Long weekend here in the US (Memorial Day's tomorrow) and instead of doing anything that resembles relaxing, I spent about two hours this afternoon sitting on the floor of my office going through The Drawer. You know the one. Every house has at least one. Mine is the bottom drawer of an IKEA Alex unit that's been slowly filling with dead technology since roughly the Obama administration, and today I finally decided I was going to empty it out and be honest with myself about what's actually ever coming back.
Here's the inventory, more or less in the order I pulled things out:
- Three iPhone cables with the white coating peeling off in that specific spiral pattern, none of which I'd trust near an outlet
- A first-gen Apple Pencil, no idea which iPad it charges, I don't own that iPad anymore
- A CyberPower UPS that's been silently dying since March, it beeps once every four or five days now, just to remind me it's there and unhappy
- Two USB hubs, one from a laptop I sold in 2019
- A Fitbit Charge that still turns on and still, somehow, remembers my step count from whatever day I stopped wearing it
- An honest-to-god 30-pin dock connector cable, for a device I have not owned since college
I kept exactly four things and the UPS is going in the trunk of my car tomorrow morning for the e-waste drop-off at the county recycling center, assuming they're actually open on a holiday Monday, which I genuinely don't know and didn't check before deciding this was the plan.
The thing that got me, sorting through all this, wasn't the clutter itself. It's that I could reconstruct my last fifteen years of gadget ownership almost entirely from the contents of one drawer, and most of it was garbage the day I bought it. Not garbage in quality necessarily — the Fitbit worked fine, it's just that a step counter stopped being a standalone product about six years ago and nobody told my drawer. I think about this a lot actually, how much of "personal tech" is just accumulated obsolescence sitting in a box waiting for you to feel bad about throwing it away. I don't feel bad anymore. That's new for me. I used to hold onto cables because "you never know," and I've decided that's a lie I told myself so I wouldn't have to make a decision.
One thing I'm keeping, against my own new rule: a Palm Zire 71 that doesn't even power on anymore. No practical reason. I bought it with money I saved up from a summer job the year before I started this blog, and something about pitching it felt like erasing the reason I started writing here in the first place. Sentiment wins sometimes. I'm allowed one exception.
If you're doing your own version of this over the long weekend, my only actual advice is: don't try to sell the small stuff. I spent maybe twenty minutes trying to figure out if the Apple Pencil was worth listing somewhere before realizing I'd make maybe eleven dollars after shipping and the emotional cost of dealing with a buyer who wants to negotiate down from eleven dollars is not worth eleven dollars. Recycle it or give it to someone who wants a project. The math on reselling old peripherals almost never works unless it's something genuinely collectible, and a used stylus from 2015 is not that.
The other thing worth saying: check your county's rules before you just chuck electronics in with regular trash. Mine fines you for it, apparently, though I've never actually seen anyone get caught, which either means enforcement is rare or everyone else already knows better than I did. Either way, not worth finding out. A lot of counties do free e-waste days a couple times a year instead of year-round drop-off, so if you're planning this same kind of cleanout, it's worth a quick search before you load up the trunk.
Drawer's empty now except for the Palm Pilot and a phone charger I'm keeping out of pure paranoia. Feels good. Probably won't last — give it eighteen months and there'll be a new pile of stuff nobody bought recently but nobody wants to admit is dead yet. That's sort of the whole cycle though, isn't it.