Pointless Collections

That’s my collection of magnets on the fridge. Over the past 3 or 4 years, I’ve been trying to pick one up from every city/state/place that I end up visiting. They’re a good thing to collect since they take up so little space and I’ll always have a place to put them since I’ll always have a fridge. Or a stove. Or a metal door. I also like that most of them are durable, they don’t get scratched up or dusty since they’re all stuck on the fridge, and they’re prominently displayed where people can see them rather than being put away in a box or a drawer. Magnets are the only thing I collect anymore.

I used to collect lots of crap. I had a gigantic phone collection, a basement full of outdated computer systems and accessories, dozens of boxes filled with miscellaneous plugs and wires, a sizable DVD collection, probably 1,000 books (95% that were probably only read once or less), business cards, hundreds of t-shirts. I collected all kinds of phone company related items such as pay phone inserts, calling cards, advertisements, plates and postcards.

I had most of an entire room of our basement filled with kids clothing that my kids either outgrew or hadn’t grown into yet. I didn’t want to throw any of it out, because I might know someone that needed that size of kids clothing someday. And of course I had to collect dressers, shelves, totes, and racks to keep all this stuff on.

Each year, I worked at building up my Christmas and Halloween decorations. In the days after each holiday was over, I would snag even more decorations to add to the giant totes that stored our various holiday things. I also saved every little scrap of wood from my home renovations and other projects. I built wooden racks to store all the spare wood on. I had piles of alarm clocks, piles of smoke detectors and piles of circuit boards.

At some point during the past 4 or 5 years, I realized how pointless it was to collect so much stuff. All it did was take up space, deteriorate and cost money to maintain. There was really no reason to keep any of it. My constant acquiring of stuff was turning me into a compulsive hoarder. I bet that’s how those people start out, just collecting things that seem useful at the time. Soon after my realization, I was lucky enough to get a huge kickstart in ridding my life of all those possessions.

In 2005, I moved from Illinois to Oregon. And thankfully, I deemed it way too expensive to move my giant house full of useless stuff to Oregon with me. I didn’t intend to get rid of all my stuff right away, though. At first, I decided I would just sell all the furniture, put my stuff in storage, cram what I really needed into the car and drive to Oregon. And that’s what I did. I made more than enough money to move myself to Oregon by selling 3 floors of furniture. And I just barely managed to shove everything else into a 10 x 12 storage unit.

I planned to try and move it all to Oregon. And while I still missed some of my old stuff once I moved to Oregon, it kind of made me realize how much I didn’t really need it and I began to despise the $50/month bill that I was paying to store 960 cubic feet of things I didn’t really even need. When I visited Illinois the following Christmas, I got rid of half of the things in storage. I either sold it, donated it to Salvation Army, or threw it away. It was painful to throw away so much good stuff, but it felt great. The following summer, I got to do it all again. It took about 20 months and over $1,000 in storage fees, but it was finally all gone. Sure, I still kept some of it. Mostly just sentimental and/or useful things, though.

That’s how I managed to rid myself of probably 95% of my possessions. And I’ve done pretty good at not letting it pile up again either. I’ve actually sold every single one of my DVDs during the past year. And I’ve been buying books cheap on Amazon, reading them, and then immediately selling them back. Sometimes even at a profit! I even use the library. It makes so much more sense than owning thousands of books I’ll never read again. I’m a regular donater at Goodwill and a regular seller on Craigslist. I throw out all of my kids clothes that are too small instead of waiting years to meet someone who has a kid that might need them. My own collection of shirts is at a reasonable level. I even get rid of electronics that I don’t think I’ll ever use again and I only own phones that I actually hook up to phone lines regularly.

Last year, I talked to this old man at a flea market who had a table full of baseball memorabilia. Everything you could imagine related to baseball was on this huge table. I asked him how he ended up with so much of it and he said he’d been collecting it since he was a boy. It was just something he obsessively collected for 30+ years, for no reason really. He told me he didn’t even need the money, but he didn’t know what else to do with it all and wanted to get it out of his house because it was just taking up space. So he rents a table every few weeks at the flea market, trying to get rid of it all. That’s your future, collectors of stuff.

So ask yourself…do you really need several closets and dressers full of clothing? Is your collection of stolen ashtrays really worth the space that they take up? Wouldn’t you love to make hundreds of dollars by selling your DVD collection? I ended up getting over $500 for all of mine. All those movies and TV shows are on cable all the time anyway, aren’t they? On-demand programming is growing quick on both the internet and cable TV, so all those DVDs (and even Blu-ray discs) are going to be obsolete in just a few short years. Better sell them while they’re still worth something.

How about making a few more hundred dollars by selling all of your books? I bet half of what you own is available at the library anyway, as well as tons of what you don’t own. Make a small fortune by selling them! Does your room full of Star Wars action figures and toys really mean that much to you? Do you really think it’s going to go up in value? Will that value even be worth the effort of storing it all for 50 years? How about those cute little figurines that you keep in a glass case. What are they good for? Are you seriously keeping those hundreds of magazines for reference? How many times have you actually referred to them?

In closing, watch this short video:George Carlin – Stuff. And I expect the comments area of this post to quickly fill with people telling me how I’ve made them decide to free their lives of clutter.