Went to an estate sale today.

Crazy how much time we spend chasing material possessions, curating our homes, acquiring things, acting like we’re going to live forever.

Then one day, sooner than you think, your family will take the good stuff before strangers dig through what's left, looking for deals. No attachment, no emotion, zero care at all for you or your life.

It was a good reminder.

What actually matters is family, love, relationships, memories. Not the material stuff. Not the money.

You don't take any of it with you.

This page is a permanent link to the reply below and its nested replies. See all post replies »

swirlie · F

I'm a member of an online auction website which sells every kind of 'thing' or 'stuff' imaginable. What I've noticed most of all with online Estate auctions is that all the stuff for sale looks exactly the same from one auction to the next. It's all the same shitte, all the same style (French Provincial), it's all from the same era (which means originally acquired post WWII).

None of it has any inherent meaning of itself, which means that what the kids didn't want, ended up in an online Estate auction for scavengers to rake over in their quest for so-called 'antiques'.

We have to keep in mind that every single thing in an auction was originally purchased from a shelf in a store which sat beside a dozen or more just like itself and grandma simply reached up and grabbed the closest one she could reach, paid for it, brought it home, then coveted it for the next 75 years, at which point her family fought over it and sometimes disowned each other because they didn't get the 'thing' that grandma had on her china cabinet since the day they first recall seeing grandma in their life.

As the online Auctioneer has often told me when I went to pick stuff up that I had purchased, "its only 'stuff' and it only has the inherent meaning that we assign to it, but of itself it's both meaningless and worthless in the real world".