5 Useless Products That Nobody Can Throw Out

Our societal book-harm taboos sometimes go even further than that. A woman who made a video instructing viewers how to cut up old books for an art project had to take down the video after a wave of abuse by angry Internetters, and the surviving copy of the video contains comments calling her a "book murderer" and declaring that the video is "quite possibly the most offensive thing I've ever witnessed." Given this climate, it's no surprise that most of us choose to hold on to old crates of books we'll never read again. And when we do decide to clear them from our houses, most of us can't bear to actually throw them in the trash or recycle them: What are we, history's greatest monsters?

Why It's Bullshit:

Look, I know why people have this attitude. For centuries, books were wisdom in paper form. Without Internet access or even widespread education, destroying books meant destroying perhaps-irreplaceable knowledge and history. And obviously nobody is advocating tossing out copies of the Gutenberg Bible or anything.

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Except maybe this guy.

People, the world has changed. I feel it in the 75th printing of Fifty Shades of Grey, and I smell it in the local library's moldy copy of Protecting Your Child from Ritual Satanic Abuse. Book printing is now cheap, easy, and completely morally neutral. Just because you've stuck some words on paper, that doesn't mean that paper is sacred or worthy.

And yet despite this, any online query about throwing out or recycling books is still met with exhortations to donate the precious things instead, usually to thrift stores or disadvantaged children. People just can't recognize that not all books are valuable by default, and that the world isn't full of poor people just dying for a copy of Guide to the Amiga 4000 or Microwave Cooking for Single Dames. Libraries and thrift stores don't have unlimited storage space for our sweat-damp old romance novels, and kids in underprivileged school districts are probably not clamoring for 15-year-old copies of Stephen King novels with suspicious-looking splash marks from when you read them on the toilet.

The reality is that most of your crappy old books won't sell, and if you insist on shunting them to thrift stores regardless, you're just shunting the responsibility, labor, and recycling costs to charity workers. All because you couldn't deal with tossing your copy of Science's Greatest Gift: An Expectant Mother's Guide to Thalidomide.

Like anyone, you want to be the kind of person who wears a Panama hat. And you tell yourself that if you buy this hat, maybe you will become this person. The next day, you look at your hat and realize that you are not yet brave enough to wear it. What if someone judges you? What if the salesperson was lying to you when she said you looked just like an unbearded, less woman-battering version of Sean Connery? What if the hat is some sort of drug code among today's teenagers? For today, it's best to be safe and go hatless. But you don't want to throw out the hat, because tomorrow you might be braver. So you put it in the closet, on top of the piles of other hats and clothes that you tell yourself you'll wear one day.

Why It's Bullshit:

You're never going to have a life-changing event that makes you into the kind of person who wears Panama hats. Or bright pink shirts, or steampunk goggles, or thin-person dresses, whatever it is that's been sitting in your closet unworn for the last 12 months. Real life doesn't work that way. A person of the opposite sex is not going to frolic into your life and cure your inhibitions over the course of a weekend. People do change, but when they do, it's usually slow, and by the time it happens, the hat will be dusty anyway, and maybe by then Panama hats will have been appropriated by a completely different crowd anyway.

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Probably Mormons.

We all owe it to ourselves to get rid of our better-person clothes. By keeping this shit in our closets, we're not just rejecting our present, slobbish, sweatpants-wearing selves; we're also saying that we'll never be OK with ourselves the way we are. No, we'll always need that emergency supply of clothing there, mocking us whenever we open the closet door and reminding us that today is yet another day when we're not cool enough for the right hat.

Why It's Bullshit:

I'm not going to dismiss the desire to hold on to dead loved ones' possessions. It's human nature to keep a cherished item or two, or even entire boxes. But when you've got a quarter of the basement full of moldering boxes of Cornelius' useless stuff, you have a problem. These objects are not serving dear Cornelius anymore, and more importantly, they're not serving you. Most likely, you're not regularly going down to the basement to thumb through his used handkerchief collection or peruse his Frank Sinatra fan fiction.

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"If this is wrong, Sammy," he whispered, stroking the other man's cheek, "I don't want to be right."

Holding on to dead people's stuff usually has little to do with you, or your dead loved one, or your feelings for them. It's about trying to avoid a painful experience. Throwing away Cornelius' stuff is going to suck, and it's going to hurt, and you're going to tear up at the sweet nostalgic scent of BENGAY and rotting mothballs. So you avoid the task, and soon there are raccoons living in his stuff.

Of course, the cure for this isn't difficult: call in a few less sentimental friends and get them to toss out his stuff while you're not there. There's a risk that by not doing it yourself, you might accidentally dispose of a valuable coin collection or Adolf Hitler's thigh bone, but that's life.

Why It's Bullshit:

Much like books, photographs were way more valuable when nobody had many of them. For a long time, photographs were so inconvenient that people just didn't take that many. Just a few generations ago, you might inherit less than half a dozen pictures of your beloved deceased grandmother. Nowadays, Grandma takes more photos just to document her trip through the airport in New Jersey.

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"And here's the sink after the nice lady cleaned up Grandpa Elmer's accident with the Mexican food."

Sure, keep the 90,000 pictures your great-grandparents left behind if you want: They're not hard to store. Just don't expect anyone else to be interested in most of them, not unless you pull off some mighty fine scrapbooking.

Why It's Bullshit:

Recently, I helped clean out the house of an elderly couple who grew up during the Great Depression. These people weren't hoarders, but they were certainly knocking on the hoarding door: The place was so stuffed that a well-fed individual could not move through some of the rooms without knocking over furniture. Now, these people weren't slobs. They had a complicated organization system for all their absolutely useless shit. We found, among other things, a box of pen lids, a bag of old shoe insoles, a whole shelving system for different flavors of expired gelatin powder, and a huge, teetering pile of carefully washed takeout containers.

If the couple had thrown out this shit before, a lot of it could have avoided ending up in a dumpster. Much of the household goods could have been donated if they'd done it 30 years ago. Unfortunately, they held on to the stuff instead, and very few people want to inherit ancient burnt-orange salad bowls or dusty '90s jeans.

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"Here's some dead batteries and a partially used box of Depends. Nothing is too good for the poor."

And it gets worse. When you're clearing out a house, you've got a limited amount of time to get rid of all the shit in there. When you have entire rooms of crap packed to the ceiling, you can't take a year off work while carefully separating everything that might be recyclable. Most recycling centers also have fees and limits to how much stuff you can dump, so a lot of recyclable stuff also ended up in a dumpster, just because nobody had the time or money to sort it properly. This couple's desire not to waste anything led to a lot of shit unnecessarily going to waste.

Obviously, not many of us are at the elderly quasi-hoarder stage yet. But the lesson remains: If you're too guilt-ridden from watching Captain Planet as child to be able to toss your household crap outright, you should at least set aside the time to take it to a thrift store or a recycling depot or something. Don't keep it in your house, or one day all that shit will be on a one-way train to Landfill City. Plus, if you die tomorrow in a freak pug-puppy-pile suffocation accident, your relatives will appreciate it.

C. Coville has a Twitter here and a Tumblr here.