"My father kept manuals for products we hadn't owned in years, filed alphabetically in a cabinet. When I asked why, he looked at me like I'd suggested burning money. "What if we need to look something up?" The concept of finding any manual online in seconds just doesn't compute for a generation that had to rely on these paper lifelines."
"After helping several friends clear out their parents' homes recently, I've noticed a pattern. Boomers hold onto certain items with an almost religious devotion, while their kids see these same objects as immediate candidates for the donation bin or trash. It's not about sentimentality versus practicality. It's about fundamentally different relationships with stuff, shaped by the worlds we grew up in."
A persistent generational divide shapes how people decide what to keep. Older adults often preserve physical items like instruction manuals, phone books, printed emails, and photo albums because those objects once provided practical access, security, and connection. Younger people rely on digital tools, online manuals, and cloud storage, so physical artifacts appear unnecessary and are more likely to be recycled or discarded. The divergence arises from different lived experiences with technology and scarcity, not merely sentimentality versus practicality. Clearing parents' homes commonly reveals patterns of near-religious attachment to certain objects among Boomers versus pragmatic decluttering by their children.
Read at Silicon Canals
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