alt Hacker NewsEven if you have the space I'd caution against it. Cleaning out my parent's house after my mother's death was a chore, and they weren't hoarders in the classic sense but they had a lot of stuff. Thousands of family photographs, in boxes, that had never been organized or put in albums. Clothing, in suitcases, that hadn't been worn in decades. Toys from my childhood. Furniture with almost zero resale value. It all went in a dumpster. It was emotionally draining to get rid of some of it because I had memories attached to it. The thing is, if they had gotten rid of that stuff themselves, I would never have missed it. Even after all that I probably ended up keeping too much of it. I now have several shelves in my basement with boxes from my parent's house, that I have never opened since bringing them home.
I have promised myself that I will not leave that kind of accumulated junk for my kids to sort through some day, but I honestly wonder if I will get around to doing my own purge. It hasn't happened yet.
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Relatable. In my case my dad passed away and at the time my relationship with him wasn’t the best. It wasn’t until I had a child of my own, about 5 years later, that I started to empathize with him orders of magnitude more - and to wish I had more of his things to help me feel closer to him. Sadly, I had kept almost none of it because I lived in a 1-bedroom condo in the city at that time and didn’t feel like I could spare any space for any of it.
> The thing is, if they had gotten rid of that stuff themselves, I would never have missed it.
I took the same lesson from clearing out my parents things. What I'm trying to do now is to clear out incrementally. Doing a full sweep is way too easy to defer to future me and therefore never happens, so I try to do a small amount regularly. My big box of cables (another recent thread here) is a rich source of material that will keep me busy for a while. Pretty sure nobody will appreciate going through that.
Also just trying to notice things around the place that I really don't need, books I'll never read again, boxes that have not been opened for years. A little bit at a time. Removing each one gives a small sense of achievement.