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.”
…
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.
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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 grandmother recently died. Her son and his awful wife couldn’t wait to swoop in and take all her stuff. I actually didn’t mind though. They took all the tvs and old fur coats. Me and my brother got the pictures they left on the walls and the silly fridge magnets she liked. I think we ended up with the better stack of stuff at the end of the day.
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.
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”
🏅
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 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.
Much of the consumerism that taught them to accumulate junk turned into a burden for us all. Everything they bought is “vintage” and many pretend it holds onto some type of value. That or they didn’t want to clean up their garage for 30 years. The boomers’ posthumous contribution to landfills is truly staggering.
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.
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…
Estate sales and auctions are where this stuff goes.
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?
Don’t let the scammers trick you unto paying your parents debt. Debt cannot transfer to you.
Ahahahaha thank you.
Answer is sell the shit.
Sell it to who? Nobody else wants the shit either, that’s the problem
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…
Silver has an inherent melt value though, $30 an ounce.
So say you inherit a silver set weighing 110 troy ounces.
https://www.silverqueen.com/item/250501?Mcat=e7c15b48-b610-4c99-831d-937f77ccc4c9
Just the silver, BY ITSELF, is worth $3,300.
Those silver platters are plated
What’s the melt value of Elvis commemorative plates?
That might be true if it were pure silver, but it isn’t.
At best, it could be sterling silver. If it was made in the past century or so, it’s likely just silver plated.
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.
Personally, I think we should bring back the custom of grave goods. If there’s some precious heirloom that holds sentimental significance to a person but isn’t otherwise valuable or useful, why not bury it with them?
I’m already thinking about getting some land and making an “indefinite time capsule” for storing a bunch of stuff that I have no use for but that I wouldn’t want to see go off to a landfill for sentimental reasons.
Seeding the land for the next generation of American pickers?
I’m thinking more along the lines of future archaeologists. We learn so much about ancient cultures from what they bury with their dead, I figure we should return the favor.
Geez they had a lot of absolute tat!
“Why the fuck was this man burried in a refrigerator and why the fuck was it set on fire?” I want these to be the exact words for when my inevitable redneck viking funeral is done.
Every time I pass a cemetery, I think, there’s a million bucks in jewelry just sitting there.
We’d need to take some cues from how the ancients did it. Either arrange for long term security, like the Egyptians, or rely on secrecy, like the Mongols. It won’t work forever, but as long as it works for a couple of generations I’d be satisfied.
One idea that comes to mind for modern grave goods would be to bury them in a nuclear waste disposal facility.
I don’t think we want to give an incentive to plunder nuclear waste.
“This necklace is beautiful, but why does the air taste like metal?”
Bring back kurgans and put parks on them.
At my grandmother’s funeral, she wore her jewelry for the viewing but it was quietly removed by the funeral home folks and handed to my mother before the burial. So there might be less jewelry than you’d expect.
Your mother is a grave robber. Smart woman.
I didn’t mind the wedding ring, but I do wish they’d let Grandma be buried in her cheap costume jewelry. Let the dead woman have her bling.
Same funeral, my aunt asked me accusingly if the pearl necklace I was wearing came from Grandma’s jewelry chest. It didn’t. Grandma didn’t own pearls.
I love that your last paragraph explains that you want to avoid things going into a landfill by reinventing a landfill.
There’s rather a big difference between a time capsule and a landfill.
The difference being a landfill might one day be mined for raw materials, whereas no one past your grandchildren will know about your time capsule until archaeologists discover it and misattribute all your sentimental crap as religious or sexual paraphernalia.
You’ve made a heck of a lot of assumptions about how a time capsule like this would be set up. But even so, how is being mined for raw materials better than having some of my stuff be misattributed?
No. We do not do nuance here
Yes, but it’s a curated and cataloged landfill.
Friends… relations… Whatever the hell Meatwad is… I’ve lived a full life. It’s actually been pretty bitchin’. But now, regrettably, my life has been taken. Please bury me with all my stuff, because you know it’s mine…
Was that the one where he kills himself so he can haunt Meatwad?
ed: Oh yeah, s3e1 “Video Ouija”.
“Dearest Meatwad, turn on that dumb game cause I’m gonna whale on you from beyond the grave!”
I of course remembered Billy Witchdoctor but for some reason I didn’t think it was from the same ep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_Teen_Hunger_Force_season_3?useskin=vector
Ultra mega chicken
So… a storage unit?
No.
Bury me with my sweet vice I scored for free that one day.
About to be? My dad and mom are TV level hoarders. It’s going to take dumpsters to clean their houses. And very little to none of it is worth anything.
Going through this with my MIL. My wife is hurt that she got cut out of the decision-making, but it has been somewhat of a blessing in disguise in that her older siblings are the ones having to handle disposal of the decades’ worth of knickknacks lining every wall in her house.
Estate sale my boy. You will actually come out ahead… it’s whoever buys responsibility to throw the garbage away.
I am thinking of doing an estate sale on myself. :-/
When we bought our current house, the previous owners had the basement walls covered with framed pictures of various things (I don’t remember what all they were - likely family and friends, that sort of thing). When we stopped by for the inspection or something, I noticed the trash was out, and one can that was open on the top was filled with those pictures.
That moment really reinforced the point that all the crappy knick-knacks we have laying around will likely also end up in the trash someday. We’ve definitely reduced our purchases of stuff like that and try to stick to stuff we’ll actually use.
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 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.
We will own temporary licenses to things, and we will be happy.
That’s a good point. My wife has an extensive audio CD collection. There’s something to be said for “owning” that music. But if she does, I will be keeping that collection on some other long-lived media instead that consumes less physical space.
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.
