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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

My wife and I do a full clean out every year. Our key phrase is "Be ruthless". Some things are obvious tossers, some are obvious keepers, and if it comes to a discussion usually just saying "be ruthless" to the other is enough to force the decision.

It's frightening how much stuff you can collect over the year but also how much stuff you kept last year that you no longer care about.

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On the other hand, if it's my closet or the landfill (as opposed to reselling, and the associated depreciation and opportunity costs) I'm not in a rush to toss things.

Unless there are circumstances like an impending move, or I am running out of space in the closet.

It's kind of a difficult line to walk. I used to keep way too much stuff. But just yesterday I pulled equipment (tools, a VGA cable, a prototyping board) out of the back of my closet that I hadn't used in four or five years, and was able to save myself a couple hundred bucks (computer repair). That VGA cable occupies very little space.

I would advise you to not completely rule out the tax that every item you own has. Even just looking at a drawer that is full of odds and ends can be stressful. With that said I am all in favor of re-selling things, then someone can get use out of them and overall waste in the system is reduced. Now I just need to sell my $300 jambox that I only used 10 times...

I have never found a drawer full of "odds and ends" stressful: I can see how you might, but from my perspective seeing that drawer is satisfying and soothing, as it means that I'm more likely to have whatever it is that I might need. The tax is only in "whether or not you can find it", which some people have also cited as being stressful, especially when you are trying to find something you know you own but are unable to do so; but, once you realize that throwing something away means you can't find it, it becomes acceptable to sometimes fail to find something and end up with two of them. The secret is just to make certain that the stuff that you don't use often is the stuff most likely to be lost. (Of course, if you can find someone else who will find these things valuable, I'm all for giving the objects away.)

I imagine that how organized the unused stuff is would be a factor in how high the tax is. If you can't remember that you own it and where it is when you need it, there's no usefulness to having it. If it's getting in the way of finding other stuff, the value becomes negative.

In large quantities, stuff taxes also include how large a dwelling you need and how difficult it is to move.

Studying abroad made me more aware that there are penalties for not having stuff, too. It was mostly basic cooking implements that I missed, and also things that are just useful to have around, like tape and plastic wrap.

I'm definitely aware of that. But I am also avoiding the other extreme. For years I was cutting "stuff", largely because I was moving constantly. Then I bought a small house and stopped living with other people, and found that a barren house is its own brand of distressing.

I'm not very good at creating a "warm" house, but one thing I do know is that empty rooms and bare walls are not it! So I am not afraid to have a little extra "stuff", for example my $10 pair of ice skates. What little annoyance they provide (Where does one KEEP ice skates!?) is easily repaid by the fun they provide pond skating each winter.

Reading your post, I imagined the ice skates as wall decorations. Just a nail needed, and maybe an old frame or some of that fancy ricepaper sticky tape.

I hear this. Oh, do I hear this.

First, you can donate many things to other people who will get use out of it. My house has two recycling bins: one for the traditional recyclables, and one for the stuff to donate to AmVets or Goodwill or the Salvation Army or whatever.

Second, I also feel the tremendous amount of waste going on with so many things that have piled up in my house (against my will in the first place). And many of them would not survive a trip through the Goodwill.

One reason I want to go live on Mars is that I'll never come in from working on the fields to find a bunch of new junk in my hab.

The "ruthless" spring clean is a similar tradition in our household. Now, if only we hadn't bought all the stuff we "no longer care about" in the first place.

Want something? Bookmark it in a folder in your browser. Forget about it. Come back a couple weeks later. Still want it? Get it.

I do this with Amazon wishlists. The side benefit is that often things from that list end up as Christmas or birthday presents so I get to both stop buying so much myself, but receive some of them anyway.

Me too. I add stuff to my wishlist throughout the year, then one month before Christmas and my birthday I go through and remove all the items I no longer want. Plenty stays on, of course, but plenty is also like "Ehhhh...I wouldn't actually do much with that", "Ehhh, I ended up seeing that elsewhere and don't care to own it", etc.

I also like going back to them occasionally and realizing I could buy everything on my wishlist for $1000 or whatever. I still don't though :-)

Stop doing presents for christmas and birthdays too then, and make it clear you dont want them.

I've been trying to convince my wife's family that I don't want birthday or Christmas presents for years. No such luck... I end up having to put a bunch of useless crap on my amazon wishlist just to keep them happy.

The trick is to request non-physical stuff. As an example, request a track day on a race car track (if you're into cars). That way, you get an interesting experience and no/reduced clutter.

I always ask for Kiva or Watsi gift cards/donations in my name, and make it very clear that any other gifts will get sold or returned to fund those two things.

I do this for all my old technology books. Like most of you I was sure there was a nugget of knowledge I could still extract from some old book so I kept them for a long time. In one day I bar-code scanned in all of the UPCs and saved them in a wish list. If the book was available cheap then it went in the paper recycling bin. I told myself that if I really want that OLD book back it is available for $1+s&h used. I cleaned up a lot of shelf space and still have my books available on a few days notice.

PS-I have never needed to buy anything back from my old book wish list.

To be fair, half of the stuff I throw out when cleaning each year is stuff that I already got my use out of: old tshirts that are getting frayed, worn socks, old underwear, old towels, inner shower curtain, clothes that no longer fit right, worn/stained bedding, stacks of papers, half filled notebooks, felt pens that have the tip worn down (I write too hard/poorly), etc.

What's amazing to me is the volume of "long term consumables" I seem to go through - eg, things that I'm not wearing out on a weekly rate, but nevertheless, and wearing out on a quarterly/yearly rate.

Couple that with things that I realize need replacing (old dishwear that's accumulated stains/damage/missing pieces), that I've lost a bunch of silverware but still have a pile of spoons, etc and you end up with a fairly sizable selection of stuff every year, even though all of it makes sense both to have bought in the past and to get rid of now.

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