One last note, it also helps me to save money. Stuff that I like but I still do not buy because I want my apartment clutter free.
I had a conversation with my wife about them that literally started with her saying “Yes, but it’s the thought that counts” and I had to cause marital strife by pointing out the severe lack of thought involved in giving us something we have to store in our tiny place and will never use.
What you do after receiving it is entirely up to you. Don't fall into this trap of feeling obligating to keep an object you didn't ask for, nor expect. Love people, not things.
I say this having had an impractically full home for 29 years, and now only just really figuring all this out. Finally have space to use what we do have.
In Japan, re-gifting is the norm. It is becoming more common in the UK too now that people are living in smaller properties.
I find non-consumable gifts to be a stress to receive, and to give at times. I try to always make sure if I give a gift that it's consumable so that it won't linger, mainly out of respect, just like I wouldn't outstay my welcome as a guest anywhere.
The worst is being gifted something handmade by would-be artists who can't see the flaws in their own work and thus why it doesn't sell, and they end up giving it out as gifts. No joke, had a room full of objectively bad paintings, poorly painted glassware, badly knitted blankets et al. A huge relief to get the space back.
Just in the last month I used some sandpaper that had sat in a box for several years, pulled a ten year old DVD off a shelf and watched it, re-read a book from my childhood and connected an obscure audio adaptor that had been untouched for at least five years.
Earlier this year I played games on two different games consoles from previous decades and reactivated a Raspberry Pi from a previous project into a new one. I pruned a tree and dug a flower bed with some tools that were recovered from a grandparent's house after sitting untouched for well over a year.
If everything in your house that's more than a year old is worthless, maybe you're just buying things which are worthless from the beginning.
One slightly more nuanced method I've used when cleaning out is the question "how likely am I to need this again, and is storing it until then easier than selling it now and buying it again if I ever need it". The answers to this shift, for example it justifies getting rid of more possessions as you get more income, and increasingly only keeping things that you actively use or that would be inconvenient or time-sensitive to get again.
The cost is keeping unused stuff around is higher than acquiring it again were you to need it again.
And why do you even have a passport if you don't travel? The deed of your house? Why would you keep a piece of paper you could so easily lose, especially since it's on the land registry anyway?
You also seem to have forgotten that there was a pandemic. I expect 99% of passport-owners went a full year without using it because there was nowhere to go. Earlier this year there was a couple of weeks where you couldn't expedite a passport request for any amount of money due to the backlog created by people who'd allowed their passports to lapse during the pandemic all trying to renew at once.
Which actually shows another problem with the "just buy it again, bro" plan: In addition to being wasteful, it's risky. There's no guarantee that you can just re-buy things, or do so expediently and for a reasonable price, or that you'll have the liquidity to do so. Shortages, buyouts, mass layoffs, inflation and price spikes are all things we've seen many examples of in the last few years.
If you're renting a small apartment, it's not.
You still need to be organized even if you have space.
Absolutely great bit of advice.
Not all junk can be sold though, of course. But I think it's worth considering, maybe someone else will find them useful and then they can live on a bit longer.
Friends tell me that my ridiculously large vinyl record collection (that I only really listen to a small sub-set of) would be worth a lot on Discogs but I find it hard to motivate myself to actually do it.
And out where I live something like freecycle is very thin.
Many things are worth something--maybe even a bit more than something--to the right person but making the connection to that person is often more trouble than it's worth.
Can you elaborate a bit on how even the yard sales weren't worth the bother? I imagine that I'd basically sell everything for the first person who wants it, for whatever price.
I'm on a fairly busy road but in a semi-rural location so I'm not going to get that much traffic.
Emotional attachment sure can suck though. Like gifts from loved ones, etc. Not for documenting purposes, but I found help photographing the items so I can preserve those memories. It also helps that most printed material fade away (like thermal printed receipts), so a photograph helps a lot too. I store them on Google Photos (using 100 GB package), so they are searchable by location, text, etc.