Millennials are about to be crushed by all the junk their parents accumulated.
Every time Dale Sperling’s mother pops by for her weekly visit, she brings with her a possession she wants to pass on. To Sperling, the drop-offs make it feel as if her mom is “dumping her house into my house.” The most recent offload attempt was a collection of silver platters, which Sperling declined.
“Who has time to use silver? You have to actually polish it,” she told me. “I’m like, ‘Mom, I would really love to take it, but what am I going to do with it?’ So she’s dejected. She puts it back in her car.”
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Sperling’s conundrum is familiar to many people with parents facing down their golden years: After they’ve acquired things for decades, eventually, those things have to go. As the saying goes, you can’t take it with you. Many millennials, Gen Xers, and Gen Zers are now facing the question of what to do with their parents’ and grandparents’ possessions as their loved ones downsize or die. Some boomers are even still managing the process with their parents. The process can be arduous, overwhelming, and painful. It’s tough to look your mom in the eye and tell her that you don’t want her prized wedding china or that giant brown hutch she keeps it in. For that matter, nobody else wants it, either.
Much has been made of the impending “great wealth transfer” as baby boomers and the Silent Generation pass on a combined $84.4 trillion in wealth to younger generations. Getting less attention is the “great stuff transfer,” where everybody has to decipher what to do with the older generations’ things.
The universal accumulation of stuff in western (& western influenced) societies:
- landfills & shit pools instead of remediation & recycling
- oil & plastics as a life blood (subsidized by governments)
- consumerism over creation
- marketing: “corporations will produce better things for us and solutions to our problems” hogwash
I’m given hope, hearing recent art show in California is entirely made from trash.
That said, our inheritance is banks of shit & “trash”, oil & plastics centric toxic energy-hole, and a society that subscribes to corporate dependence.
Wake! Create! Remediate!
I feel like I just read a Dr. Bronner’s soap bottle label.
Haha jokes on the kid! My grandmother would buy all sorts of crap only use it once then give it to my mom. My mom has it piled away in a store room and when she goes, I’ll add it to my hoard collection. (Were not super hoard-y and can still walk and use all my furnature, etc, we just cant bring ourselves to throw away things that work, in case we need or want them one day / possibly sell them as collectables, even though they’re worth nothing now…) when I go, the kid will inherent 3 generations of crap. Sucker!
My folks have been spinning off their treasures for a couple decades now. They waited until their kids had already established & furnished their own households, so a lot of it ended up in the category of “Yes, I can put this in the trash for you.”
Lifespans are at the awkward stage where the kids are too old and the grandkids too young to want any of those household staples.
First world problems
Most boomers aren’t leaving shit to us but debt and worse economy ever. What fuck is this article. Answer is sell the shit.
To who? Aquaman?
Ahahahaha thank you.
Answer is sell the shit.
Sell it to who? Nobody else wants the shit either, that’s the problem
This is the truth. Both sets of parents have dumped stuff on us often enough that we’ve had to put our collective foot down and refuse most items. Gone are the days were there might be just a few real nice items people wanted to keep, now it’s collections of Precious Moments figurines or similar that nobody wants.
It’s really hard to get rid of stuff that is still good and useful. You can barely literally give it away. I hate waste, so just dumping whatever it is in the trash is an absolute last resort. Places you would think that would take stuff are also overwhelmed and won’t take a ton of different things. Salvation Army, Goodwill…all of them have gotten picky and will refuse things even if new on occasion.
It’s really given me a deep revulsion for “stuff”. If something comes into our house it has to have a real purpose, or if it’s replacing something, the old thing must go ASAP.
Salvation Army and Goodwill don’t refuse things— I’m not sure where you’re getting that. They take their free donations, mark them up so much you could almost buy things mew elsewhere for the same price. They’re not a resale shop like Buffalo Exchange
The trick is to pack up a big box full of stuff and give it to them all at once so they don’t have time to look through it and refuse it.
They absolutely will refuse things they know they’ll have a hard time selling, and trust me they have unique insight into what people want and don’t love the idea of warehousing unsalable merchandise. Many Goodwill location’s FAQs acknowledge that they refuse to take certain things. Salvo has a whole page dedicated to why they refuse certain things.
My parents went through this when their parents died in the early 2000s. This is an old people vs young people thing. Let’s see what millennials accumulate as they go senile.
Let’s see what millennials accumulate as they go senile
Probably not as much, what with not having anywhere to keep it
I’m leaving a bunch of tools and crafting supplies. I hope I jumpstart a career or hobby when I die or it gets tossed whatever I will be dead.
All my stuff can just burn with the rest of the planet, I don’t have kids.
Mine is all on my server, photos and videos of me and my kid. Movies and TV shows I ripped from when blockbuster went under.
There’s going to be so many Funkopops.
Man take the silver, you can scrap that
I was thinking the exact same thing, maybe it makes a cold bastard, but they clearly didn’t use it…so I will… at a smelter!
There is a whole industry to transport Silent Gen and Boomer treasures to the landfill. Most commonly, a waste management company is going to park a construction dumpster in your driveway the same week you die. And there are hands for hire if your children can’t be bothered to go through your crap themselves.
There are also auction and estate companies that will try to get value out of furniture. That’s dying out though because IKEA doesn’t make furniture suitable for inheritance.
Estate companies will take the “good stuff” to auction, and house sale the rest for a few weekends. After that, there are businesses whose sole thing is buying up the remnants for their resale/thrift store. Think Big Lots but for dead people’s stuff.
Personally I hope my stuff gets handled like this. I’d rather someone, who wants the object, gets it for cheap, rather than it be a burden to my kids.
It’s how I got it all anyways. At leas the tools.
I really hope there’s a store called “Dead People’s Stuff.”
I drove past this place the other week. It’s almost what you want. Shop called ‘Vintage 2 Die 4’ with the moto of “We have the best deaf people stuff”
“Big Plots”
🏅
I have hoarder grandparents… I sometimes wish for a house to go up in flames while they’re not home just so nobody has to deal with going into it.
What the article doesn’t say is the stuff is all there is - there’s no money. Just stuff.
So if you throw it out, your inheiritance is nothing, otherwise you have to be come an online seller which - if you’re not already you know why you’re not already.
Estate sales and auctions are where this stuff goes.
There are multiple whole entire industries dedicated to fleecing such individuals. Health care in the USA for one… Donald Trump’s campaign to name another…
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My father was an incorrigible hoarder, but my mother had been culling his shit for years ever since he got too sick to stop her. Now that he’s buried she’s culling the last of it all, which is still a lot. She is not a hoarder but we kids have no use for her stuff even tho it’s quality. Estate sale is what it’s gonna be.
Fantastic! We can rebuild Florida!
My mom was disappointed when I said I didn’t want any of my dad’s things when he died last year. Hell, I hated turning some of it down. And I’m not taking any of her stuff, either. I’m really not into the “50+ years of cigarettes” aesthetic.
You actually don’t have to polish silver. It’s anti-bacterial properties still work if it’s tarnished.
But it looks shitty, it’s not nice to eat with black spoons and forks that never look clean.
Goblincore…
My father’s mother died a few years back and due to a rabbit hole I won’t get into, was left with cleaning out her condo by himself. She wasn’t a hoarder or anything, but he was floored by the work involved.
During the pandemic hermitude, he absolutely purged his own house of everything like this. He didn’t want us to be burdened with it when his time came. It’s ironic that I was a little upset over some of the things he threw out xD
My mom made them sell their house because “it’s the only way I could think of to get the basement cleaned out before we die”. She didn’t want to burden us but it really just changed the time line.
