Life is a use-it or lose-it situation, innit?

My grandfather has a laptop that he acquired in the late 80's. The first time it was booted and run was in 2019, when I was at their place, and he brought it out to show it, how he had laptops before they were cool. He had preserved the laptop alongside his cherished possessions, like a totem, a figure of prosperity and good luck.

My parents have a separate closet for the 'nice clothes', the fancy, expensive and often not used clothes that they claim to save for special occasions. Not a single occasion worthy of those clothes has arisen.

The other set of my grandparents, they had a special guest room for 'special guests'. Over the course of the five years I lived at their place, that room was used maybe three or four times. It was cleaned daily though.

It took me a very long time, and I haven't internalized the lesson yet completely, to understand that life is meant to be lived, not to be 'saved for later'. Everything has an expiration date, everything. Even the fanciest of things. In a sense, one is just 'renting' things when buying them, when they go bad, one must return them to Earth. The rent is paid up-front, and it's up to us to decide if we want to get our money's worth for things we acquire, or let our investment go to waste. There is nothing fundamentally wrong about renting a place to never use it, it's just a terrible misallocation of resources, often by folks who are specially lacking in those.

One way to look at things that has reshaped my thought has been this: I look at something that I own, put an estimate on how long it might last, and how much it cost, and do a simple division. The cost per year. At the rate of 10% inflation, the cost of ownership doubles every 7 years. Something that cost me $100 today will have been worth $400 if it lasts 14 years. Then the question I ask myself is this: how might I get my money's worth, get that $30 a year value by using it. Every year I don't use it, I've misspent that money that could have gone elsewhere.

That's one of the easier ways to see the fallacy behind hoarding mentality. That's not all. There's also the running cost of ownership. The cost of space inside one's closet is not nil, refrigerators need energy, that costs money, to keep cold, the higher the thermal mass of the items inside there, the more it costs to run the cooling system. There's opportunity costs too: the previously-mentioned $100 worth of good is a total loss of $800 over 14 years if that money had been invested in the stock market instead. Would one be okay seeing their cash decay in front of their eyes, instead of investing it somewhere more productive?

This is a complex topic, I want to write more on this as things evolve.