Reply To: Culling The Pile…

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I gave away a load of minis after covid. It was really, really cathartic. But my wife says I’ve long had a rather unusual relationship with the whole concept of “ownership”. See, I don’t actually understand ownership.
To me, we never actually own anything – it’s all just stuff that’s in our custody for a while.

That house you “own”? You didn’t build it, did you? Someone else owned it before you. Someone else will own it after you’re gone. It’s not a “forever thing”. Just something you have custody of for a while. Who still has their first car? Nope? What happened to it? I’ve no idea what happened to mine. But someone owned it before me, possibly a few people did. Then. I had it for a while, and now it’s gone.

I see pretty much all my possessions like this.
When I’ve helped clear out relative’s belongings, a lot of it gets given away (to charity or friends). Some of it gets mercilessly chucked out. When I’m gone, I’m pretty ok with my loved ones doing exactly that too – don’t hang onto the crap I’ve collected, just because I had possession of it for a while! Let it go. It was me that enjoyed holding onto it for a bit, not you.

I do the same with my own possessions every now and again.
When they no longer give me joy or comfort – I get rid of them.
My wife thinks I’m crazy. But then again, she benefitted when we first got together and I gave her my house (actually, sometimes just giving stuff away (without being dead first) comes with legal obligations – but the principle is the same).

But even beyond this existential crisis of ownership, getting rid of minis is also great for your mental wellbeing.
I had a massive pile of potential for years. Sometimes it would nag at me, that it wasn’t finished (let’s be honest, not even started). But what nagged even more what the time, at some point in the future, I’d have to commit to getting it done. To get from “I’m so sad this pile of grey is still grey” to “I’m relieved this pile of grey is no longer grey” would require more time than I wanted to commit to it – and even the idea of committing all that time to getting it done, when future-me could be doing something else, that would make me sad too! Now-me was committing future-me to stuff now-me couldn’t be bothered doing. Why would future-me want to do it? Future-me would have no time to do cool and groovy stuff, just because now-me was a jerk.

So getting rid of your unpainted minis not only clears space on your shelf, it clears space in your mind. And it gets you a whole load of your life back, that you can spend doing other, cooler things.

And if you get rid of some minis and then decide it was a massive mistake and you need to get them back?
Remember the buzz you got when you first acquired those minis?
You get to have that again too, when you buy them for a second time!

Get rid of your unpainted minis.
It’s win-win-win!