I had the display case open on the table and a plan worked out. Fifty Rose Parade pins, four sets, listed individually. Two hundred listings, two hundred small photographs, two hundred descriptions. It would take weeks, and at the end of it the case would be empty and I would have money.
Something made me check eBay before I started cutting. Similar pins were selling for two or three dollars each. After fees I’d clear about a dollar a pin. Two hundred hours of work for two hundred dollars, and at the end of it a thing I liked wouldn’t exist any more. I closed the case and put it back on the shelf. It’s still there.
Why does decluttering advice never tell you when to stop?
Every guide I’ve read is built around getting going. Start with one drawer. Start with the obvious rubbish. Build momentum. Don’t stop.
The advice isn’t wrong, and it works. Momentum is the hard part at the beginning, because most of us are standing in a room we’ve been avoiding for years.
What almost none of it tells you is when to stop, and that omission is where the damage happens. Momentum doesn’t know the difference between a drawer of dead batteries and a case of pins you collected over a decade. It just wants the next thing in the box. I’d built exactly that momentum. I’d cleared the garage, cleared two closets, and was moving fast enough that the pins looked like inventory instead of a collection. Fast enough that I nearly didn’t check.
What is the difference between a collection and an accumulation?
People use hoarder as an insult and collector as a defense, and neither word is doing much work. The distinction that survives contact with an actual attic is simpler.
An accumulation is everything that arrived and stayed. Nobody chose it. It came in the post, or came free, or came with something else, and there was never a moment where anybody decided to have it. A collection is a set of things somebody chose on purpose, one at a time, for a reason they could still explain. The pins are a collection. The three boxes of cables in the same room are an accumulation.
Both live in the same house and look similar from the doorway, so purges go wrong. You can’t apply one rule to a room containing both.
Who were you before you learned to stop?
My parents Jerry and Valerie were hoarders. By the time they died they had a one-bedroom apartment packed floor to ceiling, with pathways between the towers. Two storage units crammed with valuable things they never saw again and were paying monthly rent on. It didn’t start that way. Jerry collected art supplies. That makes sense for a graphics artist who later painted for a living. Valerie collected antiques. My maternal grandmother Jean collected UFO magazines with the dedication of somebody who believed the information might matter one day. Somewhere along the way collecting became accumulating and accumulating became hoarding. Valerie’s antiques multiplied into anything remotely old or interesting. Jerry’s art supplies became every piece of everything that might ever be worth something.
After my mother died, my father donated the contents of one storage unit. Then he died too. I was three thousand miles away when the social worker who managed the apartment complex rang me to describe what she was looking at and ask what to do with it. I told her to donate all of it.
I felt numb. Not surprised, because I’d watched it build for decades. Not triumphant, because they were gone.
When do you notice hoarding in yourself?
When Claudia died in 2005 and the evidence of what I was becoming surrounded me.
When Claudia died in 2005 and the evidence of what I was becoming surrounded me.Share on X
Her things, my things, a household full of accumulated weight, and suddenly all of it mine to deal with. I spent a year pitching her belongings into garbage bins as a form of survival.
In that year I read a book called Not for Packrats Only and it landed exactly right. I looked at what I’d built up and recognized the pattern. I was heading down the same path as my parents.
I had been telling myself I was different. I was a collector, not a hoarder. I’d interests, hobbies, legitimate reasons for acquiring things. Every one of those sentences was true and none of them was the point.
How much is a lifetime of clutter really worth?
The first time I sold seriously, I made thirty-five thousand dollars. That’s not a typo, and it’s not a boast either, because what it really means is that I’d accumulated thirty-five thousand dollars of sellable goods without noticing.
Every purge since has yielded less. Partly because I sold the obviously valuable things first, and partly because I got better at not acquiring in the first place. The trend line on those numbers is the real measure of whether the habit changed. The pins would have been a rounding error against that. Two hundred dollars, spread across weeks of tedious work, in exchange for permanently ending something. The arithmetic was so lopsided that once I saw it the decision made itself.
That’s the practical version of the advice: before you break up anything that took years to assemble, find out what it’s worth.
Not what you imagine, and not what the completed listings you want to believe say. Actual recent sold prices. It takes ten minutes and it’s the only thing standing between momentum and regret.
Why are the hardest things to throw out never the valuable ones?
The hardest items are the ones carrying a story.
The exercise equipment is the version of you who was going to get fit. The books you haven’t opened are the reader you meant to be. The craft supplies are a hobby you’d for six weeks in 2014 and enjoyed enormously. None of those objects is doing anything for the person you’re now. They’re doing something for a person you imagined, and keeping them doesn’t make that person more likely to arrive. Usually the opposite, because a house full of unstarted projects is quite good at producing guilt and quite bad at producing action.
The pins are different. I don’t keep them because I might get back into it. I keep them because I liked collecting them and I still like looking at them. That’s a live reason instead of a story about a future that’s not coming.
For years I was one of the credentialed photographers covering the Rose Parade in Pasadena. I’d get there at 3 in the morning, set up and follow the parade, inches from the floats. One year a rainstorm hit that was incredible, super cold. That was the year I decided to take the bus. It was terrible, but it was fun and an adventure.
Who sorts a hoarder’s belongings if nobody else does?
People avoid thinking about who ends up sorting their things, and that avoidance is the reason the book has the title it has.
Everything in your house gets sorted eventually. If you don’t do it, somebody who loves you does it in a fortnight, grieving. They’ll have no idea which box holds the thing that mattered and which holds twenty years of bank statements. They won’t know that the pins were a collection. They’ll see a case of small metal objects and make the fastest decision available.
That’s a practical argument. You’re the only person alive who can tell the difference between your collection and your accumulation, and that knowledge doesn’t transfer.
The book on this: The Dead Don’t Need Stuff is 168 pages on telling a collection from an accumulation, and on clearing a house without destroying the part that mattered.
How do you stop before you break something up?
Check the numbers before the labor. Sold prices, not asking prices. If the return is under about five dollars an item after fees, you’re donating with extra steps.
Name what it’s out loud. Collection or accumulation. If you can’t say why you chose it, it’s the second one.
Stop when you notice momentum making decisions. The sign is speed. If you’re not pausing on individual items any more, you’ve stopped sorting and started clearing.
Put the hard things aside instead of deciding under pressure. One box, revisited when the sorting energy has passed. Most of it’ll be easy in a month.
Defend the collections. Whatever survives this process on purpose deserves a shelf instead of a storage tub. If it’s worth keeping it’s worth being visible.
The case sits where I can see it. I know exactly what those pins are worth, about a hundred and fifty dollars, and considerably more than that to me. Both of those numbers were necessary to make the decision, and only one of them was on eBay.
