Ohh I have been feeling this exact thing over the last weeks!

It was exacerbated by a conversation with Andrea, when I was telling her my Mums family had 8 children and 2 parents living in a 3 bed council house almost exactly the size of our little house in Castlerock where during the pandemic we wondered how on earth we’d ever manage to live there when Savanna and the 3 boys would get to their teens. So we moved to the arse end of nowhere into this big old place.

Now don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love it here and have enjoyed every moment of working on it and fixing it up, and with the way the world is headed this may end up being one of those old timey multigenerational homes if our kids struggle to get housing.

But with all the additional space we have grandually been unpacking all the crap Ive gathered up over the years, and yes Ive added some crap since we got here too.

But Andrea couldn’t believe that 10 people all lived in the one little house so I phoned my mum to ask if there was a point where they were all in there or did marriages etc mean there was never a full house. Turns out nope, they all lived there all the boys in one room, the girls in another and one room for the parents.

Then she said somthing that hit me like a bag of bricks, “Warren, remember folks really didn’t have anything, not like today where you have stuff all over the place, we didn’t have a lot of clothes and bed rooms were just for sleeping in, we basically lived out side”

My own childhood was not dissimilar although already by that stage I had more ‘stuff’ than my parents ever had (my fathers household was 9 people)

And then I thought about all the stuff I have accumulated and just had this awful sense of dread and almost feeling like I was drowning in it. I thought, if I pop my cloggs tomorrow, what on earth would andrea and the kids even do with it all, some has value but only to the right people and they are unlikely to be ever able to manage working that out.

So we have been thinking along similar lines.

We have an old cottage just behind the house here that I was planning on turning into little music rooms, but now we are gonna demolish it. There is already a godly amount of space here, and more of it will just compound the problem.

So I feel you mate, I don’t have any answers, but Im interested to see what other folk are feeling on this! 🙂

Thanks for sharing!

It was moving that did it for me. After unpacking the nth box (I think I had about 12 big boxes of models –  I found new Imperial Guard I hadn’t built. I gave away a foot high stack of Codices I’d moved in. I’ve still 10th edition box models to build because I’d bought two bloomin’ boxes and yeah, I also think of the cost, what if that’d gone into overpayments and what not but there’s also life to live.

I came late to the magnetising models party so had everything wrapped in bubblewrap and now… it’s no spend unless I really want it. It’s not denial, just an acknowledgement that I’ve got enough. The real killer was working out the cost of Really useful boxes to pack everything away for another possible move!

I gave away a load of minis after covid. It was really, really cathartic. But my wife says I’ve long had a rather unusual relationship with the whole concept of “ownership”. See, I don’t actually understand ownership.
To me, we never actually own anything – it’s all just stuff that’s in our custody for a while.

That house you “own”? You didn’t build it, did you? Someone else owned it before you. Someone else will own it after you’re gone. It’s not a “forever thing”. Just something you have custody of for a while. Who still has their first car? Nope? What happened to it? I’ve no idea what happened to mine. But someone owned it before me, possibly a few people did. Then. I had it for a while, and now it’s gone.

I see pretty much all my possessions like this.
When I’ve helped clear out relative’s belongings, a lot of it gets given away (to charity or friends). Some of it gets mercilessly chucked out. When I’m gone, I’m pretty ok with my loved ones doing exactly that too – don’t hang onto the crap I’ve collected, just because I had possession of it for a while! Let it go. It was me that enjoyed holding onto it for a bit, not you.

I do the same with my own possessions every now and again.
When they no longer give me joy or comfort – I get rid of them.
My wife thinks I’m crazy. But then again, she benefitted when we first got together and I gave her my house (actually, sometimes just giving stuff away (without being dead first) comes with legal obligations – but the principle is the same).

But even beyond this existential crisis of ownership, getting rid of minis is also great for your mental wellbeing.
I had a massive pile of potential for years. Sometimes it would nag at me, that it wasn’t finished (let’s be honest, not even started). But what nagged even more what the time, at some point in the future, I’d have to commit to getting it done. To get from “I’m so sad this pile of grey is still grey” to “I’m relieved this pile of grey is no longer grey” would require more time than I wanted to commit to it – and even the idea of committing all that time to getting it done, when future-me could be doing something else, that would make me sad too! Now-me was committing future-me to stuff now-me couldn’t be bothered doing. Why would future-me want to do it? Future-me would have no time to do cool and groovy stuff, just because now-me was a jerk.

So getting rid of your unpainted minis not only clears space on your shelf, it clears space in your mind. And it gets you a whole load of your life back, that you can spend doing other, cooler things.

And if you get rid of some minis and then decide it was a massive mistake and you need to get them back?
Remember the buzz you got when you first acquired those minis?
You get to have that again too, when you buy them for a second time!

Get rid of your unpainted minis.
It’s win-win-win!

But I get your point

I fear, maybe not. That you no longer have your C64 means you don’t own it. And when you did, what did “owning it” mean? My point is that even when you think you “own” something, you’re really only a custodian for it, for a short while.

Same goes for everything. Including minis. So don’t be afraid to let them go. If you’ve had them for a while, you don’t have to keep them forever.

I’m just saying: I still have my C64. Do you still have your specky? No? Win for the C64. Don’t @ me!

Let’s build a snowman!