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Comment by lee | Hacker News Reader

I'm in a situation where my partner loves to acquire things whereas I have a minimalist mindset.

I have felt like every item I own is a burden, and when I live in a house where the vast majority is "owned" by the both of us, it can be overwhelming.

I've learned to cope though by simply internally "letting go" of ownership. They're just inanimate objects and they're not "mine". I simply possess them as a mental/legal construct.

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Take your partner to an estate sale, where the next-of-kin are trying to sell their departed parents' stuff. And just wander around contemplating. We're not taking any of our "stuff" with us when we go. An entire lifetime collecting all these knickknacks and tchotchkes and stuffing your house and storage units with them and at the end... It just becomes a burden to someone else.

I think this activity can be good therapy to help people to stop and think about their "stuff accumulation".

I don’t buy and keep things to take with me when I die. I get them to be useful to me and others. In fact, I’ve gone to many estate sales and picked up useful things at significant discount off new, sometimes even free. It would delight me if someone else benefited from my stuff after I am gone.

The biggest thing I struggle with is keeping it organized in a useful way.

Yep. My parents moved into a retirement community and have a huge unfinished basement, probably 1500-2000 sqft of floor space. And they have filled it with crap. Its like a warehouse down there. Some of it has value but vast majority of it is just plain junk (mostly stuff from their old house which they should have gotten rid of when they moved, some literally in the same boxes). They are in their 80s and not dealing with it. It will be my problem eventually.

I would ideally like to be able to fit my whole life into a suitcase and be sufficiently free of commitments that if someone asked me to move to the other side of the world next week I could. I achieve this in my own life, but I share the feeling of almost overwhelming burden you describe when I see my parents' possessions. Some day I am going to have to deal with them. It would be unbearably wasteful and disrespectful to just throw them out or give them away to people who don't value them, but disposing of them properly would be a major undertaking, and many of the items have great sentimental value to my parents so I can't imagine giving them to anyone else but at the same time I don't want them. I doubt that I could trick myself into overcoming this by "letting go" as you describe.

I'm similar; I found a way to "compartmentalize" - I don't concern myself with what's in my wife's closet or in her boxes. I also have some spaces that are purely mine - so I can have the flavor of minimalism that brings me joy.

> I have felt like every item I own is a burden

This is starting to get to me. Everything I buy I now have to store somewhere, and/or is then something that I need to throw out. And everything I throw out seems like such a waste to me.

Something changed in my mindset over the last couple of years.

I have so many tools that I feel this way about. I enjoy lending them to people because it makes owning them feel like less of a waste, but I don't have enough of a social network to lend them often enough to "break even" on the second cost.

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