"We are such stuff / As dreams are made on"
A thousand pardons to the Bard, but I'll wager that even William Shakespeare had a problem with storage space - as in lack thereof. And since he used the "S" word as we do today, I'll again wager that he probably cursed all of the stuff for which he had no proper storage, yet couldn't bring himself to discard.
Now mind you, I can't think of nary a dream of mine which has been built upon the jumble of accumulated stuff littering B2's rat-infested, bug-infested hovel. All I know is that it is very difficult for me to throw things away.
A few years back I wrote about a glut of stuff crammed within Casa B2 and how it was (and still is) saved for future fix-it projects. Yet all of this stuff always seems to be in the way, and none of it is ever exactly what I need for any new project. But even after coming to grips with the fact that some of it has to go, I haven't tossed any of this man-made detritus. The fact is, no matter what label you assign - parts, junk, spares, collectibles, antiques, heirlooms, keepsakes, trash - it is all stuff and takes up space.
When in doubt, blame your parents
It's a sickness, an illness I tell you, and I place the blame squarely on my parents and in-laws. They had to ruin my life by living through the Great Depression as well as the rationing during World War II, and then reminding me of those awful times every wretched day. If you throw in the fact that we didn't have much disposable income when I was growing up, it's not hard to see why I have guilt-induced sticky fingers when it comes to stuff disposal.
My family and just about everybody else I knew reused everything, from clothing to screws, nuts, old electrical wire, any box ever made (many were wooden in those days), the tiniest scraps of wood or metal... You had to fix everything until it couldn't be fixed anymore, and then find an innovative use for that unfixable thing.
Of course, it was unthinkable to ever buy anything new when used would do, but even buying something new involved a great deal of pre-purchase product investigation, sales negotiation, or searching the far-flung reaches of the planet to find the best sale price. Let's not even get into the bartering aspect of stuff accumulation or the merits of product guarantees.
One's trash is another's junk
Used paint cans? Mom: "Dry 'em out - I can use them to hold clothespins out at the clothesline." Old window screen? Dad: "Don't throw that screen out! We'll make a Helgramite sifter." Helgramite? Yup, an aquatic insect larvae we used for fish bait - we would make wood-framed shaker-box sifters, jamb them under water alongside creek beds and catch the little varmints in the screen. Anyway, you get the picture - nothing was ever thrown away and everything had a second or third life.
All of which helps to explain why I have a hard time parting with things like those two huge, perfectly good molded foam pieces for which I have no use, that large, bizarrely-shaped metal cone that has no apparent purpose (or clue as to origin, for that matter), myriad empty coffee cans I'm saving to organize stuff that I'll never organize, the jumbo cooler with the broken hinges and clasp and the interior scarred with multiple cracks, the five-gallon plastic buckets filled with odd assortments of this and that I no longer recognize as ever having a use, uncountable wood scraps, that cheap flashlight with the metal switch parts eroded away by battery acid ...
Insightful planning vs delusional compulsion
[Sigh] And that is merely an inkling of the practical stuff I have clogging my existence. I've read that people who can't seem to throw things away are unusually intelligent and see more connections between things, which leads them to value those things much more than others. However, I have also read that this is a type of excessive-compulsive disorder, which is why I always do my best to ignore what I read.
However, let's be realistic. Each of you knows that once you throw something away, that something will not be there when you really need it, and then you have to go through the hassle and expense of purchasing a new or used something to replace the discarded something. And that is assuming the particular something is still manufactured or can even be found.
Let's face it - most of you reading this are in the same boat but don't have the guts to admit it. I know this is true because I keep my eyes open when I visit friends and relatives. They are all, in one form or another, swimming alongside me in an endless sea of stuff. Closets, attics, and garages are filled with teeming piles of stuff that will never again see any practical use. We all know this is true and yet we all hang on to our stuff.
So why not just start throwing things away? Say what? Don't you know that your looking at a perfectly good 1956 Schwinn Speedster bicycle chain?