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Comment by YurgenJurgensen | Hacker News Reader

Even ignoring facetious examples like "your passport" or "the deed to your house", this is terrible advice.

Just in the last month I used some sandpaper that had sat in a box for several years, pulled a ten year old DVD off a shelf and watched it, re-read a book from my childhood and connected an obscure audio adaptor that had been untouched for at least five years.

Earlier this year I played games on two different games consoles from previous decades and reactivated a Raspberry Pi from a previous project into a new one. I pruned a tree and dug a flower bed with some tools that were recovered from a grandparent's house after sitting untouched for well over a year.

If everything in your house that's more than a year old is worthless, maybe you're just buying things which are worthless from the beginning.

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The advise was worded too general, but I think it's a valid starting point for evaluating how important something really is.

One slightly more nuanced method I've used when cleaning out is the question "how likely am I to need this again, and is storing it until then easier than selling it now and buying it again if I ever need it". The answers to this shift, for example it justifies getting rid of more possessions as you get more income, and increasingly only keeping things that you actively use or that would be inconvenient or time-sensitive to get again.

Who knows what else you would have used, or watched otherwise. This is really personal though. I have a hard time parting with things, but I also don't care about them as long as I have them, so I end up being a collector of suboptimal items. This doesn't mean that others are in the same situation.

you could have easily purchased new sandpaper, rented the movie on netflix or bought new games.

The cost is keeping unused stuff around is higher than acquiring it again were you to need it again.

And why do you even have a passport if you don't travel? The deed of your house? Why would you keep a piece of paper you could so easily lose, especially since it's on the land registry anyway?

The cost of keeping small non-perishable items around is zero. The cost of re-buying them is nonzero. The environmental cost of sending perfectly functional items to landfill and consuming energy to recreate them is definitely nonzero. (And the financial cost of disposal is also nonzero; it's just priced into your taxes.)

You also seem to have forgotten that there was a pandemic. I expect 99% of passport-owners went a full year without using it because there was nowhere to go. Earlier this year there was a couple of weeks where you couldn't expedite a passport request for any amount of money due to the backlog created by people who'd allowed their passports to lapse during the pandemic all trying to renew at once.

Which actually shows another problem with the "just buy it again, bro" plan: In addition to being wasteful, it's risky. There's no guarantee that you can just re-buy things, or do so expediently and for a reasonable price, or that you'll have the liquidity to do so. Shortages, buyouts, mass layoffs, inflation and price spikes are all things we've seen many examples of in the last few years.

> The cost of keeping small non-perishable items around is zero.

If you're renting a small apartment, it's not.

Even if you're renting a big place, you still need to find a suitable place where you'll find it again.

You still need to be organized even if you have space.

Look at the post I was replying to. There was no "if you're renting a small apartment" condition, or any other conditions to limit its applicability.

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