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And an altruistic gift for friends and family: take away their useless rubbish.

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.

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Yeah, we had a lot of construction debris once, and rented a 30 cubic-yard dumpster (one of the big ones). After we tossed what we had, we told the neighbors to bring all they wanted. It was really helpful, especially since there were definitely a few that were down on their luck.

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.

This is great! I can recommend everyone doing this - it's weirdly satisfying to help out in other peoples places and not as much a "chore" as in your own home for some reason.

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.

I've found books surprisingly hard to get rid of. Local recycling center doesn't take them, and they are pretty heavy so you can't set out a big bin full of them for trash collection. Used bookstores are extremely picky about titles, authors, and condition. Listing and selling on eBay is not worth the time for the tiny amount of money you may make, and most of them don't even sell.

I mostly just end up throwing them away a few at a time.

That surprises me. I've always been able to donate to my local library for their annual book sale. I've also seen donation containers in various parking lots around my area. Books are one of the easier things for me to get rid of.

>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.

This is probably why a lot of book exchanges[1] have odd books. I remember sitting in a bar which decor were bookshelves with old books, I found a book about DOS 5.0 which actually amused me.

[1] https://londonist.com/london/books-and-poetry/bookswap_eastc...

The unfortunate fact is that although we romanticize reading, most books don't have much trade value. And if it's already in the Library of Congress, it's as good as archived.

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".

I have a big cinderblock set of bookshelves in the back of my garage. It's where the not quite ready to go out yet books go. I did some book downsizing during the pandemic. This summer I'm going to try to get some more books and a fair bit of clothing out of the house.

Try your local Buy Nothing group. I got rid of some books I didn't think anyone would want, but they were excited about them.

Your comment is cathartic to me for reasons I cannot explain. I hope, for my sake, that everything you mentioned really is something you're doing often. I love the idea of constant forward progress in downsizing not just your own possessions, but that of the near and dears too.

I think I understand your feeling. The thing that makes me most empathetic with my family and friends is visiting them at their house and witnessing their struggling with stuff. It looks like a physical equivalent to the emotions and feelings in which we often find ourselves entrapped.

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.

Oh, I definitely try to help, although it is very very important to be respectful.

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.

For the tables, in some markets they're primed for being upcycled and you can make some pretty bucks.

Careful with this, it's the thinking process which leads to hoarding behavior if unchecked.

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.

I'm crashing at my parents atm (including my family).

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.

I counted more than 200 dishes in a house of 2 :(

>constant forward progress in downsizing not just your own possessions

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.

I helped a friend move out. They loved to buy stuff and never use it. Anyone who came over to help left with some decently priced trinkets. I left with an instant pot, sous vide wand, console table, a bag of small electronics, expensive markers and pens, and other stuff I surely forgot. I couldn't believe my good fortune and felt I had to compensate them. But they refused. We had performed an extremely valuable service just removing the items, the value of which was immaterial.

I'm in a high foot-traffic urban area and anything that's too cumbersome to sell locally (I don't want to haggle over a $5 item) we just put outside on the sidewalk. Almost all of the time, it finds a new home.

Yup, I never turn down leftovers or anything my parents want to give me even though at least 3/4th of it goes right in the trash or recycle. They need help letting go and I'm here to take it off their hands.

I've been doing this with my parents, but for stuff I want. They have a lot of old computer stuff that they don't need. I've been taking some of it each time I visit.

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 can always dispose of it later if I decide it's not useful.

I bet they though the same.

This is an interesting thought.

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.

Maybe but this is different. Computers are a hobby for me and this is hardware and software I used growing up. It's not like I'm taking stuff I have no interest in.

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