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What should I do with all that junk, all that junk inside my trunk?
Drez
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I have a lifetime of swag. Seriously, I have some gaming swag that dates back to the Atari 800 XL days.
I want to embrace minimalism and digitalism but I don’t necessarily want to willy-bully throw everything away. But I have so much working printing garbage here I’m really conflicted.
This may be more of a psychological than logistical issue but I’m curious if anyone has any thoughts.
I want to embrace minimalism and digitalism but I don’t necessarily want to willy-bully throw everything away. But I have so much working printing garbage here I’m really conflicted.
This may be more of a psychological than logistical issue but I’m curious if anyone has any thoughts.
Switch: SW-7690-2320-9238Steam/PSN/Xbox: Drezdar
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Whether it's a rock or a Crash Bandicoot tshirt, you can keep it for the memory. But for each thing, so yourself if you need the thing to remember.
Like I don't have anything from that day but still remember when I saw Windows 98 crash at Comdex.
If not keeping something, sell/trash/donate - whichever you you know you will do the quickest.
I'm also big on keeping memory boxes and have been thankful for them as I get older. I have a few old threadless/thinkgeek shirts that I cut out the design so I could keep them in part but save space. I also use tee-shirt scraps as painting rags, though.
If you have crafty friends, or want to pay for a service, you can turn old teeshirts into a quilt.
I personally have trouble letting things go, but limited space and moving a bunch helped me learn to organize, space save, and purge in cycles.
My spatula didn't spark joy, so I threw it out.
Now I can't fry eggs any more
Do you want the actual stuff, or is some of it wanting the info contained in the stuff, or is it just to not lose potential access to that information?
I had a bunch of old 8-bit computer games / manuals / posters / magazines, and after some poking around it turns out that the game manuals have been scanned, someone bought the rights to the magazines and sells a DVD of them all scanned in, the games can be played via emulators, etc. So I just took photos of what I owned and now have them digitally instead of in paper / cassette format. It's not quite the same, but I realised that in practise, I'm actually fairly unlikely to play Stryker's Run again, and if I want to, I wouldn't do it by geting out the old computer + CRT monitor + tape drive, I'd just play it via one of the online emulators, and if I wanted to read "Creative Graphics on the BBC Microcomputer" or the September 1986 edition of Acorn User, I can read a PDF version.
I kept a few things, sure, but a lot of the bulk of it, I don't actually want to own the things themselves, but I also don't want to forget that I once owned them, and photos are a lot easier to store than boxes of paper. And it was also (and this may well be a personal peculiarity) a relief to realise that I hadn't somehow become the sole custodian of the archives of XYZ, that someone else out there had already backed it up online and so if I threw out my copy of something, it wouldn't be lost to the world forever.
Same with posters / toys / other physical artifacts -- some of them I kept, sure, but most of them I just want to not accidentally forget, and taking a bunch of photos felt like a decent way to pay tribute to the things without having the actual bulk and weight to deal with any more.
Oh my god, no I won't.
There's a lot of psychological baggage with owning stuff. Memories, sunk cost fallacy, the positive validation you get when people come over, so on and so forth... Getting rid of stuff is HARD.
The biggest thing is you want it to go to a good home.. someplace that will appreciate it. If your collection is mostly made up of swag, it's likely the kind of stuff that would be best in a museum or some other collectable place. Which then means finding such a place.
Honestly, I've had the most success at just donating things to Goodwill. If I look at how much things are worth, it makes me hesitate. If I ask friends if they want it, it causes all sorts of delays because you want to be fair. But Goodwill's kind of a one and done thing.
My current effort is best seen in the Graphic Violence toys thread. I'm going through, photographing my things, and writing down what I think about them. I kind of want to use that to decide if I'm really attached or not.
Jokes aside, she addresses this topic. Obviously you're not going to throw away your spatula and your tax documents just because they don't spark joy. You can keep items you need.