This may just be a “me thing”, but a decluttering-related musing I’d like to share in case it resonates with anyone else.
‘what is “historicity”?’
'When a thing has history in it. Listen. One of those two Zippo lighters was in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pocket when he was assassinated. And one wasn’t. One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. As much as any object ever had. And one has nothing … You can’t tell which is which. There’s no “mystical plasmic presence”, no “aura” around it.
- The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, pages 65-66
The Man in the High Castle is an excellent, weird book, but I’ve noticed that the concept of “historicity” is present in much more mundane places than the kind of cultural artifacts it’s used in reference to in the book. Like in family heirlooms and some of my own “sentimental” items.
An example, I have a “sentimental trinkets” box on my bedside table. Inside, I had a toy that I played with as a small child over 25 years ago, but I didn’t have any specific memories attached to it. I just knew I’d had it decades and moved continents with it, so I assumed it was precious. In hindsight it wasn’t sentimental at all, it was the historicity that made me keep it. So I stopped keeping it.
Another toy in that box that I’d also had over 25 years has a specific memory and story attached and makes me smile when I think about it, but it’s not even the same toy that features in the memory. And because the primary association is with that story and that memory, I don’t think of it as “a toy I’ve had since I was 4”, I think of it as “the toy bought to replace the identical one I lost in the ocean and picked up a live crab while searching for it”.
As a lover of museums and archeology I don’t think historicity is a bad concept to value when it’s on a more grand, cultural scale, but within one lifetime I’ve learned to appreciate the distinction and let go of things that aren’t actually valuable.
it’s a struggle to know what to hold on to, like data in a museum, or books in a library, versus what to discard…
a lot of minimalists or declutters might want to get rid of physical books personally but they probably hope or want some entity like the library of Congress to be “hoarding” books or storing them, so it becomes difficult to know what to retain versus get rid of
There is definitely an underlying assumption that everything is infinitely replaceable or accessible, especially for books and media, which is simply not true. But starting from the assumption that everything is valuable is just as bad. If you can identify where the value actually lies for you it can help.
E.g. for me the thing that’s valuable is knowing what I thought of a book when I read it and how it made me feel, because my memory is very poor. Now I’ve started keeping a digital notebook with a private review of each thing I read, so I only have to keep books I want to read again. Which is still a lot, but much less than it was.