> There’s probably a fifth D: the delusion that your children will want the items you’re planning to bequeath to them, especially the kind of furniture that used to be called antiques

I'm at the age where a lot of friends are starting to deal with parents passing away, and it is very stressful for the next-of-kin to not only have to deal with the grief of loss, but then have to figure out what to do with houses and storage units full of junk. Some attempt to pick through the crap to find the 0.1% with legit sentimental value, others have more energy and try to do yard sales / estate sales, but most just call the truck and haul everything to the dump.

I don't know where people get this idea that their children are going to appreciate garages full of falling-apart furniture, "fine china" and 1970s era stereo equipment. If you want to pass on something to your children they will appreciate, pass them a cleaned-out home or pre-arrange a junk hauler.

When my sister died five years ago, her best friend, who was local and I wasn't, was a huge help to me in getting her house cleaned out. While neither my sister nor I have kids, my sister's two best friends do have kids who were her effective nieces and nephews. So we offered the kids anything they wanted that I didn't want (which wasn't much - just family stuff) and they took a surprising amount of it. Most of it was more modern furniture in good shape, which I didn't want. I got the antiques. One of the nieces wanted the very old china and crystal. So it is possible to get rid of a house full of things without trashing it all, but it can take time and that's not always practical.

I question whether that's the dominant assumption. I know there's hoarders, but there's also loads of "stuff" associated with day-to-day life. Live in one place and you'll have boxes of bandages and aspirin, tools for fixing the lawn mower, a small compressor for blowing out your sprinklers, board games, extra coffee mugs, shoes that are ok but you don't like very much, on and on. None of that "junk", even if you might use it rarely and certainly won't perish without it.

There's little nobility in throwing out your fourth set of perfectly serviceable bed sheets or the nicked pair of nail clippers in the guest bathroom. Which leads to accumulation, like moss on a tree.

The Silent Generation had a standard of living, particularly among the working classes and rural folk, well below what millenials/GenZ are used to. They kept stuff, took good care of it to make it last as long as they could, jury-rigged things with what they could to conserve money, and so forth. No ordering cheap stuff from Temu, no electrical devices so cheap that they're disposable, no fast fashion, none of that. That submitter recently who broke apart a book for their own convenience probably would have been soundly thrashed for it. So, yeah, of course, at the end of their lives they wind up with a pile of worn out household items and what their grandchildren view as a hoarding problem. But one can hardly blame them.

We live in an era of immense wealth and convenience relative to them.

My parents (born in the late 30s-late 40s) just moved from a 5 bedroom house larger than my own into a 2 bedroom retirement apartment.

The house sold more quickly than expected, so they were in a panic to move out.

They're not hoarders -- in fact, the house was always impeccably tidy, and not at all cluttered.

They had to get rid of SO much stuff. My dad was an only child, so he had kept so much stuff from his father before him. My mom was one of many, but the eldest, and the family archivist, so she has the photos and old movies and stuff.

Ultimately the biggest problem is their children (my sister and I) DON'T NEED THEIR STUFF. We're adults in our 40s and 50s. We have houses of our own, filled with furniture of our own. Smaller houses than our parents', smaller garages, already more cluttered than our parents'.

Yes, we took on some keepsakes we love, we took on some furniture to upgrade our own. But mostly, there just isn't room. I don't have room for 2 generations' worth of accumulated tools, no matter how handy they may be. I don't have a house full of empty walls waiting for artwork and pictures. We're already storing heirloom china from my wife's side of the family that we haven't touched in the 10 years we've had it, we don't need to store another set of heirloom dishes we'll never use at dinner parties we'll never hold.

As generations get spaced further and further apart, the heirs no longer need stuff to start lives of their own. As property gets more expensive, our homes get smaller, so we wouldn't even be able to use all the stuff if our homes were empty!

As a data point, I counted all of the chairs at my parents' house. 44. 44 chairs. We thought it was hilarious, so we told my in-laws, and they counted chairs at their own home -- also 44!

Woah woah woah - don’t lump 1970s era stereo equipment in with that. If any of these friends have vintage Pioneer (SX-##50/80) that’s “junk” to them, I could take it off their hands ;)

If they are sufficiently adult. Just ask them now do they want it. I can manage to pick stuff I want and then later dispose if I made mistake. If all children refuse just get rid off it already.

> 1970s era stereo equipment

Some of what glitters _is_ gold!

If its falling apart its not good furniture.

A lot of old furniture is better than all but very expensive new stuff. My kids like my parents' and grandparents' furniture.

It's just the ultimate procrastination. Like you can literally put this task (getting rid of junk) off for your whole life. Why wouldn't you?

> I don't know where people get this idea that their children are going to appreciate garages full of falling-apart furniture

Are you genuinely asking where they get this idea? People are getting downvoted for giving plausible answers.

The simple one is they appreciated getting it from their parents. It's only very recent that everyone has a surplus of everything, including the parents themselves.

I'm kind of glad my parents didn't just throw a lot of stuff away.

> I don't know where people get this idea that their children are going to appreciate garages full of falling-apart furniture, "fine china" and 1970s era stereo equipment.

Nobody has that idea. People want to hold on to all their stuff, and they would bring it with them in death if they could. But since you can only travel with very light luggage from this world to the next, they tell a nice sounding lie that they're keeping and amassing stuff and wealth for their children when they die.

If they really wanted to help their children, they would do it while still alive.

> where people get this idea that their children are going to appreciate garages full of falling-apart furniture, "fine china"

My parents are still convinced I should keep the china set they gifted us for our wedding decades ago, because "What are you going to do if your boss comes over for dinner??". It's never been used.

> I don't know where people get this idea that...

Kinda legit: Most people who lived through the Great Depression learned a "never throw any possibly-useful thing away" ethos as a survival skill. And they often taught that to their own children. And stuff became obsolete far more slowly back then, and furniture repair was a normal things, and ...

More commonly - "leave it to my children" is an excellent self-delusion...er, I mean psychological dodge, if you don't want to deal with the physical work, time required, or mental grief of proper sorting and disposal. But note that the "mental grief" may not be internal to the person deciding to procrastinate. If some of their family really don't get along with each other, then paying rent to put off the angry family drama may be their least-bad option.

For most of human history, children very much would appreciate inheriting crafted goods. The kind of rampant, commoditized consumerism where we routinely snub our noses at and throw away perfectly useful goods is a rather recent trend.