Everyone who owns a house fills it with what other people call junk.

That's a good argument for living in a small place rather than a house as big as you can possibly afford.

I don't see what the big deal is to be honest, just a harmless hobby to collect random trinkets, it gives people joy, and you can just get rid of it when they die. I don't see what the harm is

Buying random trinkets that are mass produced in a factory overseas and shipped across the ocean is not ideal.

When you fill your house with it, to the point where you're a hoarder and can't see your floors and walls, that's a health hazard that attracts dirt, rot, and pests.

Opportunity cost is high. Acquiring the trinkets in the moment feels great but leads to long term challenges.

One must live an ascetically trinket-free lifestyle in order to fully minmax their life

Alternatively, one really should stop to think about what they care in life at least once or twice each decade.

Lots of people never do it once in their whole life. There's a world of optimization levels between "randomly doing things" and "min-maxing life". There's a huge-ass chunk of people who never leave the 0-optimization level of randomly doing things.

I am not advocating minmax-ing

The son in the article, nine months into the process of clearing his parents' house, estimated he is one-third done. That's a lot of mental and physical work he inherited, or alternatively signed up for.

I cannot believe it is necessary to be so persnickety about it that it causes you stress and bitterness. Give your siblings a day to grab anything they want, then rent a dumpster and a wheelbarrow and go to town. Throw away everything you can force yourself to, one room a day. Dad's dead, he won't care. If it takes nine months, you're doing it wrong.

You can just use a service to take care of the estate, you are not obliged to do that at all.

That's assuming they've got money to pay for it after funeral expenses, et al.

They've had this house for 9 months. They're paying money to keep it, whether it's rent, mortgage or property taxes.

Sure, it's a matter of preference, I just prefer to have less stuff, everything else being equal.

In that case it's a good argument for you to buy a smaller house, but if you accept that it's a matter of preference and not something that can be generalized then it's not a valid argument for other people.

Yeah I think this war on consumerism and boomer lifestyle is a bit exaggerated, and I mean, if you take away all the benefits and rewards you have to take away some of the demands too. I can recycle and share and rent and downsize if I can also downsize my working hours accordingly. A bit weird that the middle class now wants to get rid of the carrot and just have a bigger stick, that doesn't really add up for me.

I think you'll find for the generation being discussed they likely didn't buy "a house as big you can possibly afford". Their houses were sanely priced, decent sized accommodations before the property market went bonkers at some point in the 80's.

A lot of those houses got additions added over the years, and were 2500sq ft which is plenty of room for junk as kids grow up and move out

And that as well.

I'd love to, problem is that they don't make 400-600sq ft houses anywhere near a job.

You missed the point. The point is that the value depends on the person assessing it.

Often because they were poor.

My father hoarded all manner of stuff in the garage. It took me days of work to clear it out. And yet I basically understood why each thing was saved.

That chunk of metal was used to repair the car when the front quarter panel rusted from salt. That brass got brazed onto that fixture. Those were the washers for the kitchen sinks. That leather chunk repaired his briefcase. That stuff was used to fence in the garden. That stuff was used to stake the tomato plants. He held onto furniture from my room until I was out of grad school and needed it. etc.

We flat out didn't have the money when I was growing up to just buy stuff from a big box store (and they didn't really exist yet). If we didn't have the material, it didn't get fixed.

A lot of children didn't grow up like this. None of the younger generation in my family want any of the furniture. They have the disposable cash from their parents that they can buy something "new". I would have killed at their age for the stuff I now throw out. C'est la vie.

I think nearly everyone holds junk. Rather few go to actual minimalism. For rest they end up collecting some things marginally useful.