Of course, now I realise jus how close the Second World War was. If the war had finished in 1997, with rationing continuing until 2007, I too might be loathe to throw things away.
But I draw a line at normal paper :)
She also used to wash ziploc bags for reuse.
There, it is just not so visible because disk space is ever increasing as well as getting cheaper.
In the days of Napster, people collected gigabytes of music just to have it - at some point this was more minutes than they could ever listen to in a life span.
Few people actually care to collect that stuff in order to make it accessible to more people. For example, the people at archive.org, as well as many libraries, are doing a great job.
But the majority of collectors collect only for their own, usually with an unwieldy directory structures and meaningless file names (track1, track2, ...). They won't ever find anything they search for. It's often faster to search & buy those via Internet. Same with movies.
It is even worse with personal photographs and videos. The same way some people have loads of paper photographs around, other have disks full of digital photographs. 200+ photographs per day of vacation are not uncommon. Who will ever look at those?
Reducing those to the "best" 10-20 items already feels like an imposition to most. Reducing those further to 1 photograph to summarize the vacation is considered extremist by most. And even then, they will just mark the best photos, but won't delete anything except for the most blurred garbage photos.
Even more strangely, some people do feel the urge to clean up their mess, but as with physical items, deleting loads of digital items takes a lot of time for them. This is the next round of absurdity: They would rather spend a weekend (or full week) on finishing their photo/video archive than to go out for another trip.
Maybe we need a "digital item" version of Paul Graham's classic "stuff" article? http://paulgraham.com/stuff.html
I have thousands of albums in my google play account, go through spurts of adding more, and constantly listen to the whole collection on shuffle. It shows how many times each song has been listened to, it's rare for me to ever see a song without at least one play.
(And playing it on a TV screen in the background while doing computer/tablet/smartphone stuff is not what I would consider "healthy" consumption, because then it is more a source of noise than anything else. You can't really enjoy it and miss most of the movie.)
It's small enough that it isn't an issue, and it's nice to look at the refrigerator and remember all the places we've been.
My mother wasn't quite as bad, but she used to have her own mountain of decorations until I got her to agree to let me get rid of about 75% of it. It's still taking up about 12 or so large plastic storage bins, but it's way less than it had been.
Nowadays we do want durable items even if we are more at leisure to replace them. I am very happy that most of the easy to fail components in my MacBook Air are replaceable (I/O board, fan, battery, SSD) and would love it if other parts were too. Working on computers for as long as I have I know people like to get what they can out of a computer; the number who just go buy a new one when it dies isnt as high as you'd think. Same with other items like phones, cars, etc.