I used to look daily, just to keep an eye on the market. Have saved searches such as "PRS" and "Paul Reed Smith" etc and would just check the new listings daily, instead of getting them emailed to me. I then got a new phone last week and decided not to install the eBay app so I don't spend as much time looking at "stuff". This all got cemented last week in an email chain with some of my mates, we were talking about old motorbike bits and when they stop being "stuff", and become "junk".
Here's an excerpt from this
http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html
I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can't afford a front yard full of old cars.
It wasn't always this way. Stuff used to be rare and valuable. You can still see evidence of that if you look for it...
When I look back at photos from the 1970s, I'm surprised how empty houses look.
Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven't changed correspondingly. We overvalue stuff.
Companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums training us to think stuff is still valuable. But it would be closer to the truth to treat stuff as worthless.
In fact, worse than worthless, because once you've accumulated a certain amount of stuff, it starts to own you rather than the other way around.
Every thing you own takes energy away from you. Some give more than they take. Those are the only things worth having.
A historical change has taken place, and I've now realized it. Stuff used to be valuable, and now it's not.
In industrialized countries the same thing happened with food in the middle of the twentieth century. As food got cheaper (or we got richer; they're indistinguishable), eating too much started to be a bigger danger than eating too little. We've now reached that point with stuff. For most people, rich or poor, stuff has become a burden.
