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.”
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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.
Personally, I think we should bring back the custom of grave goods. If there’s some precious heirloom that holds sentimental significance to a person but isn’t otherwise valuable or useful, why not bury it with them?
I’m already thinking about getting some land and making an “indefinite time capsule” for storing a bunch of stuff that I have no use for but that I wouldn’t want to see go off to a landfill for sentimental reasons.
Bury me with my sweet vice I scored for free that one day.
Was that the one where he kills himself so he can haunt Meatwad?
Ultra mega chicken
So… a storage unit?
No.
Seeding the land for the next generation of American pickers?
Every time I pass a cemetery, I think, there’s a million bucks in jewelry just sitting there.
At my grandmother’s funeral, she wore her jewelry for the viewing but it was quietly removed by the funeral home folks and handed to my mother before the burial. So there might be less jewelry than you’d expect.
Your mother is a grave robber. Smart woman.
We’d need to take some cues from how the ancients did it. Either arrange for long term security, like the Egyptians, or rely on secrecy, like the Mongols. It won’t work forever, but as long as it works for a couple of generations I’d be satisfied.
One idea that comes to mind for modern grave goods would be to bury them in a nuclear waste disposal facility.
Bring back kurgans and put parks on them.
I don’t think we want to give an incentive to plunder nuclear waste.
“This necklace is beautiful, but why does the air taste like metal?”
I’m thinking more along the lines of future archaeologists. We learn so much about ancient cultures from what they bury with their dead, I figure we should return the favor.
Geez they had a lot of absolute tat!
“Why the fuck was this man burried in a refrigerator and why the fuck was it set on fire?” I want these to be the exact words for when my inevitable redneck viking funeral is done.
I love that your last paragraph explains that you want to avoid things going into a landfill by reinventing a landfill.
There’s rather a big difference between a time capsule and a landfill.
No. We do not do nuance here
The difference being a landfill might one day be mined for raw materials, whereas no one past your grandchildren will know about your time capsule until archaeologists discover it and misattribute all your sentimental crap as religious or sexual paraphernalia.
You’ve made a heck of a lot of assumptions about how a time capsule like this would be set up. But even so, how is being mined for raw materials better than having some of my stuff be misattributed?
Yes, but it’s a curated and cataloged landfill.