Do you tend to hold on to possessions for purely sentimental reasons, or do you sell them or throw them out when they are no longer useful?
If you do get rid of them, do you ever regret it or feel bad about it? If you don’t get rid of them, are you drowning in things?
Both my husband and I hold onto things for sentimental reasons, and we also hold onto things because we think someday we might have a use for them. We are not exactly drowning in things, but only because we live in a rather large house.
For the most part, I hate clutter, so I don’t mind tossing stuff that’s taking up space. (and I’m pretty particular about avoiding buying stuff in the first place that I know is just going to end up with this fate)
Although, I have a few particular items with sentimental value, one of which I lost recently to my great dismay. It was a little leather decorative drawstring coin-bag that I got in Mexico, and carried with me all over the country (and Guatemala) in my travels. In Mexico, they actually use coins (10 peso pieces are roughly equivalent to 1 dollar, and there is no paper equivalent. Plus, a dollar goes a lot farther there) and I would keep my pesos in there wherever I went. I really, really loved that bag - stupidly, I was bringing it to work every day (I keep my own bank with customers and was keeping my change in it), and one day I left my apron that had it, along w/ my ID card and $30 cash, and no one returned it. I was really depressed about that. The ID card and cash were replacable, but I will never get that bag back.
I do have one large boxful of sentimental possessions, but I try not to acquire more and I’m mostly good at letting stuff go. I recently donated some children’s books that have been in my family for at least fifty years. I’d been keeping them for no other reason than that we’d had them so long…I didn’t care for them when I read them as a child, and they were just being kept in a box in a closet. I hope they’ve gone to someone who could appreciate them.
My MIL recently died and we had to sort through her possessions. She kept every card and letter she’d received, not to mention all the little knick-knacks she had, and the closetful of clothes with the tags still on. It was a difficult job to go through all that stuff, and in more ways than one.
I tend to be practical about objects – can’t think of anything I keep for purely sentimental reasons.
I’m not sentimental about much and I don’t like clutter. I am rarely sorry I threw something away unless I did it accidently.
I am an odd duck when it comes to being sentimental. Some things, yes, most things no. I think the rhyme/reason is that I tend to keep stuff that I think my children might be sentimental about – my old poetry, my grandmother’s jewelry, my father’s wallet. I don’t really want the stuff, but I think “what if my kids want it someday?”
As for just general stuff, I abhor clutter, so I tend to look at things as “will this be needed/used within the next 12 months?” If the answer is no or I don’t know, it gets thrown out. My husband hates that. He is sentimental about everything.
I did get pissy when I found out my prom dresses had disappeared, though. I had planned on wearing them again sometime. They were both handmade in a classic style (not typical prom dresses, trust me) and would have worked well for any dress-up occasion. Meh…such is life.
My mother warned my daughters to get to her home and take what they wanted as soon as she died. She says that my wife and I will have all of her stuff out for the trash before she is cold.
So, that is one large vote for me not being sentimental.
I’m not terribly sentimental about belongings, with one exception. I have in my closet a twenty-year-old 19-inch television that I won in a raffle. I couldn’t fit it in my backpack! I had to rent an apartment to put it in, and things only got more settled from there.
I look at it now and then, and wonder, “What if?”
I’m not sentimental. If I kept everything my mom gave me over the years, I’d have to get a storage shed. I’ve even started tossing old photos.
I’m more sentimental about handmade things, like stuff the kids made in school. And personal record items, like report cards, WWII ration books, and my dad’s seven sets of divorce papers.
I’m moderately sentimental. I don’t like clutter much, either, so I tend to throw out more than keep. My husband apparently wanted to keep everything he had ever owned in his life (we found boxes from some of his toys from his childhood in his apartment when we moved in together, never mind the toys), but he’s coming around on that since he saw my dad’s house after he died. My dad was a hoarder who didn’t clean. Ever.
I’m pretty bad about a lot of things. Things that mean something or are really nice, like the cuckoo clock my sister brought back from Germany for me, I definitely feel sentimental about. I still have some pictures and cards from my former boyfriend for whom I still carry an itty bitty torch, definitely sentimental.
When my grandmother died my dad and I went through her things, like someone mentioned above, she’d kept every letter, card, picture or school memo from we grandkids. Several of them I took and brought back home with me.
A small handful of letters my mom had written her when my parents were young for example. I got a huge kick out of reading about stuff like “this really nice apartment they’d gotten which was pretty expensive at $35 dollars a month, but well worth it”!! 
wow…
And my grandma was an amateur photog, so some of the pictures were really neat. Great black and whites of my parents and such. And then some silly pretty useless things like a bird my sister had drawn on a piece of government office letterhead.
But these are all things that are in a folder in my file cabinet. Someday I’ll scan them all, but I don’t know if I can throw them away. hmmmm.
If it doesn’t fit in my one “sentimental shoebox”, it gets tossed.
There are only a few things I can think of as I look around the house this morning that I am sentimental about.
I have a bottle of Japanese whiskey that was my Dad’s. I gave it to him when I first went to Japan. He was so proud of his “world-traveling executive” son and showed it off to everyone. When he died I asked mom if I could have it back.
I have a box of some small things given to me when I was in my 20s that I keep. I have my first teddy bear (it is as old as I am.)
And that is about it.
It doesn’t make me proud but I will admit to being attaching way too much sentiment to things. There have been two watershed events in my life which pretty much stripped me of the bulk of my material posessions each time. Anything I still have from before either of them has taken on a life separate from it’s original purpose.
The best advice I have ever been given on the subject is to reserve sentiment for people, who can return it, rather than things. And that helped me greatly reduce my collection. But still those things are precious to me and no matter how ruthless I become at clearing clutter I don’t think I’ll ever advance to the point of being able to get rid of them.
I’m sentimental about things, but it got to the point where the clutter was getting overwhelming. I read something (I think in an advice column, so I guess once in a while they do give good advice) about how many people with lots of sentimental things get into the habit of keeping things, whether or not they have sentimental value. With this in mind, I started looking at all my … well really, a lot of it was crap, and asking myself what exactly the sentimental meaning was. I was a little surprised that there were some items that I had no idea why I kept them or what they were supposed to mean. This helped me prune significantly.
My house is still a showcase for a lot of stuff, and if you are a design minimalist it would probably drive you crazy, but it’s a lot more manageable now and makes more sense to me.
Not very.
I save pictures, but not very often objects. I do have a dress that I saved from my senior prom. It’s black velvet and off the shoulder. I looked fabulous. I really did, and I can’t bring myself to get rid of that dress.
I am partly sentimental but I don’t have too many sentimental possessions. I do, however, hate waste, including wasting money so I hate the idea of just tossing something out. Sometimes, OTOH, things I do want to get rid of are hard to get rid of - I have a bunch of slide carousels that I don’t know what to do with but I don’t want to just pitch them into the trash. I also hate being inefficient, so buying something, giving it away, and then having to buy a new one someday seems stupid to me. I also like the convenience of having what I want when I want it. Most of my possessions are organized very well - if I have space to keep them. Where I’m in trouble is where I’ve run out of space.
So some things I keep because I expect I’ll need them again. Others I keep because I’m trying to figure out how to get rid of them without just tossing them into the trash. I’m not good at paying attention to my surroundings and I adapt very well, so that I have to make an effort to remind myself to do something about getting these things out.
But, in fact, today’s chore is to plan how to get rid of the more difficult things.
I don’t know how much of it is sentimentality and how much of it is just being resistant to getting rid of something that there is 1% chance that I could need/want in the future. But I discovered one trick to helping myself be able to get rid of things like old tshirts with sentimental value but that I don’t actually wear anymore. I take a picture of it! That way I feel like I still have it as a memory, but I don’t need the actual object. I’ve also heard of people turning old tshirts into pillows and quilts.
I am very sentimental about stuff I think deserves it. I am also almost the opposite of a packrat. I have this mental game that I play where I can sort things and decide with 1 - 2 seconds whether it will have any future value to me and what that could possibly be. Everything starts off with a negative rating so each and everything has to justify its existence every time I go through the exercise. I do have some sentimental things though although many are stored electronically at this point.