I live in a Manhattan-sized 1br with my wife at the moment and one of her friends gave us _four_ martini glasses. They’re a major pain to store anywhere and what’s worse we don’t drink!
I had a conversation with my wife about them that literally started with her saying “Yes, but it’s the thought that counts” and I had to cause marital strife by pointing out the severe lack of thought involved in giving us something we have to store in our tiny place and will never use.
The purpose of a gift is to be given/received. It is given to convey a sentiment.
What you do after receiving it is entirely up to you. Don't fall into this trap of feeling obligating to keep an object you didn't ask for, nor expect. Love people, not things.
I say this having had an impractically full home for 29 years, and now only just really figuring all this out. Finally have space to use what we do have.
Applying those principles, I once immediately tossed a gift of a large, ugly toy dog, unpleasant even to touch, much less look at. The friend who gave it to me kept asking about it.
It can happen, that's for sure. But Martini glasses, probably not. I'm sure there's a strong chance they were either a gift to them, or cheap. It says a lot that the poster doesn't even drink! I've been in the same position with receiving sets of shot glasses or cocktail glasses, but anybody that knows me more than a few hours knows I don't and can't drink alcohol.
In Japan, re-gifting is the norm. It is becoming more common in the UK too now that people are living in smaller properties.
I find non-consumable gifts to be a stress to receive, and to give at times. I try to always make sure if I give a gift that it's consumable so that it won't linger, mainly out of respect, just like I wouldn't outstay my welcome as a guest anywhere.
The worst is being gifted something handmade by would-be artists who can't see the flaws in their own work and thus why it doesn't sell, and they end up giving it out as gifts. No joke, had a room full of objectively bad paintings, poorly painted glassware, badly knitted blankets et al. A huge relief to get the space back.
Even ignoring facetious examples like "your passport" or "the deed to your house", this is terrible advice.
Just in the last month I used some sandpaper that had sat in a box for several years, pulled a ten year old DVD off a shelf and watched it, re-read a book from my childhood and connected an obscure audio adaptor that had been untouched for at least five years.
Earlier this year I played games on two different games consoles from previous decades and reactivated a Raspberry Pi from a previous project into a new one. I pruned a tree and dug a flower bed with some tools that were recovered from a grandparent's house after sitting untouched for well over a year.
If everything in your house that's more than a year old is worthless, maybe you're just buying things which are worthless from the beginning.
The advise was worded too general, but I think it's a valid starting point for evaluating how important something really is.
One slightly more nuanced method I've used when cleaning out is the question "how likely am I to need this again, and is storing it until then easier than selling it now and buying it again if I ever need it". The answers to this shift, for example it justifies getting rid of more possessions as you get more income, and increasingly only keeping things that you actively use or that would be inconvenient or time-sensitive to get again.
Who knows what else you would have used, or watched otherwise. This is really personal though. I have a hard time parting with things, but I also don't care about them as long as I have them, so I end up being a collector of suboptimal items. This doesn't mean that others are in the same situation.
you could have easily purchased new sandpaper, rented the movie on netflix or bought new games.
The cost is keeping unused stuff around is higher than acquiring it again were you to need it again.
And why do you even have a passport if you don't travel?
The deed of your house? Why would you keep a piece of paper you could so easily lose, especially since it's on the land registry anyway?
The cost of keeping small non-perishable items around is zero. The cost of re-buying them is nonzero. The environmental cost of sending perfectly functional items to landfill and consuming energy to recreate them is definitely nonzero. (And the financial cost of disposal is also nonzero; it's just priced into your taxes.)
You also seem to have forgotten that there was a pandemic. I expect 99% of passport-owners went a full year without using it because there was nowhere to go. Earlier this year there was a couple of weeks where you couldn't expedite a passport request for any amount of money due to the backlog created by people who'd allowed their passports to lapse during the pandemic all trying to renew at once.
Which actually shows another problem with the "just buy it again, bro" plan: In addition to being wasteful, it's risky. There's no guarantee that you can just re-buy things, or do so expediently and for a reasonable price, or that you'll have the liquidity to do so. Shortages, buyouts, mass layoffs, inflation and price spikes are all things we've seen many examples of in the last few years.
A few years ago I had to clean all my crap out of my parents house. I put them in boxes unlabelled and waited a year - I couldn’t even remember what was in them so went straight to the dump and heaved them in.
Second hand markets are also great for these. I recently sold all of my electronics online. I offered them for cheap so that I can get rid of them faster, and even the most worthless piece of junk, an 12+ yrs old, beaten up cheapo laptop with a 32 bit CPU found its new owner for some pocket change.
Not all junk can be sold though, of course. But I think it's worth considering, maybe someone else will find them useful and then they can live on a bit longer.
Selling stuff is an absolute PITA. There used to be people who would sell for you on eBay for a cut. AFAIK, that's all gone. I could never be bothered to sell the huge amount of mostly fairly low dollar stuff I don't want. Friends I know who have moved say even yard sales aren't worth the bother. I have stuff like a big pile of laserdiscs that someone would probably like but just not worth the effort to sell.
Selling is definitely a pain. I usually donate unwanted items to local charity shops. For more specialist or other items they won’t take, I prefer to give them away on freecycle.org (or a local equivalent).
Friends tell me that my ridiculously large vinyl record collection (that I only really listen to a small sub-set of) would be worth a lot on Discogs but I find it hard to motivate myself to actually do it.
In my case, one of the things I have is a big stack of laserdiscs. Someone would probably pay OK money for them. But no way am I going to sell them one by one on eBay and even boxing them all up as a take it or leave it sale is almost certainly more trouble than what I would get for it all.
And out where I live something like freecycle is very thin.
Many things are worth something--maybe even a bit more than something--to the right person but making the connection to that person is often more trouble than it's worth.
Can you elaborate a bit on how even the yard sales weren't worth the bother? I imagine that I'd basically sell everything for the first person who wants it, for whatever price.
Pretty much going by what a friend who was moving across the country told me. I imagine I'd still give it a shot if I were going to otherwise just chuck a bunch of stuff in a dumpster. And I have had some luck leaving basically crap for free at the edge of the road.
I'm on a fairly busy road but in a semi-rural location so I'm not going to get that much traffic.
I had a conversation with my wife about them that literally started with her saying “Yes, but it’s the thought that counts” and I had to cause marital strife by pointing out the severe lack of thought involved in giving us something we have to store in our tiny place and will never use.