Who knows what are gems are what are not? I scan tons of stuff related to my children's school/activities etc. One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them and find some things they will call gems and lots of other junk. Or maybe they will consider it all junk and just get rid of it. But I can't be the judge of that now, I can only be the custodian.
> One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them
My mother used to say the same thing. But I‘m not looking at that old stuff, ever. Maybe your kids will. It’s your decision whether it’s worse to be false negative or false positive here. If the stuff is not taking up too much space, it’s probably a good idea to keep it. Hoarding is something else though.
So the idea that most of it is worthless is far far less justification to toss the entire pile. The cost to benefit ratio is shifted by more than 1000x.
And even then, while cleaning out a physical hoard you'll take time to look through things.
Maybe your kids will enjoy it, though. But that feeling is far from universal.
Does that make me a... vicarious hoarder? What point are you trying to make? If you keep knick-knacks for the sake of others, you're a hoarder and should admit it's actually just for yourself -- if you enjoy someone else's knick-knacks which they saved for you, you're also a hoarder?
He can't give them to you if he threw it away. Also, he can ask that question to you because your choices and preferences are, to a large extent, set.
The same stuff, that my child would throw away without hesitation few years ago, is now "precious memories" and not to be disturbed. The emotional value of things doesn't follow much logic and has massive volatility until adulthood.
I mean I totally understand that me keeping bunch of stuff isn't a guarantee that they will find what they value at that point of time. Maybe the lego-shaped eraser would be the most interesting piece of stationary they will remember; doesn't mean I can hoard every piece of stationary. Digital stuff is different though - my SSD doesn't bulge just because I'm putting more files holding snippets of life on it.
I’ve known several people who had to go through their parent’s entire lifetime of accumulated stuff and it was quite the job. Dumpsters were rented. It was a big burden to leave the kids.
Digital stuff will also be a lot to go through. My dad has hundreds of thousands of photos, backed up in triplicate. I was helping him clean the basement once and found 5 1/4 inch floppy disks labeled “backup” from the 80s. He’s kept all digital files. Many of them are locked into various proprietary apps as well. So I’ll likely need to spend months going through it all, while everything is still working, to see what is worth saving, and migrating it into a format I can manage. It will be a massive project, on top of the physical stuff. I’m hoping I can talk the rest of the family into an estate sale for the physical stuff, but the digital stuff is arguably the bigger job, with no way to outsource it.
There is also the question of corruption, or simply being able to read older files. I grabbed some documents I had saved on his computer back in high school about 15 years later. I had saved them as rtf files at the time so they would be more portable. I tried off and on for a week or two to read them in more modern times and it was a no-go. I could get sections, but not the whole thing. I don’t know if the rtf standard changed or the files were simply corrupt, but they were basically trash. I’m sure I’ll run into a lot of that as well.
In this case, the author wrote the notes. If they say it has no value, they probably know what they’re talking about.
Well, yeah, if they say it has no value, then obviously it has no value to them, no one could claim otherwise.
I guess the context in this thread kind of shifted to it might still be valuable to someone, even if it isn't valuable to them. There been a lot of cases in history where very smart people judged their own journals to not be very valuable (to them) so they think nothing of it, then 100 years later someone discovers the journal together with a ton of valuable (to the world) nuggets in it.
My sister and I have an agreement to trash my mom’s hoard of our school stuff she refuses to get rid of that we don’t want. All it does is bring us stress. If they made physical art like clay pots in a kiln, keep it for yourself if they don’t want it. If it’s something you can scan, I doubt it’s worth keeping and makes it much harder to find signal in the noise when too much is scanned.
Stuff causes stress. It's really true. Even if it's mostly out of the way, every time you see it it will cause some stress about whether it should be moved, reorganized, saved, or thrown away. The house I grew up in was always cluttered and I'm bad about it myself. Every once in a while I will order a roll-off dumpster to the house and get rid of things that have accumulated over the past 10 years or so. It's a relief but then it starts over again.
If there's one habit I wish I had it would be to regularly and ruthlessly get rid of stuff that I don't use anymore.
I am not exactly a minimalist, but I freely give away and loan things to people who might get more value put of them, it's enabled me to move across the country multiple times for good opportunities at very little notice.
