I have way too much material stuff because I’ve spent my whole life as a collector of various things. Which is something I’ve enjoyed and still do, but it gets to a point where I begin to lose track of The Things and whether I sold them off, gave them away, or still have them in a closet or the garage. Of course, I’m rather old, and my kids are still rather young, and I kind of hope they will not be interested in most of the junk I’ve been interested in.
I feel that way because I want them to both define their own interests not based on my own (my father desperately wanted me to be interested in basketball because he was; I could never work up the slightest interest for the sport–either watching or playing) and also because I don’t want their lives to be focused on “collecting” as mine has. If they’re going to collect anything, I would hope it will be experiences and not stuff.
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There’s something in poetry and literature called the tragic fallacy, and it basically refers to the idea that some greater dignity, order, or morality oversees and is at play in human existence. The writer’s job is to perceive that happening in life and describe it in poetry or other writing. We see this represented a lot in movies by funerals and burials taking place when it’s raining, for example, suggesting a larger order commenting on human affairs.
I bring this up because I think a lot of people believe, as they get towards the end of their lives, that they can write a will describing how they want everything to be handled and work out after they die. Each of their possessions sort of clicking into place with exactly the persons they want to have them. In that sense, we, the deceased, are inflicting our comments and wishes (as a larger order?) onto those that are still living.
But in reality, the fallacy is tragic because it’s an illusion–there is no greater, guiding morality for humans, as much as we would like their to be one. And the same is true about what happens to your stuff after you die. The truth is that most people don’t care about most of your stuff–all the order we want to bring about is meaningless and arbitrary to everyone else. It gave your life meaning to accumulate all that stuff, but that’s not at all what gave your life meaning to the people who cared about you. All they want is more days with you alive and in their lives. The people who care most about your stuff after you die are either looking to profit off your death, or they’re terribly sad and hoping to have a piece of you that they can pour their grief into.
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Many years ago when I still lived on the East coast, a girlfriend took me to a place in Pennsylvania that she thought I would like called the Mercer Museum. It is described as a museum of industrial-revolution-age artifacts and tools, but in reality, it is an impossibly large collection of…well…what most people would consider junk.
It is impressive for how remarkably large it is. This guy set his mind to accumulating a whole lot of stuff from a certain era, and he completely succeeded. And they’ve done an admirable job of displaying it and describing it so that it doesn’t entirely look like the results of a hoarder who collected junk (though that’s what it is, honestly).
And as I wandered through the place, it was hard, even then, decades ago, to not feel torn–thousands of people make the trip to this “museum” to view (what I learned was only a small percentage of) the stuff this guy was obsessed about and collected during his life. And yet, most of the stuff held zero interest for me and I would imagine for the vast majority of the people who showed up there. It is a legacy–much as all of my collected stuff will be, unless I get rid of it all–but it’s impressive not because of how neat all the stuff is but because of how much of it there is. And there are a lot of other things I’d prefer museum-money be spent on. Much as I imagine my kids will feel as they loo at all my accumulated stuff–”I wish dad had spent his money and time on other things.”
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As I consider my “legacy” (though I don’t think of it that way–I think of it as my accumulated stuff; my wife thinks of it far less politely), I am often reminded of an old Twilight Zone episode. In it, a boy starts collecting stuff when he is very young, and he makes a deal with some sort of magical goblin like creature, that he will one day have the most amazing collection of stuff, as long as he always makes his collection a priority.
And so the episode shows him growing up, becoming a man, getting older, collecting and finding these amazing items, but making terrible decisions in his personal life. And then towards the end of the episode, he pulls into the parking lot of an auction house in a classic car, filled to the brim with all his stuff. He is an old, withered man. He looks like he hasn’t washed in weeks, his beard is down over his chest, and he is in poor health. And alone.
The last scene is of this enfeebled man sitting in amongst the crowd at a high-end auction house as they sell off all his stuff. His eyes close, and he seems to die sitting in the chair. We see the goblin creature looking satisfied in the shadows.
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One of the nice things about having a decent board game collection is that they can be played. And many of them must be played with other people, thereby forcing you not to be a hermit-hoarder in order to enjoy them. You can also teach your kids how to play and end up creating memories, which are far more valuable than stuff, especially if you write them down (because as you get older, you will forget a remarkably frightening amount of stuff, and remember with weird clarity a lot of other stuff that you might prefer to forget).
Of course, games evolve and go in and out of favor, but once people have a game they like, especially one from childhood, they tend to keep playing it (see the dreaded Monopoly) and finding other people who like it to (even if it makes no sense to the rest of us).
This means there’s a sort of inverse relationship between “rare” games and “popular” games. The rare games that I feel really glad to have will mean nothing to my kids (aside from their potential value, I suppose) because they won’t remember playing them. The popular games, meanwhile, like Catan or Sagrada, for example, will be the ones that they care most about. My kids will almost certainly never play Battlestar Galactica (in part because they’ll never watch the show), and I almost never play it myself (because I know very few people here who ever saw the show or have the slightest interest in the game) (yes, they’re philistines) as much as I actually really like playing it (driving through northern Utah this summer? Stop by!) because I watched the show and think it’s a great game.
So should I sell that or keep it? At what age (my age and the age of the item) does it make sense to let something go? And how do we know when it’s that time? And how can we possibly expect to know which things we possess right now that anyone we care about would want to possess after we’re gone? No one’s going to want my board games, but they might want the relatively worthless ring I wear every day of my life. They might want the mug I drink coffee from most mornings, but the beat-up 1965 Mickey Mantle card I bought for $5 when I was a boy will be meaningless.
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@OhBollox I’ve had the same experience as you when people die. And it’s led to me to anticipate what will happen when people older than me will be gone one day, and who will act in what way towards what things. And it used to really bother me, imagining having to fight for some item or be slighted or be excluded my some other relative. But now, I don’t care. People are awful. This can’t be a surprise to me any longer. My experiences with the people I miss can never be taken away.
@Baelnor I am sorry for your loss, though it sounds like you made the right decisions in the wake of it, and in that way, you also gained something too.
@rinelk I don’t know that I will ever be “okay” with the idea that I’ll be dead. So you’re one up on me.
It sounds really rough. Been there with pet issues and sometimes it is the mundane “daily demand” that keeps us going, even when we think it shouldn’t.