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Comment by pandinus | Hacker News Reader

My late father was a child during the depression era and so he grew up to be very resourceful/thrifty, hard working, and epitomized the "waste not, want not" slogan. So yes it can come off as hoarding and it was a lot to go through after he passed. Yet after a lifetime of scrimping, saving, reusing, and repurposing, he ended up with quite a lot to show for it. He never paid for storage, didn't clutter any open spaces, but every closet or spare room of his home was packed.

If you have the storage then by all means keep whatever you value. If it would require paying a recurring fee to keep it, then it better be worth it.

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Even if you have the space I'd caution against it. Cleaning out my parent's house after my mother's death was a chore, and they weren't hoarders in the classic sense but they had a lot of stuff. Thousands of family photographs, in boxes, that had never been organized or put in albums. Clothing, in suitcases, that hadn't been worn in decades. Toys from my childhood. Furniture with almost zero resale value. It all went in a dumpster. It was emotionally draining to get rid of some of it because I had memories attached to it. The thing is, if they had gotten rid of that stuff themselves, I would never have missed it. Even after all that I probably ended up keeping too much of it. I now have several shelves in my basement with boxes from my parent's house, that I have never opened since bringing them home.

I have promised myself that I will not leave that kind of accumulated junk for my kids to sort through some day, but I honestly wonder if I will get around to doing my own purge. It hasn't happened yet.

Relatable. In my case my dad passed away and at the time my relationship with him wasn’t the best. It wasn’t until I had a child of my own, about 5 years later, that I started to empathize with him orders of magnitude more - and to wish I had more of his things to help me feel closer to him. Sadly, I had kept almost none of it because I lived in a 1-bedroom condo in the city at that time and didn’t feel like I could spare any space for any of it.

> and to wish I had more of his things to help me feel closer to him

Yes. When one is young it is difficult to appreciate this, but later in middle age this becomes very precious. Store everything, your future self will be happier for it.

> The thing is, if they had gotten rid of that stuff themselves, I would never have missed it.

I took the same lesson from clearing out my parents things. What I'm trying to do now is to clear out incrementally. Doing a full sweep is way too easy to defer to future me and therefore never happens, so I try to do a small amount regularly. My big box of cables (another recent thread here) is a rich source of material that will keep me busy for a while. Pretty sure nobody will appreciate going through that.

Also just trying to notice things around the place that I really don't need, books I'll never read again, boxes that have not been opened for years. A little bit at a time. Removing each one gives a small sense of achievement.

I found soap decades old, very likely older than half a century. Hundreds of boxes and hence thousands of soap bars. I'd regularly found them for years and years here and there for my great aunt had stashed those left and right. I found some in system ceilings (!), in the attic, in the basement, in drawers.

My great aunt died years and years ago (RIP) but as recently as a few weeks ago my brother and I cleaned/emptied a garage where she had hidden some stuff.

More soap bars.

I don't need the physics/chemistry: I know that soap is a stable molecule. I suspect some of the soap bars were dating back to WWII.

My great aunt was also in the "waste not / want not" camp. But as she lived through WWII as a teenager, she was in fear of ever missing things again. Hence the soap bars.

This makes me wonder how many people have a garage full of TP just in case COVID-29 plays out like the first one did.

I definitely make a point of keeping a small stock TP (and cheap/easy food, like bologna, hot dogs, and bread) around in these post-covid days.

Not to the extreme of the story about the soap, above, but: Something in my mind was changed a little bit more every time I'd go to the store and there were empty shelves. So now I do things like always have a few weeks of TP, and I freeze things like bread and bologna.

I never did that at any point in my adult life leading up to COVID: If I ran out of something, I just picked up more later at the store the next time I was nearby (or any other time; lots of things were 24/7 back then).

My grandfather was like this, grew up in the depression and fought in the pacific during ww2. His garage was full of coffe can after coffee can filled with random nuts and bolts. When I was a kid every meal with my grandparents was 50% leftovers and they had a giant garden. Waste not want not indeed.

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