I discussed this previously here.
TL;DR: I have plenty of stuff, which I’m not willing to get rid off.
So, I just did.
I’m in a situation where I have to move to a new town. I’ve basically being living there for a while now, even though I’ve been unwilling to make the final move until my employer was willing to make my position permanent. Well, that happened. So, it was time to reassess my living situation and now, instead of basically living in two places, I made the decision to move. I haven’t even found an apartment yet, but I have my sights on a good one. If I can get that, I have to be prepared to move fairly soon.
So, it was time to reassess what I actually want to move with me. I mean, like I mentioned previously I owned a fairly big collection of World of Darkness books (105 books, to be exact). I did have some affection for them, but in reality I hadn’t really even touched them during the seven year period I’ve lived in my current apartment. So, what would be the point of taking them with me? They take up a lot of room and I did find someone to take them from within the Guild. I also gave away almost all of my CDs a month or so back and today I also gave away over half of my boardgames. I left myself a sizable number of those. A good selection of games which cover a wide array of complexity and gametime.
I got rid of this stuff mostly for practical reasons. They take up a lot of room and I don’t really need it. It feels nice to have this stuff available to me, but I don’t really have a need for them. There’s also the point-of-view that maybe someone else can actually use this stuff for something. In the end, these are luxury items. I don’t really need them and I left myself with more boardgames then I will probably ever need.
I guess this utilitarism is what I should emphasize the most. It’s not the best for the game companies (except that their products get more visibility), but at the same time, more people will gain access to these games. And I did pay for them once upon a time. I should be able to do what I want with them, including gifting them away.
I would also estimate that because of the amount of stuff I’ve given away, I have around ten boxes less to move. That’s definitely nothing to sneeze at. Last time I had 32 boxes. This time I’m going to have more due to my ever-increasing number of movies, which makes getting rid of some of the stuff even more important. I’m also going to go through my books to see if there’s any I want to give away, although I already did that last year, so there shouldn’t be that many. Unless I change my principles on which I do that.
Well, we’ll see. However, just getting rid of this stuff has allowed for plenty of reflection on my part. One might think I wouldn’t just want to give this stuff away, since we’re talking 10,000 euros here, easy, but at the same time, am I ever going to sell it? No. I don’t want to go through the hassle. So, if I don’t need it, why wouldn’t I just let go off all of it? In the recent years, there has been a lot of talk about not letting our possessions define us. I don’t really feel I moved away from that idea as much as I proved to myself that it’s true, at least in my case.
Okay, maybe my collection of movies does define me to an extent, but if you’d see the movies, you’d know why I don’t really mind that.