Somewhere in your home is an object you have not touched in three years and would be upset to lose. Most people, asked to name it, can do so immediately. The speed of that recall is itself interesting — we know exactly which possessions occupy this strange category, even though by any functional measure they are dead weight.
The question of why is more layered than the decluttering industry suggests.
The endowment effect explains part of it
Behavioural economists have a tidy answer. In 1990, Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler ran an experiment in which participants were given mugs and then offered the chance to sell them. Sellers wanted roughly twice what buyers were willing to pay for an identical mug.
Ownership itself changed the perceived value. Not use, not need — ownership. This is the endowment effect, and it is robust across cultures, object types and experimental designs.
It explains why getting rid of something feels like a loss even when keeping it produces no benefit. Losses loom larger than equivalent gains, so parting with an unused object registers emotionally as a cost while the space it frees registers as almost nothing.
But the endowment effect does not explain the specificity
Here is what the standard account misses. If ownership alone drove attachment, we would be equally reluctant to discard any owned object. We are not. Most people can throw away a chipped mug without a second thought while being genuinely unable to discard a particular jumper that no longer fits.
The difference is not value. It is that some objects are load-bearing for memory in a way others are not.
The philosopher Edward Casey wrote about this in the context of place — that memory is not stored in the mind alone but distributed across the environment, held in objects and locations that act as anchors. Remove the anchor and the memory does not vanish, but it becomes harder to reach. It loses its handle.
This is why the objects people cannot discard are so often connected to a specific period rather than a specific person. The concert ticket, the university hoodie, the tools from a job you no longer do. They are not sentimental about the object. They are sentimental about a version of themselves that the object provides access to.
The problem this creates in small homes
None of which would matter if space were free. In most British cities it is emphatically not.
The average new-build home in England is now among the smallest in Western Europe. London flats routinely price at figures where a square metre of floor space costs more than a small car. Under those conditions, storing an object at home is not neutral — it has a running cost, even if that cost is never itemised.
This produces a genuine dilemma rather than a moral failing. The decluttering literature tends to frame keeping things as a psychological problem to be overcome, with the implication that a well-adjusted person would simply let go. But there is nothing irrational about valuing an object that provides access to a period of your life. What is irrational is paying central London rent to house it.
The resolution most people eventually arrive at is separation rather than disposal. Things that are genuinely in use live where you live. Things that are load-bearing for memory but functionally dormant live somewhere cheaper. Firms offering removal and storage stackt style — collection, holding, and return when wanted — exist largely because this middle category is so much larger than people assume when they first take stock of it.
It is not a compromise so much as an admission that “use” and “value” were never the same axis.
The category that should go
There is one group of objects that does not survive this analysis, and it is worth naming because it accounts for a great deal of what fills lofts and spare rooms.
Objects kept out of guilt.
The unused gift from someone who would notice. The expensive purchase that was a mistake. The equipment for the hobby you were going to take up. These are not memory anchors — they anchor an obligation or a failed intention, and keeping them does not preserve anything worth preserving.
They also tend to be the objects people feel worst about, which is a reasonable diagnostic. Guilt about an object is a signal that the object is doing no work.
A better question than “do I use this”
The standard decluttering prompt asks whether an object sparks joy, or whether you have used it in a year. Both are proxies for something more specific.
The more useful question is: if this were destroyed in a fire, would I be sad about the object or about what it reminds me of?
If the answer is the object, keep it accessible — you actually use it, or you actually love it as an object.
If the answer is the memory, photograph it and consider whether the physical thing needs to be within arm’s reach, or merely needs to continue existing somewhere.
If the answer is neither, you already know what to do.
