Fighting the Packrat

I come from a line of packrats on both sides of my family. Over the years our family has bought stuff and been given stuff. But as packrats, we do not get rid of old stuff. This leads to eventually packing it away in spare cupboards, drawers, shelves, closets or putting it in boxes and storing it in my parent's crawlspace.

A packrat's motto is "I can't throw it away because I might need it someday." Experience dictates this is true, but you will never need it UNTIL you get rid of it. My grandfather also had to deal with an additional problem: "Hey it's on sale, I better buy two."

I spent my early years accumulating stuff and "saving it for later" without realizing what it would eventually lead to.... clutter!! I would save things like it was being taken off the market. Our crawlspace always had room for one more box. Nothing really brought this issue to light...until I had to move. Oh MAN!!! Years and years of stuff is not easy to downsize, so I never did. But after moving I was determined that I would sort through all my stuff rather than just store it, because I had just moved into a condo with no crawlspace. And if I wanted a roommate, I would have to move my stuff out of the spare bedroom.

Thirty one years old and I decided to fight the inner packrat. Some people have a one year rule (if I haven't used it in the last year, it goes). I think I needed to set a 10 year give-or-take rule. Not great but it's a start. I sorted my post secondary education notes and threw out a stack of notes 3 feet high (and I still kept eight 3" binders of notes). There were boxes of comic books, wires, $26 in pennies, brand new packages of oragami paper from when my dad taught Japanese exchange students in the '80s, more wires, floppy discs, pictures, miscellaneous electronic junk, and boxes and boxes of miscellaneous trinkety stuff. Everything was sorted to one of 4 places: garbage, recycling, MCC or a new box of sorted stuff. I have never gone through that much stuff
in my life. It is VERY time consuming, so I might add that my recent job termination was very timely.

After all the sorting that I've done I've come to realize that life is too short to hoard stuff. We need to be generous and give it away or else we end up with more stuff than we know what to do with. If I haven't used it in 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years then I probably never will. And if I really need it again, I can always buy a new one.