On another note, my parents passed away awhile back, and the single most overwhelming day-to-day challenge was how much stuff they had, which in effect meant how much stuff I had. It didn't really hit me all at once, though, since every single object was its own epiphany. By no voluntary effort of my own, I own a chainsaw! A shotgun! A bookshelf filled with deranged right-wing books! A C-band satellite dish! Another chainsaw! Another shotgun!
Fortunately, there's such a thing as an "estate sale" where other people will actually come in and sell all of your stuff out of your house for you. All you have to do is go through and pick out the things you actually want to keep, as well as papers and photographs. The trick to this is, you don't actually have to be dead to have an estate sale, although you probably need to have so much stuff that it's worthwhile to take the time whitelisting the possessions you want to keep rather than blacklisting the ones you don't want to keep. Ironically, this only exists on the backs of the hoarders pg writes about. You can get amazing deals on "perfectly good" stuff at estate sales.
The papers and photographs alone, though, can be overwhelming. Easily most of the stuff I kept were papers and photos. [1] I could justify all the advances ever made in computing simply by looking at an attic full of papers and photographs and contemplating the fact that they would all fit in my hand were they digitized.
[1] The rest were either items of genuine sentimental value or--my own weakness--"perfectly good" "vintage" computers, including a pair of NeXTs! If anyone here knows of a good Apple museum, by the way, please email me, because I don't want my attic to be it.