>I think your polyurethane example mirrors what I see with my mom, and to some degree in myself, and it's something different. It's a fear that you're throwing away something useful. It's not that me or my mom is unable to decide, it's just that we don't want to throw it away because perhaps one day it might be useful (to us or someone else), so we decide to keep it.

This to a T.

My hoarding, which fortunately is mostly digital, is grounded in the fact I came across far too many fucking instances of "Why the hell didn't I keep that?!" such that the prospective cost of throwing something away (deleting it) far outweighs the cost of just keeping it.

Hence I've kept even files that I know for an absolute certainty I would never need again but still hoard because what if I need it?!

As an example: I have a PDF scanned copy of my passport renewal application from over 10 years ago. I will never need it again, the form itself is no longer valid, literally nobody would want it. But I keep it. Why? Because "Why the hell didn't I keep that?!".

I fear what would happen if I learn the same lesson in the physical world.

Yes, it's that.. you can easily find someone with regrets of having thrown something away which actually turned out to be useful later (I have lots of those), but it's very rare to find someone saying "I really regret I didn't throw that away" (unless it's e.g. some chemical stuff which went bad and created a mess). So, better safe than sorry.. I've hoarded a lot of stuff, but I've also realized there's not enough time left in life to use everything, even though I only hoard stuff I'm actually interested in. So I dump stuff. And sometimes I regret it - where's that nice piece of wood I had stashed away, now suddenly it would have been useful.. so I go and buy, instead. And so on.

Fortunately digital content rots extremely slowly, especially if emulation is available. Physical stuff sometimes does, the more chemical or advanced it is, the more it rots.

With physical things it really depends on what you save. I personally tend to keep a bunch of hardware around many people would not. Some of those things will most definitely go out of usefulness date before I get to them, but are hard to get anyway so weird to get rid of. These are liable to become useless. Others are older spare parts that would not, but I cannot be bothered to sell them just yet... They might go out of style and become useless, but are likely to keep their value.

Yet more are some pieces for plans the didn't pan out yet, but they might. These won't break or might get used for something else. And a few fixable broken things that are not quite junk. These might get fixed depending on requirements.

That is different from my mom's minor hoarding in that she keeps things that will not get used for anything ever, look cute but are horrible to keep, and additionally I do regularly clean out total junk...

The new meta is to give stuff to people who will make use of it.

I don't have a tendency to hoard, but I do find it useful when I'm considering whether to keep a thing, to consider whether I can easily buy an equivalent or better thing on Amazon or eBay and have it at my house within a couple of days for a minimal cost. If so, then the question isn't whether the thing will someday potentially be needed, but whether I'm willing to potentially pay $X if and when that happens, in exchange for not having the thing take up space in my house until then. If you want to get fancy with it, you can mentally multiply X by the odds of that day every coming.

This is a strategy I'm trying to adopt as well. For a lot of things though the answer is that it's not easy to get a replacement easily and cheaply (no Amazon in Norway), which makes the decision tough.

Another strategy I'm trying to adopt is one my brother-in-law lives by, which is to focus on one "thing" at a time. Like he recently wanted to get an RC race car. So he sold his previous "thing" and bought an RC car setup. He'll keep it for a year or two until he finds something else he wants to try and he'll sell the RC car stuff and buy something else.

I tried this strategy as well, but I've been disappointed when business update their portfolio. Typical example keeping a couple of door knob in case the old model is not available in future, so that all innrr doors in the house have the same knob.

It's funny, I was just chatting with a friend at brunch today about this thread, and he mentioned the same thing. Turns out we both do keep a dedicated box of extra house parts for this reason. There are indeed things that aren't easily replaced and it can make sense to keep. But if you're going to do that, you want to make sure there's a system so you can find them if you do end up needing them, and also so you don't end up with crap you don't need taking up space.

This is one of the tacks I have to take with my partner sometimes because she will hold on to stuff she thinks she can’t get again. She’s getting better at getting rid of stuff we don’t need.

>>"can't let go in case it might be useful... "

Yup, that's a key right there.

I do have a more inherited items from my family's past than I can use and have a hard time getting rid of these items.

I find that it is definitely easier when I can give it to someone who will care for it, or even a charity thrift store (e.g., some animal shelters run them for funding). Just tossing it in the dumpster or leaving it in the rain is almost painful, but if it seems that it'll be taken care of (especially better than I would), it's all right.

Similarly, I work with some very expensive materials at my composites business, and offcuts can be valuable. I cringe to put those offcuts in the dumpster, but when they accumulate too much, just giving them away on Craigslist to someone who will use them feels fine.

So, both the inability to make decisions, and also the ability to let someone else make the decision that you'd make (i.e., figure out how to put the stuff to use), are both helpful angles.