I\u2019ve been thinking lately about my tendencies to keep stuff.<\/p>\r\n
(This post is just recording some things I\u2019ve been thinking about, and adding some musings as I go. I\u2019m not looking for advice here.)<\/p>\r\n
I have a lot of stuff. A lot of it is stuff that I love and am very happy to have; but some of it is stuff that I have no need or use for or even interest in.<\/p>\r\n
For me, keeping stuff in the former category is good. I have no interest (for myself) in minimalism for its own sake. And so when I see society seeming to suggest that it\u2019s inherently better to get rid of as much stuff as possible, I get annoyed and grumpy and I push back.<\/p>\r\n
But it recently occurred to me, during a discussion with my therapist (and after some recent discussions with various people about Marie Kondo), that the stuff in the latter category is not stuff that I need to keep. Keeping that stuff doesn\u2019t, in general, make my life better in any way.<\/p>\r\n
I tend to hold onto any given item of that sort for any of several reasons:<\/p>\r\n
(A few members of my extended family have had hoarder tendencies; I don\u2019t know whether there\u2019s anything genetic about such, but if so, I suspect that I have some of those genes.) (\u2026And I\u2019m immensely grateful for one cousin\u2019s hoarder tendencies, because they\u2019re the reason that I have various photos and videos of my mother.)<\/p>\r\n
But even taking all of that into account, there\u2019s some stuff that I really just don\u2019t need. For example, my therapist gently suggested that I don\u2019t really need to keep fifteen-year-old utility bills.<\/p>\r\n
I know, rationally, that I don\u2019t need<\/em> to keep those. It\u2019s not like I expect to ever have a use for them; it\u2019s not like I think I\u2019ll need to someday prove that I paid them; it\u2019s not like I\u2019m going to do a data project recording and graphing my energy use and costs over a fifteen-year period. I can imagine future archaeologists finding them mildly interesting\u2014but I suspect that future archaeologists will have plenty to keep them occupied without adding my particular cache of old papers.<\/p>\r\n I think that I keep those kinds of things out of habit, and a sort of completist tendency, and because of the last two bullet items above: I don\u2019t like to see information destroyed, and I derive a vague sense of comfort from holding onto them.<\/p>\r\n That last factor is in some sense sufficient for me; as long as there\u2019s some positive value to retaining them, and as long as there isn\u2019t a strong reason to get rid of them, and as long as retaining them causes me no significant problems (I have plenty of filing-cabinet space), there\u2019s no real need to get rid of them.<\/p>\r\n But I think that the vague sense of comfort in this particular case is such a small positive value that it doesn\u2019t count for much. And it would be one thing if they were already all neatly filed away in my filing cabinets; but instead a lot of them are currently scattered in piles of paper in my bedroom or in the living room; that\u2019s not a huge problem, but it\u2019s not ideal. (And it would be even less ideal if I were to die unexpectedly and someone else had to spend time and energy sorting through those piles of mostly useless paper.)<\/p>\r\n I could theoretically resolve a fair bit of this issue by scanning the papers and then tossing the physical versions. But that would involve a fair bit of time and\/or money, and the result would be electronic copies of fifteen-year-old utility bills, which might have even less value for me than physical ones. :)<\/p>\r\n I tentatively decided yesterday that, as a first step, I was ready to give up utility bills that are more than ten years old\u2014but then all the folders of utility bills that I found in a quick glance through one stack of file folders turned out to be \u201conly\u201d five to seven years old. :)<\/p>\r\n Anyway, I think that I\u2019m gradually heading toward being willing to let go of some old papers, but it\u2019s going to take me some time to get there.<\/p>\r\n In the meantime, for non-paper stuff that I don\u2019t want but that might be of use to someone else, I\u2019ve been cataloguing things and moving them to the same big closet where I keep my giveaway books; at some point relatively soon, I hope to post a bunch of stuff to my giveaway lists, and to local Freecycle-type groups.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[128,29,61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anxiety","category-life-updates","category-personal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19690"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19691,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19690\/revisions\/19691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}