thing that’s been laying around for weeks. “Oh, I put it there because I was anxious for this and that. Of course that’s not its place. Let’s move it where it belongs.” I love my mostly empty house, there’s so much space to move around and breathe.
One friend showed me a bag with a heap of kiwi fruit fluff they had collected a decade ago. Nothing to see here.
One friend had too many tables, so I thought it might help them to grok the absurdity of that if I gave them a bunch more tables (tables which someone else was discarding): that didn’t work because they now have tables stacked up on one another. Nice enough tables, but I feel bad. Also it is very likely I will help them move . . .
I am semi-retired, but I still need to take care I am not wasting my time.
The free trailer load to the dump is fun mental jujutsu because dumping stuff isn’t cheap: someone who just can’t pass up a bargain trying to choose stuff to throw out for free! Needs a believable reason why it is “free” e.g. neighbour already paid me, or work is paying for it.
I haven’t done the book one exactly, but I have done similar.
Have you already refurbished a couple tables just for fun? It might make sense to flip some furniture as a hobby.
If you haven't, this is a recipe for being that guy with too many tables, whose friends drive by with a half-filled trailer and ask, politely, if maybe they want to throw something away today.
Counted 10 chairs in one room - they are couple of 70 year olds that never have guests.
7 mops in bathroom. About 20 huge bowls in one of kitchen drawers.
I'm just trying to offload the excess to some storage to make their (and mine) lives easier, but oh boy.
Or at least keep it in a steady state past some point. I've been in my current house for 25 years and I find that I need to allocate time now and then to go through and clean out some clothes, books, electronics, etc. Especially with a fair bit of storage space it can be tempting to just toss something in the attic because it's easier than getting of it--especially for bulkier items.
You can clean up, move stuff around, throw things out, get them a better vacuum, set up wifi, get them better lighting, decorate stuff, or whatever you're good at.
It's the same psychological mechanism at play when you can quickly give good advice and plan in other peoples lives but it's harder applying in your own.
I recommend trying to "optimize" your friends or parents homes if they are down / getting old - for me it's about getting rid of or organising their stuff stuff, making it easy to clean, set up good lighting etc. Always respect peoples history and stuff and history of course.
It was an awesome way to build good-will, since the price difference between a 10 and 30 cu.yd dumpster was ~10%. Obviously most of the cost is in the truck roll.
We also did the opposite once: we were demolishing a small vacation home, so we told some of the locals to pick through and take what they wanted. It was funny seeing our kitchen.. but in a different house.
It helps them declutter and lets me make sure they don't throw any of it away. I can always dispose of it later if I decide it's not useful.
I bet they though the same.
My mom passed away unexpectedly and in her sleep last year. She had been depressed for half a year prior because she had lost her spouse to cancer. She had not yet gone through their items.
So between the household results of half a year of depression and two lifetimes worth of stuff it was so overwhelming that I only believed we could get through it all because there was no other outcome to believe was possible. My aunt has experience with this and she flew home to help. It took us about a month.
And now I have half a basement room, not even 5% of the things they’d had, waiting to be packed up and shipped to me. It was all stuff that at the time I could not imagine getting rid of.
Now, I know that I will have a ton of re-sorting ahead of me because after a year has passed I doubt I’ll want to keep all of that stuff.
It’s so easy to project meaning onto items.
I mostly just end up throwing them away a few at a time.
>Listing and selling on eBay
Yeah, unless something is a big ticket item, eBay isn't worth the effort. You used to be able to outsource it to someone for a cut but nothing like that seems to exist any longer.
[1] https://londonist.com/london/books-and-poetry/bookswap_eastc...
Still, my household(multigenerational) has too many books, and this is mostly an artifact of a childhood that gave me plenty to read. We even still have the incomplete Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia picked up from when the school library dumped them.
It'll be the "great book downsizing", for us. Someday. Occasionally I look into scanning the ones I have sentimental value towards, and there are services to do so...but really, that would just displace the problem into "digital junk hoarding". It's hard to let go of things, especially in the gradual way that fits with our waste stream system.
The best tactic I've had to deal with it is to first make an explicit division of space (no piles allowed, at least have a tray or tie the bundle) and then use the divisions to create a ranking mechanism. You don't have to let go of things immediately, but whenever you have a day where you value space over stuff, the low rank stuff can be taken out with minimal ceremony: "thank you very much".
https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/techno-clutter-farnell...
A more funny story:
Back in school, when we were about 17 years old, another kid told me that his Great Uncle had died, and caused him much stress. He'd never met this distant relative, so I enquired, why was he worried? Great Uncle Ben-Ali had named my school-friend, who he'd heard about only through a grandparent but "taken a shine to", as the sole heir and benefactor of his estate - 5 acres of harsh scrub land about 200 miles into the mountains of Morocco containing a shack and two donkeys. He'd received a letter, which was very specific that he was now responsible for the welfare of the donkeys.
Today, this would probably be the start of a great scam, but this was in the 1980s before people "had internet". Many people would have just ignored the whole situation, but my friend, true to his conscience, enlisted Arabic translators and sent letters back and forth to North Morocco for months. Eventually the fate of the donkeys was secured. It was agreed that Ben-Ali's neighbour, whose land they had already wandered on to, would have the donkeys, and the shack would go back to the village/local-government.
The only part I have issue with is when the teacher says “we fix things by "switching them off and on again"” as if that’s a bad thing. I see and agree with your actual point, but a power cycle is generally step one for almost all debugging.
TBH, as an electronics engineer and computer scientist it's the first thing I do too :) I think my point in that article was that we shouldn't teach that it's the _only_ recourse, and after if it still doesn't work then just replace it.
It's still one step better than the wisdom of my Grandmother's generation:
"If it doesn't work bang it once on the top. If it still doesn't work bang it hard on the side twice. If it still doesn't work, call a man."
(The Apple III was a beneficiary https://www.techjunkie.com/apple-iii-drop/ )
If you're not the sysadmin and the debugging relates to a production server, stop power cycling it and causing it to fsck on the way up while I'm trying to actually fix it tho lmao. Bonus points: you're frying all the information I need to actually see what is going wrong, now I'm digging in logs and monitoring graphs hoping to catch a clue
Definitely not something that happened repeatedly this morning, haha
Sure, you might bear it willingly out of that love, but you don't have to like a new tedious, dirty, frustrating project just because you love(d) the person who left it to you.
To take it a step further, the junk is usually a result of your loved one's insecurities and fears. It's largely a reminder of a burden you wish they hadn't even had to carry. Now that you have to carry the results of it, it makes sense just to want to be rid of it all.
Honestly the way I see it my mum knows me well enough. If I'm instructed to do anything like a tidyup it will be done quickly, efficiently, and without emotion.
Take a picture of your nostalgia items and bin them, the emotion is in the memory anyway. You'll look at it just as infrequently but at least it's only taking up bytes now.
Extract the useful-to-you stuff and get someone to cart everything else away with a "you get everything for £500 if you take it ALL away" deal.
If she doesn't want this I imagine my sister will be in charge, haha.
For me, it will only be a sad single day project as part of the grieving process. Hundreds of hours is just a totally different story.
My partner has inherited a big project and collection that meant everything to their Dad. He would always say, I want this taken on etc. But when push comes to shove, the prospect/reality of inheriting someone else's hobby/business, which requires years and years of work with no return just feels more and more bizarre and absurd. But you feel indebted and horrible not carrying through with wishes.
Never mind a pile of junk. You can just inherit a big pile of problems.
I have this issue currently in my home. My wife does not want to go through anything but will not let me touch it either. "no dear my shoebox sized matchbox cars collection is not worth anything to me and I am not going to play with them lets get rid of it". I leave it be, as is, as it is at least in easy to get rid of boxes now. That was at least a step forward. My parents have filled every possible storage area in their house top to bottom with stuff. Some of it has not seen the light of day in 40 years. It is at least 'neat' but it will be an interesting challenge to pull it all out and sort it. I leave that one be as they have filled the storage areas and they have no more room to still be neat and tidy but grab more items.
I've been worrying lately about leaving too much stuff for my kids to deal with, but so far it's mostly things that they left in their rooms when they moved out. I'm trying to keep from acquiring more stuff.
Doing it while they are alive is important because you get to here to story behind it. Without that it’s just unlabeled and soon to be forgotten junk.
I'll be quite happy to spend a modicum of effort sorting through material possessions when the time comes, if it means they get to spend just one extra minute creating happiness and joy with their grandchildren.
My siblings and I have been begging and pleading with them to sort this out for the past 20 years. We have offered to help. But they haven't, as said parent is "throw themselves in front of the car if we try to leave with anything" emotionally attached to this stuff and somehow maintains an inventory of everything, including how they bought it and how it made them feel.
Now they are getting old and infirm and are barely able to afford the house that they are renting, let alone put in the effort to clean it up. My siblings and I are going to be stuck with a quagmire where they only solution is to pay a professional to come over and clean out the house, and that will not be cheap.
Our neighbour died and the kids just paid not much for house clearance, which was a side line of the funeral parlor. For them it's a gamble as to whether they will find something of worth to make it worthwhile.
I have another slowly dementing relative with mobility issues. They need space, but will not give up piles of plates, and four knive blocks that litter their precious kitchen space. They don't even cook. It's impossible, and when I dare to help, it is just met with derision and scorn.
I chucked ten back issues of phone books/directories and have never lived it down.
Importantly, if trash is a bulk operation, then the cost difference between keeping things versus throwing them out becomes more pronounced, earlier on.
I'm sure most of us have that experience of figuring out that our stuff isn't going to fit in the truck and/or car and all of a sudden things we really intended to keep become negotiable. Problem is that there are probably three other things you'd be more willing to part with, but they're already in boxes in the truck.
Having cleared out 3 parents and a grandparents house, it gives a very stark vision of the destiny of my "stuff". Simply, the bulk of it is going into a landfill.
I have no children, I don't think anyone is really going to be interested much in the pictures of my cats. Or my family. Or my parents. Or any of it.
So, long term, it's all for naught. No museum for us, no trust to maintain an estate for strangers to pay tickets and walk through to take photos for their homes.
But that doesn't mean tossing it away now. Or ever. I'd like to hope I pass surrounded by my home and memories, rather than a sterile empty box already conveniently cleaned out for whoever becomes my estate administrator (whether it's a friend, or some complete stranger).
That said, if you have a collection of anything you deem of value, and you care that it does not end up in a landfill, you'd be wise to distribute it yourself while you can. Otherwise those years of Slurpee cups, Pez dispensers, collectible cereal boxes, etc. will not be cared for properly.
I see this all the time on vintage computer forums. Someone with an estate of stuff they "think" is "worth something" and want to dispose of. Meanwhile, there's always some young Indy posting "that belongs in a museum!" and "don't sell it to those vultures on eBay, they'll just part it out!".
"Well, perhaps, but if it's not out of the house by Friday, it's going to a landfill."
When clearing out an estate house, most people don't have a lot of time to do it, much less deal with it properly. It's one thing if your loved one is nearby, but quite different if you live far away. I had to clear out my fathers house. I live on the West Coast, he lived on the East Coast. There were a lot of mementos in there, things that have been part of my entire life. I even found the TRS-80 that I cut my teeth on in high school, but boxing it up, shipping it home, just wasn't practical.
I had a service come in, we cleared it out, I took the important papers and a few nicknacks. The rest they hauled off to auction, and that was that. I was done in 2 days and on a plane home. Just a stark reality.
So, anyway, keep your stuff. Enjoy it. Get more stuff if that suits you. Clutter is its own thing, and thats different. Just know that at some point, someone is going to come along and most of those things will be meaningless to them, and they'll treat it that way.
Another example. There is a house in Pasadena, the Gamble House. Craftsman home to nth degree, very well preserved. Visitors look upon it in wonder today (I certainly did). The key point is that it's not like this was the only house done like this. Several houses were done, by "important figures" in the field: architects, artisans, etc.
But, in the end, those houses were sold to...people who wanted a house. A roof, kitchen, bed and bathrooms. They weren't looking for a museum, or an art piece. Many of those houses were torn down, remodeled, etc. "OH NO!" some may exclaim, but, that's just the truth of it. Like movie makers crashing classic cars, people view things differently.
It's just a house, they're just cars.
They're getting on, and are looking at selling a treasured holiday property in a warm country - I originally thought it was due to not feeling able, or wanting to, visit - but it's because when they die they're worried about me and my brothers having to sort out marketing it and paying the inheritance tax.
I pointed out that's not a burden, it'll be fine, we're all adults and can sort things like that out - only sell if it they want to spend the money on visiting other places, or doing other things, not because they worry about being a burden after they're gone.
Lots of people downsize before retiring because they don't want to be encumbered by a bunch of junk. It's a lot of work to live in a house surrounded by stuff. It's work to maintain the stuff, it makes it harder to clean, you have to have a larger living space to house it, etc. All of these things are harder on the elderly once they can't move around or do physical work as easily anymore.
It's also not just parents to children. Parents don't typically pass away at once. Often enough it's one spouse leaving a pile of their things for their partner to live with. That can be a weighty reminder of grief and once they pass getting rid of any of their things can be too emotionally heavy to cope with.
People forget that they kept this "junk" for a reason. When you tell them to get rid of it or call it junk, you are insulting them, not their possession. It doesn't matter that you think their reason is silly. They would think a lot of your stuff is silly too. It is so sad that we've lost (almost ?) all ability for empathy. We have become so selfish and it is sad.
Like the folks in the article, most of what my relatives considered valuable wasn't, by and large, I only kept little worthless trinkets. Like folks in the article, some of my cousins got weird and fought over the stuff, but for me, it's just stuff, and I've got too much of that already.
Yeah, sure, it’s a gift I can give. But also, it took valuable time away from other care I could have given, not to mention the time it took away from my own family and work.
Overall, it’s a consumption problem that everyone should address routinely. We as a society would benefit from editing our own lives from time to time, and make this burden less for all parties involved.
This is on point. Its hard to feel empathy over your age especially when you are young. By young i mean under 40's or even 50's.
This is contextual per family; but absolutely not. There are parents who make it known to their children that they were never wanted so when a child goes no-contact, the onus of cleaning up after them post mortem can be handled by someone else.
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-Swe...
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.
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.
Apologies to any sensitive readers from Finland.
In my case, no sauna and previous owners redid the garage into hall/utility (laundry) room/big bathroom and a small unheated workshop. Guess where the clutter lives, heh. :/
I guess I'm a sensitive Finn :)
A bunch of American garages are the same way. There are lots of 2 car garages in suburbs that only have enough empty space for 1 car, if any at all. I suspect that this may be more of a widespread phenomenon than I had realized.
Growing up, I'd hear of all of these big tech companies that got started in some guy's parent's garage. I considered my parent's 1 car garage: mom complained when she couldn't put the car in it, and the rest was filled with tools and the lawnmower. No way a company other than a car shop could get started there.
“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.
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.
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.
My mother is a little bit better, but she definitely saves more stuff than necessary. Not to quite the scale of her mother, but it seems like a learned behavior.
Did it take you 2 years because you thought some of it would be actually valuable?
Seems like a weekend job with a couple of buddies and a pack of beer. Buddies are also great for this, because they don't have any emotional attachment to the junk.
It's easy to say "toss it all out in a weekend" when it's not your family's stuff.. hence your point about getting friends to help. :-) But sometimes efficiency and speed isn't the point.
My SO is going through something similar and it's a very emotional and meticulous process, where you don't want to miss out on a chance to learn about your family's history as you sort through it all, particularly if you don't have much family left.
I have the same hoarding mentality, despite being extremely wealthy by my parents standards.
My mum still keeps everything she gets her hands on, part of the reason is because reacquiring once discarded may not be possible. So better to be safe.
While you get pretty good at using things to fix other things, these days everything seems to be single-use molded plastic with clips; once broken it often has no chance of being fixed. :\
My mother grew up fairly wealthy in a socialist economy, with a level of comfort and stability that doesn't match much of what we consider the experience of poverty. But material consumer goods were more difficult to come by and replace than in the 1980s US context that she later immigrated to. that mismatch has been apparent in a hundred conversations where she's unable to answer "why do you need to keep this" but also unable to discard the item.
His garage when he died was packed to the gills with ... stuff. Mostly tools (he was a mechanic) and things he dabbled with, but almost none of it quality in any sense. Enough to where he built a little outbuilding/shed and kept shit there too.
I'm not to outbuilding level, but I have the same tendencies, and I'm very well off by most standards. I'm working on it, and now that I've gone through my father's death and had to deal with that, am focusing on not having my son have to do it.
When we had to clear out the apartment of MiL, she had a sizable collection of books, and a bunch of clothes and shoes that had only been worn once. We tried the library and a few different charity shops, but for most things they said no. The books went in the trash and the clothes went in a clothing recycling bin - which I guess means they also ended up in the trash.
I wonder how it will end up, let the people pick interesting stuff and then leave some value there and have someone buy it in bulk or get all of it and save the cost to recycling and processing it.
After the sale a large dumpster is parked out front and the volunteers fill it with things that didn't sell, to be sent off for disposal (recycling, I think.)
The physical book market is shrinking and a significant portion of new readers likely use ebooks/audiobooks instead so there's just far less demand for physical books.
I think it's going to be very hard to even give books away in the coming decades, I can see the vast majority going to recycling.
My local library will take books for their annual fundraising sale. But I suspect most end up recycled or tossed even so.
Book charities won't send to jails, only to prisons, because they say people aren't held long enough in jails, even though I know people who have been waiting 11 years for trial so far.
Somethings do get passed on.
"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."
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.
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?
You can recreate keys from images
if true then TIL!
I doubt there's any forgotten houses or cars in my family's junk collection in any case and I have no use for old bike locks and padlocks, they'd binned anyway whether I found a matching key or not
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.
If I see something useful that also reminds me of my parents or my childhood, all the better. But it has to be something that's integrated into my life, not something that I'm attaching to my life because I'm afraid to give anything up.
edit: I do have to say that there might be a subtext in the article that I agree with. The useless stuff that your kids will have to deal with after you die is probably also useless to you now, so you should deal with it now.
my parents got divorced and my mom abandoned everything and everyone
The cloud, my backups, are really my only physical "treasure".
I do not have the space to keep a lot of stuff.
On the other hand, one step removed I think it makes more sense, because you have maybe less direct contact with the person -- I've got a microscope and and oil stone from my grandfather, which have some significant sentimental value to me. These were almost certainly obsolete when I got them, more than a couple years ago (Well, the microscope at least. An oil stone will last you a while). I think I value these because he was a very precise, but also very down-to-earth guy. That's my summary, having had limited time with him. My mom would not be able to sum up his whole personality in two items, because she has a much more full view of it. But, despite knowing that this stuff holds only the slightest outline of his personality, it really does mean a lot to me.
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.
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.
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.
I sold some shares (stock)in 1993 for around $8000. I bought the best PC I could get with about $3500 (a 488DX66 with 8MB RAM...). I bought my wife a 30 year old Yamaha U3 upright piano for about $4000. (It was built the same year I was born).
We still have the U3 (I just looked and they are worth about $7K now). I think it is overdue for a tune but it still has that beautiful near Grand piano tone.
The PC and the next one and the next one I bought are all in in landfill or melted down somewhere.
At the very least they should still work as firewood.
Definitely. My parents house has a china cabinet, with china dishes no-one is allowed to use. I've never understood why, I'll ask them tonight.
But in reality, those reasons are nonsense. Relics of a past age.
Also, convincing the entire population that owning a large set of useless expensive things is essential to a successful life is a good way to sell a lot of stuff and keep your China cabinet factory in business.
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.
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.
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.
Same is true with a lot of other things, but of course this is only relevant if you're going to use them.
But they will easily last 20-30+ years with good maintenance.
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.
I tend to like doing book trades though so it pays off on my travels.
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.
However, I sold my grandfathers STHL chainsaw, and that guy still uses it.
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.
I have the impression people are selling more to "make sure it ends up with someone who can appreciate it" than to make a profit, and that's a good example to follow in other niches than vintage computers I think.
* - not appropriate archival medium, of course.
That's the thing I hate most about doing deep cleans. I end up emotionally drained from nostalgia. If someone else had thrown away all the mathoms while I was on vacation, I'd never even notice they went missing.
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.]
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) .
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.
What they do, to extract $ value, is destroy use-value. The use-value didn't interest them, but waking at 4am and driving round before anyone ELSE sees the copper and takes it, interests them mightily. Consequently, anyone who is interested in finding things, finds broken things, not useful things.
I must have given a way over 50 items through this page. It is really nice that you can see the happiness of the person who will benefit from what you don't need anymore.
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.
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.
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!"
Does it? A museum for who?
I tried to dump as much as possible so they didn't have to spend too much time on it. It took a long time.
My colleagues at work were happy to take various bits such as pandrol clips.
Gotta feel sorry for curators.
Curators wish to save things in museums and are surely the epitome of hoarders, for whom almost anything can be valuable, but however who can’t even accept extremely valuable collections because the museum is already bursting at the seams. And proper curation takes, time, effort and resources.
Imagine turning down the collection of someone and rending a hole in their heart and putting tears in their eyes: decades of a collector’s loving care for their particular interest, for a bunch of stuff the museum just can’t accept.
They'll keep you going until you get a "real" toolbox (just like he did) at which point they will be relegated to holding your assortment of flare fittings or electrical connectors or something and then 40yr later when that stuff too is in a cabinet and the boxes has sat empty for 20yr you'll give it to your neighbor who'll say "wow this thing must be well made, look how long it's lasted" when in reality it only has like 5-10yr of being used for tools on it.
Chemo stopped him from putting more work into finding people.
There are hobbyist groups for just about anything, but they can be small and hard to find. I’m twenty years, I’m sure there would be three people somewhere who would want the reMarkable I have now, but I’d have no way of reaching those people.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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...
Our supply chain is crazy complex, and things won't get better as companies shut down due to the economies.
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
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.
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.
> 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
Just the beach walk will require a whole wardrobe of suitable clothes and shoes if you want to do it year around and live in a place with seasons. The scooter doesn't work in the winter.
Renting things also requires you to have a flexible schedule and be outside of the normal work week/weekend, because on a sunday when the weather is nice, everyone wants the stand-up paddle board and all the other stuff at the same time, that's the whole point of owning stuff, that it's there for you when you want it. Renting always means you get it when (most) other people don't want it.
Some gear you absolutely cannot rent for liability reasons, like most rock climbing gear.
It also depends on how good you get. I’ve been kayaking for 25 years and whatever I can rent down the street is not likely to work for what I typically want to do.
As a kid, you outgrow things so quickly that you often pass them along before they break down, or they break faster due to, well, being a kid. It's natural that things come and go quickly. This rhythm is very different in different times of life. I'm not done pondering it yet.
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.
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.
I mean, with digital stuff all the things that may be worthwhile to pass on can be passed on easily way in advance because you don't have to get rid of anything to do so. Online accounts and such will just be forgotten excepting the ones they need to access to finish your affairs (like banking).
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is just humans being humans.
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."
You're saying it's NOT relatable that your dad died and you're sad, but it is relatable that your dad died and left behind a mess?
Someone kept something useless and valueless for decades. It clearly meant something to your recently-deceased parent, so if you just bin it without thinking then that feels like a betrayal to me. Imagine if you walked into your parents' house when they were alive and just started binning their momentos/prized-possesions/favourite cups/tools/etc right in front of their face - what would the reaction be from them?
I don't think people begrudge the time and effort so much, just that they are upset at having to make decisions on what to keep and what not to keep, especially if they are already grieving.
I've got some of this on the horizon for my in-laws. I feel like if I do the clearance and not my wife we can find a happy medium - I know the in-laws well enough and long enough to treat it with respect and deference, but I am also distanced enough to not get all tied up in sorrow about old childhood memories or whatever, and hopefully be able to move quickly(or if nothing else to genuinely clear out the trash and leave the personal stuff to the wife to look through)
I would love to be able to just get someone in to clear the house and "get on with my life", but it doesn't work like that when someone dies.
Instead of being able to just grieve I spent all weekend digging through 40 year old bank statements and other crap trying to find all the documents that we need to be able to register the death so we can actually bury him.
And no, I'm not going to just get someone in to clear the place out, because in all the crap is stuff that matters. Some of it will be paper, like his hand-draw schematics from when he worked on Concorde, some of it will be objects like his first camera, or the model of a ship he built when he was young that's in a cupboard somewhere, some will be photos. But all this stuff is buried under all the meaningless objects he filled his house with (how many torches does one man really need?).
The problem with accumulating crap is not the crap itself, it's the way it acts as a barrier to all the stuff that mattered, both to him and to us.
I had been slowling trying to sort all his stuff out before he died, and as we did so we'd uncover little mementos and memory joggers (great for a man in the early stages of dementia). Each one would spark a conversation and his eyes would light up and his voice would get all excited and I'd learn something new about my dad, some new story.
But 95% of the time was just going though tax returns from when he was 30 and insurance documents for policies that expired in the 90s, and pointless objects that were only there because my parents couldn't go into a garden center without buying some nik-nak.
So no, I'm not complaining about all the crap because I'm an asshole. I'm lamenting all the time and effort lost, that could have been better spent with my father when he was alive, and with his memory now he's dead, but which I and my siblings instead have to devote to trying to excavate what's important.
In a way it was good, we'd been planning for a long, slow decline into immobile sinility due to alzheimers and vascular dementia, but in the end he died at home in his sleep, two days after seeing all his kids. He was already getting quite distressed by his memory loss, and would have hated being dependent on carers for everything or ending up in a home.
Go see you parents everyone, you might not have as much time as you think.
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.)
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.
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.
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).
Also most people have their own life/home, often far enough from their parents place to want to relocate there.
Just another way the market perversely guides capital toward a centralized population due to the quirks of estate management.
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.
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.
Perhaps gather the common items like kitchen stuff and dump it at an op shop / charity.
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...
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.
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.
"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. "
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.
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.
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-...
I've found myself slowly letting go of material things, and with that comes a feeling of tranquility.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The amazon of used stuff.
Not to mention the recycling of things people nobody wants.
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.
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)
I almost replied this way, too, but then I remember the junk drawer I have full of DB9 serial cables, Firewire cables, PCI SCSI cards, 256MB RAM chips, 2GB spinning hard disk drives, three prong computer power cables, mice, webcams, power strips, power bricks, and a fully functional Dell OptiPlex GX620 with a screaming Pentium D 3.2GHz CPU. I keep all these things out of some insane sense that "One Day I Might Need It And Will Be Glad I Kept It."
Same reason I keep scrap wood, extra floor tiles, and 1/4 full paint cans in my shed.
Five years after some of these boxes were packed, I finally went through them. I found a few things to keep, like the thank-yous from charity events I've run, but I don't need a monitor stand for a monitor I don't have anymore or all those VGA cables.
My studio and my wood shop are pretty well-organized now. Aiming to keep them that way. The rest of the house--I dunno, I live pretty lightly outside of those two areas.
And whenever I think about throwing it out, I actually do end up using something from the pile :)
My only consolation is that it's all easy stuff to throw out for the next generation - there's no emotional stuff there.
- Only one of each type of thing - Only the highest quality/safest power bricks - And items that punched above their weight in terms of utility (like an adapter that at least one end was not obsolete)
This reduced my pile by about 75% .
I find that I subconsciously keep a map of things that I encounter on my search for other items and this is actually a burden. Just getting rid of that PCI SCSI card lets me just forget that type of thing even exists and move on with my life.
I've been doing this sort of thing since the pandemic started and I haven't once regretted it. Actually now I have more space for new junk.
This does three things:
1. Makes it easy to find the right cable or to establish definitively that I don't have one.
2. Limits the volume of cables I keep. Say some gadget comes with a micro-USB cable, but the USB box is full. I either already know that I don't need any more micro-USB cables and recycle it right away, or check the box and find another USB cable to recycle to make space. (On extremely rare occasions I decide that the box is too small and either upgrade to a bigger one or split the category up into subcategories. I haven't needed to do this for a very long time.)
3. Makes explicit the process of thinking "Do I need to keep this thing?" instead of automatically storing it away.
I use the same method for chargers, mains extension leads and adapters etc.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Articles like this do gently nudge that my personal tastes in styles aren't universal, though, and it will be worth a think at some point as to whether the stuff I'm making is future waste, too.
Obviously this is the lossy side of stamp collecting, but man, to take a haircut like that after preserving something for 20 or 30 years.
Sure there are catalogs that detail the "listed price" of a stamp, but that's the dealer price to you, not the price they'll buy it at (which is likely < 10%). Buying stamps is really easy, selling them (for their actual value) is hard. (I guess this is true for collections in general.)
Apart from the selling issue, is the searching issue. You might inherit a collection of a few thousand stamps, but it's unlikely to be sorted by value. Which means it has to be examined. By a professional. Which takes time. So there goes any value in it. Which is why a dealer will only pay pennies for a whole collection - it'll chew their time separating the wheat from the chaff.
Best thing you can get any collector to do is dispose of all the value in their collection, or clearly separate the value from the rest, before they pass.
Now me, I have books. Lots and lots of books. The kids will love inheriting those... :)
No idea if they're actually worth anything, but it gives him pleasure.
It turns out the post office, mostly doesn't actually care to count up the 1 and 2 cent stamps.
There's a group of hobbyists committing felonies out there making their own stamps and sending them out. The post office doesn't notice.
One sillier trick was, forget a stamp, it'll get returned to sender. Simply put your destination as the return and you get a free mailer.
A collector dying is often cause for a feeding frenzy that will make a hundred people happy. I know of at least two game collectors who had time to plan who threw post-mortem potlatches where the people who they enjoyed playing those games with while they were alive divided the collections between themselves. I guarantee those friends did not feel burdened. Honestly as much an opportunity for renewal as a time of loss.
No where else was there such a collection of awful italian style Tchohkes, religous paintings, horrid furniture and even his own personal police baton.
Yep, everybody wins. The person selling gets quick cash for minimal hassle, and the person buying gets extremely inexpensive treasures. Win-win
I think you've misread the article a little. It's not so much a problem in the sense that there will be an overwhelming wave of junk that piles up on street corners. The problem is that there's a generation which is about to share a collective experience, one which will enforce an already minimalist tendency. The article doesn't spend most of its time going on about waste management. It's about the physical and emotional toil associated with handling an estate. That's why it focuses on stories of individuals struggling.
As someone who lost a parent this last year (and spent three days just removing food from the house), I may be a little biased. But that was my reading.
this doesn't seem like a difficult decision.
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.