I am in the process of tidying up my dad's estate, and, despite the mountains of stuff he bought, there is not one single thing that I want for myself. I am done with stuff, particularly if it has bits missing!
I am sure that, if I went to any hoarders home, it would be exactly the same. There would not be a single item that I would want to walk away with.
Younger me might have thought this store to be great, but I am done.
It requires a special mindset to want stuff, to trade stuff on eBay, to collect stuff and to see it as valuable. Stuff is at the low end of what interests me, life is about people and ideas, not stuff.
You also have to believe in money if you are into stuff. But my status has nothing to do with money or how much stuff I have. I wish I could flip the switch and make it so that I wanted to hoard money and own stuff. But, once you have gone outside your basic needs, stuff starts to own you, rather than you owning stuff.
The thing is that, with the mountains of stuff that I have had to dispose of, all of it required real humans to put in the effort to design products, get them made, get them packaged and to get them sold. They did it with pride, yet, here I am, detesting the stuff.
The tech products that were hot five years ago but useless today are what amaze me the most. Take your humble TV. I can remember a time before flat screens, then there was the time when you had dead pixels. Right now I have a huge TV to dispose of. To all intents and purposes, it is perfect. Twenty five years ago, it would have been beyond anyone's dreams, jaws would have dropped. Yet now it is worth $150, if I could find a buyer.
Hence, max respect to those such as the owner of the Bin Store that can face up to the 'empty gifts of capitalism' and make a business of making sense of the stuff that mere mortals like me want to run away from.
I have a mother-in-law who has 30-year old electronic gadgets she has no idea what they are for... Image-search turns up no results... (A few are in their original packaging - those are identifiable - but typically useless)
Her box of random cables and "wall-wart" power supplies is huge - puts my old bin to shame... (well, I have since organized my "collection", labelled and sorted everything into many smaller storage bins - sighs... as the story goes, "oh - I no longer need this ancient connector/cable, so I will get rid of it", only to inevitably need it 2-months later, so now I keep them all, but label them...)
I resigned myself to re-buying things, though of course I love USB-C is a common charging cable.
Instead of a drawer full of wall warts, I have a drawer with a little baggie full of the ends of warts, which I connect via twisted wire if I have to to a few of the wall warts I have.
So true! I just recently found an old bag full of ancient phone and other device chargers and charging cables and let me tell you, it felt so weird. I have mostly forgotten that there used to be so many variations - every brand had their own version of what mostly is a simple power connector.
The best was physically identical connecters with vastly different voltage profiles, so if you plugged in the wrong one bam magic smoke is gone, sadness.
This store is my idea of hell.
I am in the process of tidying up my dad's estate, and, despite the mountains of stuff he bought, there is not one single thing that I want for myself. I am done with stuff, particularly if it has bits missing!
I am sure that, if I went to any hoarders home, it would be exactly the same. There would not be a single item that I would want to walk away with.
Younger me might have thought this store to be great, but I am done.
It requires a special mindset to want stuff, to trade stuff on eBay, to collect stuff and to see it as valuable. Stuff is at the low end of what interests me, life is about people and ideas, not stuff.
You also have to believe in money if you are into stuff. But my status has nothing to do with money or how much stuff I have. I wish I could flip the switch and make it so that I wanted to hoard money and own stuff. But, once you have gone outside your basic needs, stuff starts to own you, rather than you owning stuff.
The thing is that, with the mountains of stuff that I have had to dispose of, all of it required real humans to put in the effort to design products, get them made, get them packaged and to get them sold. They did it with pride, yet, here I am, detesting the stuff.
The tech products that were hot five years ago but useless today are what amaze me the most. Take your humble TV. I can remember a time before flat screens, then there was the time when you had dead pixels. Right now I have a huge TV to dispose of. To all intents and purposes, it is perfect. Twenty five years ago, it would have been beyond anyone's dreams, jaws would have dropped. Yet now it is worth $150, if I could find a buyer.
Hence, max respect to those such as the owner of the Bin Store that can face up to the 'empty gifts of capitalism' and make a business of making sense of the stuff that mere mortals like me want to run away from.