Photos, trophies and awards, cards, letters, e mails etc. I seem to have a weird aversion to saving things. If something is not pertinent to future reference it is gone. I am the same way about reminiscing, all my friends seem to enjoy reminiscing, I go along with it but it honestly makes me uncomfortable. Looking through family albums makes me a little uncomfortable, I have never understood why but have been this was as long as I can remember. Is this a thing? Physical evidence of past events has no meaning to me even though in my head I seem to hold on to special moments in time.
I have some stuff saved, mostly from my high school years, which were a loooong time ago. I don’t enjoy reminiscences either, and I’ve saved few mementos in the intervening years. I feel a bit guilty about that, I mean I have no tokens from when the kids were growing up. But I kind of figure that if I needed something to remind me of a special moment, maybe it wasn’t that special.
Next time I run across my high school crap, I’m going to throw it out. Probably.
I save stuff but never look back at it, it just gets packed away. A few years ago my gf won many awards for a Unicef ad campaign she headed up. I wanted to show the stuff to a friend, but had no idea where it was. I asked her and she’d thrown it out the day after the awards ceremony. “Clutter”.
My family is a saver of sentimental things. We all love photos and photo albums. My aunt transferred all of my grandma’s home movies (50s-80s) to DVDs. My sister transferred all of our dad’s VHS home videos to DVDs. I find it very hard to throw something away that holds a special memory for me or if I know it had special meaning to someone who is now gone. My sisters and I have a great time talking about when we were kids. Lots of good laughter.
I’m guessing it has a lot to do with how you grew up. My maternal grandma was into photography so she was always taking pictures and movies. One of our favorite things was when she’d come to visit and bring her movie screen, movie projector or slide projector. We’d watch and laugh all evening. My paternal grandma always had things around her that were special to her for one reason or another.
My husband’s mother threw everything away. He has absolutely nothing from his childhood. I still have favorite books, games, horse figurines, photos, etc.
Stuff from my working world has long been in a landfill: awards, certificates, etc. hold no value for me and seem pointless to hang onto. My wife saves everything. We do have photo albums, and I like looking at them from time to time, but likely wouldn’t miss them if they suddenly disappeared. I also still have two high school yearbooks for some reason. Again, I wouldn’t miss them if they were gone. At my age, I think a lot about all this crap being left for my kids to have to sort through, and it bothers me.
My husband is holding on to several boxes of photos that his mother saved. However, he doesn’t know who many of the people are, and it’s unlikely that anyone living knows either. Possibly his niece. If my husband dies, I’ll give her a chance to take the stuff, after that it’s the landfill.
Yeah, I don’t save squat from work. I think I might have a name placard from a cubicle somewhere, but that’s it.
Otherwise, I never have been a big saver of mementos, although I kind of wish I had been. For example, my kids are in Cub Scouts/Boy Scouts, and I wish I had more photos and what-not that I could share with them about my time in Scouts. All I’ve got is a photo album that my Dad made me from the photos that my friend’s dad took when we went to Philmont (he made copies for everyone in the crew). It’s one of my more prized posessions, honestly. Otherwise, I’ve got yearbooks from high school and middle school, and some random family photos. There’s a fairly large gap in all that between the end of high school and the advent of digital photos in about the year 2000.
Since then, I have accumulated a LOT of photos, because there hasn’t been any cost to doing so, in either storage space or developing/printing. I mean, my kids are going to have thousands of photos they can look at if they want, and I’ll probably enjoy looking through them when I’m older (already like looking at the baby pictures/videos).
But I’m still not collecting physical stuff like programs, etc…
I’m a packrat with sentimental stuff, and I’m trying to pare it down judiciously. I have an extremely difficult time letting go of things my kids made or menentos of their childhood. Like everything else, though, at some point there’s so much of it that it’s a burden on the present instead of a fond memory of the past.
That doesn’t mean I’d want to get rid of all of it, though. My kids and I were looking through a box of my mom’s photos and memorabilia, and we found a farm notebook from my great-grandfather from the late 1800’s and a ration card my grandparents used during WWII, along with very old photos. My goal is to save things like that.
Recently, we spent time with a couple who sold their home, got rid of everything, and live in a travel trailer. They’re always on the road. I had to admire them. They are totally unencumbered by stuff.
Photos that are relevant to my adult life or family-oriented photos from childhood are things that are worth saving. Recently, though, I keep coming back to the idea of shredding photos and things I still have from junior and senior high school, including yearbooks, that are packed away in a box. Those were not years I look back on fondly, more than 50 years ago now, and I have no good memories attached to them. I just haven’t been able to quite bring myself to do it.
Having worked as a radio personality, I have a ton of “airchecks,” tapes I made while on the air, for the purpose of looking for a better job, mostly. These also go back more than 50 years. They’re on cassettes. The oldest ones are awful. I was just a kid and had no idea what I was doing. I can’t bear to listen to them, and I certainly don’t want anyone else to hear them, yet I can’t quite get rid of them. I’ve told my wife that after I die she should pile them up and have a Mack Truck run over them.
I have probably less than 10 photos. There are 3 framed ones out that I can see - my kids, my parents and me with my partner. I think I still have a few, in an envelope somewhere, that my mother gave me that include me as a very young kid. I have one photo on my phone. It is my joke Christmas tree. Any other photo that I have taken was for the purposes of communicating something to other people. Once it had done its job, deleted.
I have a few things, mainly from my army days, but most of those mementos also make really good man-cave decor. I have a few things from each of my kid’s childhood, plushies and the like mainly. Some of that I’ve already given to the pertinent grandchildren. Current work related items probably won’t last much past the end of working, if that long.
I do have a few pieces of furniture and art that I inherited from my parents and grandparents, and thats really about it. Everything else I have is either functional or I just like it for whatever reason or both.
Shoot, forgot the errrm, thousandish electronically stored photos I have of the kids and grandkids, but I dunno, they’re on thumb drives so I guess they count?
I didn’t save a lot of of stuff from the time before I had kids. I wish I had saved more - not awards but photos and programs. As I get older, I find that my memory is sort of weird - I can’t remember things I know must have happened , or I get mixed-up about when they happened and photos would have helped somewhat. There are only three photos of me that I know of between 14 and 24 . One was taken by a boyfriend when I was 14-16 , one was my HS graduation photo taken at 17 and the last was me and my husband taken when I was 21-24. I don’t wish I had the photos /programs for themselves but instead to make sure my memories are accurate if that makes any sense. For example, that boyfriend who took the photo of me when I was around 15 - for years , I have remembered him as being overweight. The last time I saw him was around 1982 until I ran into him on Facebook about 8 years ago. He passed away a couple of years ago and there were photos from 1980 ish in the tribute video and he definitely wasn’t overweight. I don’t know if I actually thought he was overweight back then or if seeing more recent photos on Facebook influenced my memory. There’s a piece of jewelry I think I was given by a particular person in high school - but since I’m not wearing it in any of those photos, I’m not sure.
Memories get weaker if you don’t call them up, and my memory is like a steel sieve. I never know what’s going to stick forever and what’s going to just whoosh through. If I pick up something and think, “Oh, yeah. I haven’t thought of that in forever.” I tend to keep it. Or a picture of it. Not in any organized way, of course.
Oh the other hand, I inherited a bunch of pictures from my mother. She had inherited pictures from her mother. And Grandma had inherited pictures from her mother-in-law. So I understand the problem with keeping things.
I’ve thrown out duplicates or passed them to sisters or cousins. I threw out a bunch of vacation post cards. They had never been sent and were probably kept as reminders of vacations.
I threw out general scenery photos. There had to be a relative in it to make the first cut. Great Grandma B took a lot of vacations with the son who was living with her. After finding the fifth picture of her standing next to her car at the side of an open highway, I threw the rest out.
Eventually, they will all be scanned and shared with relatives. Maybe after I retire. It’s down to six shoe-sized boxes. And that’s from ten much larger boxes.
I have a weird sense of sentimentality. There are times I deliberately try to satisfy nostalgic urges, like stopping at the same motel on different long trips. When I went to Paris in 2022, I hadn’t been in the city since 1985, and I was really hoping that the smells would trigger some sense memory and rush me back to being eleven years old. Sadly it didn’t.
At the same time, I see the corrosive effects of being stuck in the past. My sister, who has a variety of mental/emotional issues, obsesses over incidents from decades ago, half of which she remembers incorrectly. My dad, who’s suffering from dementia, spends a lot of time sifting through old family photos and weeping about relatives who’ve been gone for many years. I suppose if nostalgia brings people comfort, what’s the harm, but I also see some people retreating into it.
I take photos when I travel, but they tend to be of the sights, not people (I travel alone, so it’s not that big an issue). I can’t remember the last time I looked at photos from my high school or uni years, and I’ll only go through family pics under duress. I know I’m an unfeeling aspie, but I’ll likely toss virtually all my old childhood photos and junk once my parents are gone, because I really don’t care to see them again and there’s no one else who’ll want them.
As I have gotten older, I have found a lot of stuff I saved from my younger days no longer holds any sentimental value. About 10 years ago I got rid of 30 of the 33 trophies I won while driving race cars. They were just taking up a lot of room, 5 large Rubbermaid containers. The last 3 are in a storage container in my shed, I haven’t looked at them in years. I have whittled all the pictures I had to 2 albums and a shoe box. I didn’t need pictures of my cousins, their kids and an assortment of people I haven’t seen in years. I took 3 boxes of pictures to a family gathering about 5 years ago, what wasn’t taken was tossed in the trash. I also scanned many old family photos, I use them on social media on special days. I have nothing from my childhood, my mother saved nothing from me or my siblings. The only thing I have from my 4 years in the Navy is my DD214. I have a box of stuff from my 40 years at Boeing. When my time comes, I doubt any of my family members will want anything I have unless it can be sold for money. I figure on reducing the amount of stuff I have as I grow older. On that day all I will want to have is the clothes on my back, my recliner and an almost empty bottle of some good rye whiskey.
Wow. I’m completely the opposite. As I look around from where I’m sitting, I can tell you where and when I got most of it. Even the most everyday of objects has somewhere/someone associated with it.
It’s also different when you’ve had deaths in the family - everything that belonged to my brother suddenly acquired this intense significance when he died. Even if it was broken or incomplete.
I have both my brother’s record collection and my sister’s record collection - I keep them separate from each other and from my record collection, because those collections are a reflection of their personalities. Even without playing them, I leaf through them and remember who they were. There are many redundancies in there - for example, I have my copy of ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’, and they each had copies - I have all three. There are many people who think that’s insane, but to me, it reflects the importance of that particular work to all of us.
My brother-in-law is the precise opposite to me - I’ve never met anyone so profoundly unsentimental in my life. I remember when we were clearing out my parents’ house after my mum died - the metal garbage can was clanging every two seconds. I’ve no idea what he might have thrown out that I would have wanted to keep. I do know that when he worked on the room I was staying in, he threw out a bunch of my stuff, not realizing I had put my stuff in the chest of drawers.
And I have never gone through a purge of my possessions when I haven’t wanted/needed something I threw out or gave away a couple of months later.
I’ve gone to Sint Maarten eighteen times with my gf. (Missed a year due to COVID, but went the year right after Hurricane Irma) Each trip we get a room at La Quinta near the Pittsburgh airport so we have a place to leave our car and use their shuttle back and forth. After checking in, we walk next door to Primanti Brothers where I get a capicola and egg sandwich and a few beers.
I keep some of that stuff for myself, and enjoy reminiscing with other people who were there at the same time and place, like my old high school classmates. On the other hand hearing about how it was in “the old days” before my time doesn’t give me any warm and fuzzies. Similarly, I have have no interest or desire in saving such artifacts that belonged to my parents or grandparents. Of course I also don’t expect my daughter or her future children to feel the same way about my memorabilia. Once I’m gone, throw that stuff away. Why would anyone else want it if it has no meaning to them?
I try not to think about anything before college because those thoughts inevitably lead into thinking about the devastating loss of my parents. Of course, I’m often not successful.
I don’t much. I keep useful stuff. Trophies and awards don’t have many uses.