this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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Millennials are about to be crushed by all the junk their parents accumulated.

Every time Dale Sperling's mother pops by for her weekly visit, she brings with her a possession she wants to pass on. To Sperling, the drop-offs make it feel as if her mom is "dumping her house into my house." The most recent offload attempt was a collection of silver platters, which Sperling declined.

"Who has time to use silver? You have to actually polish it," she told me. "I'm like, 'Mom, I would really love to take it, but what am I going to do with it?' So she's dejected. She puts it back in her car."

Sperling's conundrum is familiar to many people with parents facing down their golden years: After they've acquired things for decades, eventually, those things have to go. As the saying goes, you can't take it with you. Many millennials, Gen Xers, and Gen Zers are now facing the question of what to do with their parents' and grandparents' possessions as their loved ones downsize or die. Some boomers are even still managing the process with their parents. The process can be arduous, overwhelming, and painful. It's tough to look your mom in the eye and tell her that you don't want her prized wedding china or that giant brown hutch she keeps it in. For that matter, nobody else wants it, either.

Much has been made of the impending "great wealth transfer" as baby boomers and the Silent Generation pass on a combined $84.4 trillion in wealth to younger generations. Getting less attention is the "great stuff transfer," where everybody has to decipher what to do with the older generations' things.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 3 days ago (7 children)

My parents went through this when their parents died in the early 2000s. This is an old people vs young people thing. Let's see what millennials accumulate as they go senile.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 days ago

There's going to be so many Funkopops.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 days ago

All my stuff can just burn with the rest of the planet, I don't have kids.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago

Let's see what millennials accumulate as they go senile

Probably not as much, what with not having anywhere to keep it

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[–] IceHouse 16 points 3 days ago

I'm not stuck with anything, I put all my boomer parents shit in the trash

[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I'm Gen-X and oh my god you have no idea.

My dad was pre-Boomer (born in 1931), but he just endlessly collected stuff. Thousands of movie soundtracks and classical music albums on both LP and CD. Hundreds of DVDs. Mountains of movie memorabilia and posters. Coins. Stamps. Rare books. Antiques. That's just the major collections. Lots of minor ones- sheet music, British cigarette trading cards, and then there are not just the over 20 books he wrote, but extra copies of them. Most of them are academic texts on film. The rest is stuff like terrible poetry and bad plays that no one is interested in but I can't bring myself to get rid of.

Much of it had value, so I didn't want to just dump it. We did an auction for some of it, garage sales, a flea market stall, I ended up spending about two years selling stuff on eBay, I gave a lot to friends, the CDs eventually just had to go to Goodwill because no one wanted them.

And I'm still stuck with a ton of stuff. A garage full of stuff that I don't want to just toss because someday someone might want an almost life-size ceramic bust of Charlie Chaplin and it feels stupid to just throw it away.

Meanwhile, my also pre-boomer mom (born 1942) has been collecting antique furniture.

I think I'm just going to do an estate sale when she dies.

I have one "collection." 5 bakelite radios and one Weltron Space Ball radio/8-track player. My daughter has my permission to take them to some charity place if she doesn't want them. Preferably not Goodwill or the Salvation Army, but those are the choices you get in this town unfortunately. Nothing else I have is of any real value and I'm fine with that. And having seen what I've already gone through to get rid of all of this stuff, my daughter is too.

Edit: I forgot to say that the stuff I talked about doesn't include all the stuff I said to my brother "just take what you want" about because I really didn't want to argue about it and he was going to fuck off back to Atlanta after the funeral anyway. But he doesn't have any kids and he's 11 years older than me, so I'll probably get all that shit too one day.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago (4 children)

GenX here and, yeah, I'm guilty too...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago

At least (I would think) you could sell all of those as one collection.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago (17 children)

Adults having to have adult conversations. Oh no

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 days ago

"It's not like you guys aren't going to have stuff, because guess what? Amazon is at your house every day,"

Ouch. Right in the furniture.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

We are not a sentimental age

We don't want our parent's china or their ticker-tape parades

We are not a sentimental age

We're out getting high on fire escapes

We are hooking up with strangers we will never see again

We are not a sentimental age

We are not a sentimental age

...

We are not a sentimental age

On our shoulders is a boulder of a debt we cannot pay

We are not a sentimental age

Diagnosis says I tend to disengage

I'd rather have my privacy, I'd rather have my space

These are just the pills I have to take

We are not a sentimental age

https://youtu.be/VMOdzWBu8Ic

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 days ago (1 children)

My auntie has done the opposite for fucking years : she'll come visit her mum and leave with some knicknacks she's had her eye on from a previous visit. My mum is absolutely fuming about it. She absolutely does not need anything, but just the principle of her sister being such a fucking vulture...

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago (4 children)

My grandmother came in for years and asked for handouts from stuff that was mine when I was younger. My mother kept giving her my old stuff. When I went to move out I went to look at the storage area and nothing that I really cared about was still there.

A few years ago my father mentioned all the toys I still had and that I should come and get them, I told him that They had already given away anything I cared about and all that was left was junk It just needed to go away. He got all defensive. But if you're going to let somebody come in and take from a pool of goods they're going to continually take the best things until there's nothing useful left. I ended up with a small bucket of Legos and a couple of my favorite matchbook cars.

I'm not really sore about it, but at the same time him asking me to drive 7 hours and get the collection of broken items that were passed over No, either sell it in an eBay lot or throw it away.

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