Does anyone ever feel like they have been raised to be a hoarder?

My entire life, the practice of handing stuff down has made me afraid to throw stuff away. I’m not talking about clothing that’s passed down when one kid outgrows something; I’m talking dishwares, antiques, furniture, and a lot of unwanted junk from one persons house to the next. It’s a collection of accumulated stuff!

The older I get the less crap I want. I want to go explore and see and do stuff. As a result we are now at a point where we are now trying get rid of our belongings.

The problem is that I’m so overwhelmed with guilt of, “What can I get rid of? What do I need to keep? What’s going to get me kicked out of from the family if I dare to get rid of it?”

Don’t get me wrong; I totally get and respect the generations who went through much harder times. I also get when someone has a total loss of everything they own or didn’t have a lot due to financial hardship – they tend to hold closely things they do have or get after said hardship. I can empathize. But I also feel like sometimes life events can also make you accumulate stuff just to have stuff, like its a filling a void.

I’ve been there myself. When the kids were little, just like many young families, we struggled. As a bit of “retail therapy,” I would treat myself to the occasional thrift store visit (and let me tell you, $20 can really go a long way in a thrift store!), but it almost gets to be an addiction of collecting things. I really had a lot of “stuff,” but I justified it by telling myself, “Thrift store finds could be parted with; it’s no big deal if a current decor item goes out of style or something.” I got something “new,” but it wasn’t a big deal.

It became a big deal over time when you mix my “thriftiness” with a bunch of family hand-me-downs. Now I’m left with a lot of stuff that either has no real value or a ton of value depending on whether it was a Goodwill find or has been passed down to me from several previous generations.

There’s also that guilt about stuff that (let’s be honest) I have no need or want for.

Of course there’s special things I want to hold on to – keepsakes that have meaning to me But from all the stuff that’s been passed down to me from grandparents and what not, there’s a lot of stuff I don’t have any emotional attachment to. Well, none other than guilt because it was theirs.

Take wine glasses for example. I never used said wine glasses with them. Sure, they owned them, but they have no special meaning to me.

A camera that my grandfather had at every vacation and holiday, however, is something that comes with many special memories, like him teaching me how to use the camera and take a good picture. That installed a passion for photography in me. That camera is one of my prized possessions, and it sits on my shelf as decor piece because I want to see and enjoy and remember him and those memories every day. Even when we go on the road, I can take that with me.

But what about things like those wine glasses or dish sets? I’m left with a plathoria of guilt over all this other stuff. I know these wine glasses may have some special or historical meaning in them, and I’m sure they probably cost them quite a bit back then, but at the end of the day, they just sit in a dinning room cabinet. Let’s face it, I don’t do fancy entertaining (does anyone anymore?). I also have 3 boys. The chances of them wanting any of this stuff is probably zilch.

So what becomes of this stuff that has been carefully used and passed down for a lot of years when we are now a generation who doesn’t have a use for these things?

It’s not because we don’t appreciate them. I do. I really do (I can’t even keep my own cheap dishes and glasses all in a set without breaking and shattering them so how they managed to do that for generations totally respected and admired).

But if I legitimately have no use for these items, is there really any benefit to effectively “storing” them for the next generation? And how do I offload them without hurting anybody’s feelings?