The other day the Internet gave me an article from Southern Living that purported to be about things that people regret decluttering. The story is ridiculous, but feeling bad about decluttering or wishing you hadn’t gotten rid of things is real.
No One Regrets Decluttering Wallpaper
The article, with the clickbaity title (hey, it worked on me) “9 Things People Often Regret Throwing Away — And Why You Might, Too” offers up a list of things that someone, somewhere, might have once felt bad about getting rid of but seriously they are mostly not things most people would feel bad about.
I’ll save you a click and give you the summary:
- Fashion jewelry: because once the person they interviewed found a lapel pin worth $12,000 (but it was from a political campaign from 1896 so obviously you’d think that might have value)
- Spare keys if you don’t know what they go to
- DVDs and DVD players in case your favorite series goes away on streaming
- Dust bags that come with shoes (I’m clearly buying the wrong shoes because I have never gotten a dust bag, but I’d probably use it to hold yarn anyway)
- Gift bags like you can’t just buy another one
- Wallpaper scraps (who even has wallpaper?) because you can use it as art or wrapping paper (I guess because you decluttered all your gift bags?)
- Manuals (they make a good point that yours might include the serial number of your appliance, but you can probably just keep that page and find the manual online, but check/download before you toss)
- Old memorabilia
Finally at the end we get to a potentially real one. I guess the DVD one could be legitimate if you have a copy of your favorite show or movie, but I haven’t bought a DVD since “Frozen” so that’s not one that speaks to me.
What’s a Legitimate Regret?
Just because something could potentially be useful doesn’t mean you should regret decluttering it. I definitely don’t think gift bags, wallpaper scraps or manuals (or the mythical dust bags that come with shoes) rise to the level of regret. You might be momentarily annoyed to remember you had the perfect sized gift bag but got rid of it, but that’s very different from what I would call regret (and a use of the 20/20 rule I can get behind).
And you might regret donating a piece of jewelry, art or anything else if you later learn it was valuable, but once it’s gone it doesn’t really matter what you might have sold it for, so any potential regret should be temporary.
When it comes to the sentimental and impossible to replace, I can see how you might regret decluttering if you weren’t really ready to let go of those tangible things.
I held onto a box of notes from high school for years before I finally decided I was ready to let it go. (Most of them were written in pencil and probably unreadable 20 years later anyway.) I don’t regret that they’re gone because I was probably never going to reread them anyway, and I still have the memory of passing notes in class.
Regret in Decluttering Comes from Your Energy
I think we end up regretting things we declutter when we bring the wrong energy to the process. If you feel like you’re being forced to get rid of things that still have value or meaning to you, those are probably things you’ll regret decluttering more than if you feel like it was your choice.
Even if it is your choice, if you feel rushed or stressed in the process you’re more likely to regret decluttering something because you might feel like you didn’t give it proper attention.
Silly as it sounds, the Marie Kondo practice of thanking your possessions as you let them go is actually a really good one to acknowledge and release things without regret. Or use Danshari to think about your relationship to an object in your current life and if it still has value to you.
And if you do feel real regret from decluttering something irreplaceable, take some time to write about it, make a piece or art or even talk to a mental health professional about it. It helps me to remember that nothing is ours forever and we still have the memories of the thing or involving the thing even if we don’t physically have the thing any more.
Have you ever regretted decluttering something? How did you deal with it?
