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>As objects, paper tickets serve as proof of past lives long after their brief utility as proof of payment. I sat with my accidental time capsule for more than an hour, doing what my teenage self had probably hoped I might: linking each one to a buried memory as best I could. [...] But most of the tickets I’d bought myself, in person and almost always with cash, at box offices or the Ticketmaster counter at the local grocery store. They looked like they’d been printed on a machine even older and more obsolete than the “Ticketmaster counter” as a concept. You don’t need to be a techno-pessimist to acknowledge that digital tickets, for all their advantages in transferability and traceability, don’t serve this long-tail purpose.

I did the exact opposite. I hung onto a bunch of paper TicketMaster stubs for decades because I was indecisive about throwing them away or hanging on to them. The "sentimental baggage" surrounding those tickets distorted my thinking and attached too much importance too them.

And then I read about de-cluttering your life advice from minimalists and learned of a good hack that worked for me: Just take photos of your mementos and then throw them away.

That was the psychological breakthrough I needed. I digitally scanned all my old Ticketmaster stubs as *.tif files and then threw them out. I also had a bunch of useless novelty coffee mugs (free gifts from trade shows or past employers). I just took digital photographs of each mug and then gave them away at Goodwill. Preserving them digitally helped me let go of the physical objects. Everyone once in a while, I might revisit my digital scans of the concert tickets on my computer monitor and that's good enough for me.

Reading passages like hers reminds me that that some people need those physical mementos and some don't. In a similar vein, a lot of people like physical media like DVDs and CDs. In contrast, I got rid of my entire physical library of thousands of discs. I don't miss the space they took up at all.

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