Breaking Up with My Stuff

 I threw away my inkjet printer today.

RIP, HP Envy 5450.

No biggie. I won't miss it (more on that in a moment). It stung a little to throw away an unused $40 ink cartridge, but it's not as if I had any desire to post it on Facebook Marketplace so I could sell it to some rando for $5.

I'm a huge fan of the concept of
opportunity cost.

But as I hauled the old girl to the trash chute, I got to thinking generally about the labor involved in acquiring vs. discarding things. One of my goals for 2024 has been to get rid of stuff I no longer need, objects that no longer "spark joy." Alas, with six weeks left in the year, I've made only middling progress toward de-cluttering. Some of that is due to chronic laziness. Some is due to the fact that only Tacocat and I see the inside of my apartment these days, and he is amazingly tolerant of my piles of stuff (also, being a spoiled cat, he has his own surplus of possessions that I wouldn't dare criticize).

Would you criticize this??

There is another dynamic at work, however. I've found that the decision-making process used to acquire things is far less complex than what's involved in discarding them. The former has three simple steps: 1. I see a thing. 2. I decide I want and/or need the thing. 3. I buy the thing. Easy-peasy. But once an item is mine and floating in my physical orbit, suddenly I have a multilayered relationship with it, and it takes way more than just reversing the steps to not own it any more.

I can look around me and identify a dozen things in my immediate surroundings that were impulse buys, snap decisions, and of course drunken Amazon purchases. (I'm looking at you, Loch Ness Monster in a bottle.) Some of them are items I still want and/or need. Others have definitely outlived their usefulness (if they ever had any). Yet they all continue to occupy space in my abode. Why? 

Well, let's see why some of these things still have a place here:

1. Memories. I don't need a statue of King Kong clinging to the side of the Empire State Building. But it's a memento of my first trip to New York to visit Precocious Daughter. It's also cute as hell. Verdict: Staying.

2. Delusions. I have a dressmaker's dummy whose measurements no longer match my own. Even if I still sewed regularly, she'd be no good to me, because she's a skinny bitch and I'm not. But I simply can't silence the inner voice that says I might be that size again. So I keep her, because I'd feel foolish if I lost 30 pounds and didn't have the right size dummy. (See also: sewing patterns that are 2-4 sizes too small.) Verdict: Hanging around.

3. Lack of imagination. I have a floor lamp in my living room. It's not plugged in. It's not needed as a light source. It serves only one purpose: It has a glass shelf that is the perfect height and angle for my digital TV antenna, which doesn't work if I place it anywhere else. And so, instead of discarding this useless lamp that takes up valuable floor space, it remains, because I can't think of any other way to get my local TV channels. Verdict: Still here.

4. Misplaced nostalgia. Way back in the day, my dad had a set of encyclopedias. They're long gone, but somehow I ended up with the small, cheap bookcase that used to hold them. Like the lamp above, it serves no purpose except to take up floor space - there's nary a book on it. But I remember it once was my nightstand in the first bedroom I ever had to myself, and apparently that means something? Verdict: Afraid to get rid of it.

5. Laziness. The big one. The reason I held on to an inkjet printer that hadn't worked in probably two years. Because I had to reach behind a bookshelf to unplug it. Because I had to carry it down the hall to the trash room. Because I had to move a couple of pieces of furniture that I promised myself I'd move if I ever didn't have to accommodate the printer any more. Verdict: Mission accomplished, finally.

In short, breaking up with things is at least as hard as breaking up with people, and for the same reasons. At least I rarely dream about the stuff that got away. 

Next challenge: The shoes that don't go with anything and hurt my feet but still lurk in the back of my closet and mock me.