True for me, I think. My wife is a bit of a hoarder… she keeps trunkloads of photographs, almost of which will never be looked at again. At least, I have never seen them unearthed. But OK, I guess: it’s a sort of security blanket? They don’t do any harm so I just let them junk up the house for the sake of domestic harmony.
Things I keep… my musical instruments, I still play and record music though the spark is not so strong these days…
And recordings of earlier musical work.
But holiday snaps or souveniers… nope, none of those. Memory is enough.
Some of us probably remember the excruciating evenings when our parents’ friends gave an interminable slideshow of ‘our gourmet holiday in Tuscany’…
Yeah, I don’t do that. There may be a handful of photographs in a shoebox somewhere in a closet, I guess. Diplomas and stuff are…somewhere around, I guess.
Just as the OP said, very nicely, if it doesn’t have future application, I’m not keeping it.
So, books I may want to refer to again, those stay. That old computer I may get around to flashing a SOIC chip on? Well, I might well do it, and it would be instructive.
Even with that proviso, it still ends up skirting the line between hoarding/clutter and outright collecting of sentimental pieces.
Greatest useless indulgence? Yeah, I keep empty bottles of expensive whiskies…probably should toss those, or use them as practice for using the “sabrer” technique, or target practice, or something. Build ships in bottles if I survive into dotage years.
I saved almost everything since birth, and if I had planned better, I would have saved everything.
A friend saw some of my binders full of stuff, and said, “you know, when you die, someone is going to have to go through this and throw it out? because no one wants this?” And I was like, “I don’t CARE! I’m not saving it for them!”
I have a giant stash of ticket stubs and my college and grad school diplomas and that’s it. I trashed everything else.
Quite a few years ago I had a couple of boxes of stuff and two childhood photo albums and my yearbooks. I did not have joyful childhood and it would annoy me every time I saw that old crap. Little by little I tossed all of it and each time it felt amazing! I remember thinking that I would go through the yearbooks before getting rid of them and I got part way though one of them and couldn’t take it anymore. Same with the photo albums.
I save stuff from childhood and college, but never look at it. I have a big “memory” basket and if I didn’t have things with my kid in there, I’d chuck the whole thing. It just sits there because I don’t want to sort through all that crap. I don’t want the pictures or journals or my high school diploma. I’d be happy to forget the first half of my life. Yes, there were good memories, but is it terrible if I think they weren’t worth it?
I like to remember things with my kid, though. We are already earmarking some things to save when he’s through with them. My husband takes over a thousand pictures a year of him and I never get tired of browsing them.
I inherited the family photos that were in a bunch of shoeboxes. When I retired, I finally got around to doing a cull , and I was really surprised at how few I kept. I also kept most of my mother’s photos from when she was a young single woman in the San Francisco bay area. But my mom had kept a lot of Christmas cards from her friends that meant nothing to me. We must have had 20 Christmas cards from The Brown Family who I’m sure I never ever met. Those all went to recycle.
I kept nothing from work, except for a name plaque (and the “No Smoking” sign from the TSO room) from my first real job. I also kept the name cardboard thingie from the time I was on a TV debate show in high school.
Other than that I mostly collect things I personally like…not because of sentimental value.
My wife has inherited all the photos from both our families. We have many times over the years gone through the “who is that?” game. Not just babies, three girls in her family and three boys in mine, we’ll never know about some of them. Maybe some are pictures of cousins, family friends, or came with the album. If there is info written on the back make sure you get a shot of that if you’re digitizing everything.
The fun thing is that Mom did try to clear out and arrange things. She drove down from Idaho with three office boxes of photos and we spent days labeling them. So I thought that everything was labeled.
Years later, after she died, we found seven more boxes of various shapes and sizes under her bed. Those were the ones that she had inherited. Some of the photos in them were labeled.
And, oh yes, scan the backs of any pictures you’re scanning.
In the 70s and 80s my dad took pictures that were made into slides because he thought, likely correctly, that the pictures came out better. Of course he had a few dozen of those round plastic things full of slides and never looked at them even once. My sister got them when he died. If there was a projector, we never found it.
She was able to throw a lot of the boxes in the trash without checking because they were labeled “Germany 1981” or whatever which would have been a business trip. She tried looking through a few others and they were, at best, crappy family pictures. All went in the trash.
The only collection of objects that could count as memories is on the mantle above my fireplace.
From left to right, I have:
a fez from a Doctor Who-themed birthday party
a picture of a past dog Reggie, currently buried under cobblestones so my present dog doesn’t dig him up
a picture of me taken at a dock in Wilmington NC
5 WWE zombie dolls - Bray Wyatt, Kevin Owens, Seth Rollins, Paige, and Sasha Banks
a gnome-shaped incense holder
a Xmas decoration of Cthulhu wearing a Santa hat
a maquette sculpture I made for Living Arts College of an office worker with all his limbs ripped off but being held together by little demons masquerading as him
the skull of a border collie I used to have named Lita, that my current dog dug up
I inherited a bunch of slides, some in carousels and some in boxes, from my dad. When I inherited the slide projector from my mom, we set it up and plopped one of the carousels on to look at memories of my time in Indonesia as a child.
Only to discover that my dad had painstakingly documented, in loving detail, many of his most extreme surgical cases. At least they were in black and white.
I’m not big on mementos. I’ve got the shirt number and medal from my first marathon, and some old birthday cards a friend made because I still take them out and admire them decades later. She was a calligrapher and they are just plain beautiful.
