This hobby desperately needs this kind of thing. There is so much material that could be of interest to researchers down the line. The hobby is the people making things to play, not the companies. What would Jon Peterson's work look like without the zines and other primary sources?
Sadly going to be the first of many - estate sales with tons of stuff we nerds love
Golden Bee
Explorer
Donate the books to fill empty prison libraries.
Eyes of Nine
Everything's Fine
True fact. I'm thinking personally of when my mom passed. My siblings and dad and I went through the house, and most of it I personally didn't resonate with. One of my siblings had a lot more emotional connection to much of it; but of course they lived in the smallest living quarters. And then my other sibling lives in Japan so we weren't shipping anything to him. sigh
Sacrosanct
Legend
Exactly. My mom keeps telling us kids who to break up her stuff, what to go through, etc. like we're all keeping it. It's important to her, but to us it's just junk. It's going to be a pain in the butt to deal with all that stuff when she passes.
No, when it gets to be my time, I'm going minimalist so my kids don't have to deal with it.
Ya. Had this conversation with my mom a few years ago. She was unhappy when I said I wanted nothing. Like, she had this commemorative plate from my birth year, which I had never even seen before. What am I going to do with that?
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
I have actually held off on some RPG purchases in recent years, because I know I'll be inheriting my dad's RPG stuff sooner than I'd like.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Scandanavian Death Cleaning -- "purge your crap now, because your kids don't want 99% of it" -- is one of the better minimalism trends in recent years.
MGibster
Legend
In early 2020, The Wall Street Journal had an article called "The Awkward Heirloom: No One Wants Grandma's Fur Coat. It wasn't that long ago a fur coat for the missus was a real status symbol and something a lot of women really, really wanted. And properly cared for, these fur coats and stoles can last for many, many decades and are something you could pass down to your kids. But many young people don't want these coats for a variety of reasons. The most obvious is there's a negative association with fur these days. My mother still has a fox stole, but she never wore it once we returned to the United States for fear of negative and/or violent reactions. And even if a kid doesn't care about that, those fur coats aren't really in style in most areas of the US. And even if you wanted to keep it, you do have to take special care of it and that's just a pain. The fur coat just doesn't mean to young people today what it meant to their grandmother's in the 1950s. For some families, games are going to be the same.
I've had this discussion once with my mother-in-law and only because she broached the subject herself. It was just me and her in the basement, and she made a comment about getting rid of stuff because she's not getting any younger and I encouraged her to do so. While we were in the basement, I pointed out to all the sewing magazines she had from the 80s and 90s that nobody's looked through in decades and are full of patterns that aren't in style. But then this is the type of woman who won't turn loose anything that might be useful. As we were tossing the five non-working dehumidifiers she suggested we keep the wheels just in case we needed them for something else.
I imagine people keep their stuff for multiple reasons. Some people have a hard time confronting their own mortality. Others grew up having very little and throwing something away that's "perfectly good" just seems so wasteful.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
The rough thing about the fur coats, from the standpoint of the people who bought them, is that they were sold to them as a form of generational wealth, that would be handed down to their kids and for whom the investment would remain valuable. Now, thanks to a variety of factors, that's just not the case any more. (See also: jewelry in general.)
MGibster
Legend
Aw, man. The average price of a fur coat in 1950 was $1,500 which is equal to about $20,000 in today's money. Even a "cheap" fur coat for $600 would have been almost $8,000 in today's money. The biggest problem I've seen with jewelry is that styles change over the years. Heirloom jewelry ends up looking like something a grandma would wear because that's what the style was when she was younger. If you just wait long enough I imagine some of it will come back into fashion.
A few years back when my grandfather died we found my uncle's white box D&D set. My uncle died around 1980-81, all I have are some vague memories of him, and I didn't even know he played D&D. I was hoping I'd be able to keep it, but one of my aunts decided she was going to hold on to it. I was a little disappointed, but seeing as how it was her brother and I don't actually feel entitled to anything my grandparents had I kept it to myself.
