Let’s Talk About Accumulating Stuff—and Getting Rid of It—in This Friday’s Open Thread

Stuff! When you don't have it, you want it. And when you have it, you don't know where to put it. And when you want it gone, no one wants to take it.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I moved recently within Minneapolis from Corcoran to Kingfield. All went well. It was a fairly unstressful experience as moves go, and I love the new place. But after living for 11 years somewhere that, quite frankly, was too much space for one person, and in moving to a more appropriately Keith-sized home I had to come to terms with how much I'd tucked away in the old spot's many out of the way nooks.

Old furniture and other big, useful items like you can always find a taker for. (Though the members of buy-nothing groups are way more demanding than people who are not spending any money have a right to be.) And for old TVs and electronics, this place is terrific. Fun to browse, too, even if you're not a geek, especially if you're on the hunt for old stereo equipment.

But then there are the boxes and boxes of books and CDs. I was writing about music back when you'd get a stack of CDs in the mail each week, and though I'd sell off batches of them regularly (a nice little side hustle) I also kept plenty for research purposes. I don't want to sell them all (physical media has its uses) but the ones I do want to offload are essentially worthless.

As for books, I lived, mostly unhappily, in New York from 2006-2009, and my preferred form of retail therapy was dropping $20 at The Strand or some other used bookstore a few times a week and coming home with three or four books I'd never read.

OK, thanks for listening to me whine for a bit. Now let's talk about stuff. What do you have that you should jettison? What's holding you back, if anything? What have you gotten rid of that you wish you'd held on to?

Of course, feel free to skip this prompt and talk about anything you want. This is your open thread, after all.