Stuff: the Things We Acquire and Don't Get Rid Of

All this bitching about our parents is fun, but exactly how are you not going to become your parents when it is your turn?

Your stuff owns you, not the other way around.

Here are a few ways we are trying to break the cycle for our children.

  • Make a rule of number of items out >= number of items in for any new (or new-used) stuff.
  • Ask what the kids want, or whether they want a particular item before we get rid of it.
  • Use the Marie Kondo (minus woo-woo) or other decluttering/minimalist method to get rid of items that are meaningless. Don’t fall into the “organizing” trap. “Organizing” is just bringing more stuff into your life to hold your existing stuff.
  • Stopping collecting, and getting rid of collections. Collections are the root of stuff/evil. If you think you are actually a dealer or an investor with your collection, take a hard look at yourself. Check your tax return for evidence.
  • Realizing that there is no “away”. Acquiring a new item means that item eventually has to go into a landfill, incinerator, compost pile, or sewage treatment plant. There are plenty of free items available on Craigslist, Freecycle, etc., and those are also good places for our stuff to go before hitting the landfill. We favor consumable items when gifting and setting gifting boundaries.
  • Never again rent a storage unit, buy a bigger place because it has more storage, or really, own anything that needs to be stored. Yes, there are seasons in some places. Items should “go” somewhere – as in, “where does this thing go?” – not be stored somewhere.

We are going through decades of past mistakes currently as we get ready to downsize. Every bullet point above has multiple stories of waste from our ignorance and inattention. Both kids are here, and we are getting them to triage their childhood stuff now, based on the principle of not having anything that needs to be stored. If it needs to be stored, it’s not important to us, so “away” it goes.

One fun set of trinkets that we stored in two houses and one storage unit over two decades is the family silver. This stuff is from the mid-1800’s to early 1900’s, from my wife’s great-grandparents on down through the generations to us. She polished up some of the silverware, and gave it to my mother, who loves it. Ha! There are a few individual pieces that might sell for enough to cover the cost of five years of the storage unit.

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And with that coloring, the fossilkid moniker was born

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Sadly at least some of that silverware if not all of it is gonna just be silverplate not actual silver. Many of those the date on there is the date of the original company founded not when the thing was made.
Yes a generation seriously wasted their lives polishing not silver silverware.

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To give you an idea of how much the silver plated stuff is worth. I knew an antique shop owner that would pay a blanket price of 50 cents a piece for any silver plated flatware because he knew he could turn around and sell it for a dollar a piece. So not much.

I got a handful to sell earlier this year and one of them was about $10. It’s kinda surprising the market is that good considering nearly everyone kept those.

In my very limited of two experiences with that family silverware stuff to look up and sell each only had one actual silver piece.

What do we think about books? Keep or recycle?

Oh man, our house is full of books and that’s after several purges. If the books are great,then they are great to give to someone else.

Depends on how much space you have. We just got rid of a bunch of old books to free up shelf space in our condo. If I had a house I doubt I’d ever get rid of a book.

What are the chances you will ever be interviewed remotely on MSNBC? If they’re high, keep the books.

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What a great use for phone booths

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Don’t recycle books. Donate them if you don’t want them anymore. There is a very long reuse tail for them before recycling, all the way to being color matched and sold in bulk for stagers and decorators.

First, stop buying physical books. Then you can decide what to do with your existing books. We donated hundreds or maybe even a couple thousand books to our local library. Then we donated the nice old bookshelves with glass doors to a relative. These were mostly legacy stuff from my MIL.

I keep mostly reference books and some textbooks, positioned in the Zoom frame. We also have a bunch of coffee table books that may be kept.

20 years ago, we lost the large majority of our books in a flood. Mine had moved a bunch of times, including overseas and back. I guess I had a few twinges over the years from that loss, but it was not life changing or even remotely significant. The flood coincided with my daughter’s birth, and that was life changing, and way more precious and memorable than any of my books.

Tl;dr keep a few special ones and get rid of the rest.

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I meant recycle as in reuse, donate etc.

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I tried to kindle. And still use it occasionally on holidays or when i cant find a physical book. I just find it harder to stick with reading an ebook.

I have challenges staying off of social media etc anyway, and having a physical book just works better.

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+1 to digital, I didn’t have a ton, maybe 30-40 books and donated or sold em all in last couple years. I still occasionally will buy used books cuz I like browsing used book stores and it’s nice if you can find cheap stuff. I love reading books on kindle. I would get an actual kindle too as I have problems if I try to read kindles on my phone because messages come through and I’m tempted to get on the web.

It’s a much better reading experience on a kindle too.

I usually have this site open in one tab, a wine site in another, sometimes a sports site, then a tab with whatever book I’m currently reading on the kindle cloud reader, and a tab with my current netflix series. And I just bounce around between them all night. I’m assuming this is kind of normal these days?

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It may be normal but it doesn’t seem optimal. 30 minutes a day uninterrupted with a physical book probably would be a healthier way to read.

On the book case thing. Mrs Rugby recently color coded our shelves.

While i still have some concerns about finding anything, it looks amazing. Would recommend.

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Re: books

Check 'em out.

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We have every Sega console from Master System to Dreamcast, SNES, N64, PS1/2 all in original boxes at our parents’ house. Lots of peripherals and hundreds of games. I haven’t tried to price it but I assume it’s in the thousands and climbing which makes me increasingly nervous.

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