Blog Posts - relationships

No Heirlooms for One’s Heirs?

My wife and I were at a neighborhood cookout when one of our friends mentioned he had been in another neighbor’s basement recently to help her turn off the water to her leaking hot-water heater. 

The first question everyone asked was, “Were you able to turn off the water before it ruined all her stuff?” His answer amazed us. “You’ll never believe it—her basement was totally empty!”

None of us believed it. This woman and her teenage daughter have lived in their home for more than a decade. It was simply inconceivable that her basement—like all of ours—wasn’t crammed full of the unwanted but not discarded accumulation of the goods of middle-class living in 21^st century America.

My wife and I have so much stuff.

In our basement we have kid toys that no longer work, clothes that have been outgrown (in several senses of the word), kitchenware we use once every couple of years (if we remember we have it), dozens of VHS tapes (although we have almost all of those movies on DVDs) and leftover cans of paint and rolls of wallpapers that are no longer on our walls.

But that’s not all. We also have “treasures” from both of our parents’ homes: photographs of people no one living can identify, remnants of heirloom china sets insufficient to set the table for more than two people, odd pieces of furniture and even their old clothes (which we know they will never again wear).

Why do we keep all this stuff? Is it because we watch too much Antiques Roadshow and think that all of it “might be worth something someday?” Is it because it is pregnant with meaning—or at least memories—that we are afraid we might otherwise lose? Or is it because we think that our children might be able to use it someday?

Well, if it’s the latter, we’re out of luck. A recent article in the Washington Post reported, “A seismic shift of stuff is underway in homes all over America.” Apparently the children of baby boomers not only don’t want our stuff, they refuse to take what they see as our refuse.

This realization has sparked an almost existential crisis for my wife and me. There was never any question that we would take the things our parents passed down to us, just as they took things their parents passed down to them. That is the natural order of things, isn’t it? Apparently not.

It seems the millennial generation doesn’t want to be tied down by too many possessions. The rapid growth in technology, and the speed with which today’s tech gadgets become tomorrow’s trash, has desensitized them to the enduring value of heirloom items, such as their grandfather’s slide rule, or their mother’s five sets of china or their great-grandfather’s long-outdated book about the history of America, which concludes with the Spanish-American War.

At first, this thinking seemed almost heretical. But as I considered it, I recalled a bit of wisdom that Ralph Waldo Emerson gave the world almost 150 years ago: “Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.” So as I look at all the stuff in my basement and envy my neighbor’s empty one, I believe that Emerson’s warning is a far better heirloom to pass along than any of the stuff we’ve been holding onto for too long.