It can be challenging to have the force of will to throw away an item or collection in its entirety. From a decluttering standpoint, that’s obviously the best you can do, but I’d like to propose an alternative. I call it ‘trophy-style’ or ‘trophy’ decluttering. The technique is probably so old it doesn’t need a name, but you’ll see from my last example why I think it is appropriate.
Trophy decluttering is getting most of the physical benefit of decluttering by getting rid of most of a item/collection and saving an symbolically or actually valuable subset. Clearly, this is what hunters (and even movie characters like the Predator) have been doing for thousands of years - they don’t save/display the entire beast, just keep the claws, head, antlers, what have you.
In trophy decluttering you reduce the problem of deciding whether something is worth keeping at all to (what turns out to be) the much simpler problem of deciding what subset to keep.
You’ll be pleasantly surprised how approachable this makes decluttering. In my case I had two decades worth of floppy disk. I knew only a small handful had anything ‘interesting’ on them, some unreadable for various reasons. None had been referred to in a decade. So rather than make a forever all-or-nothing decision to burn/migrate/erase the collection, I went threw them, set a few aside that were possibly interesting. The rest I degaussed and threw away. Net result:
Did I get the full benefit? No, I still have a dozen floppies that it’s questionable I can ever get the data off (or would ever want to…). But by not tying together the probably-high cost of actually migrating the media to the discard step, I effectively gained about 80% of the benefit, with a fraction of the effort.
The essay on Art Supply Reduction is the same theme. While not ready to completely lock myself out of some creative art endeavors, by trimming the collection, I got the physical space benefit, with much less of a mental investment.
Other fruitful areas? I’m sure you have a lot. Magazines? Why defer the entire effort by insisting to yourself it must be all or nothing? If you have a five year collection gathering dust, pick out a dozen issues that appeal to you, give yourself a quota, then toss the rest. Halloween props/Christmas ornaments? Keep your favorite two boxes worth, send the rest to Goodwill. Old electronics? Keep the best one or two of each item, then discard the rest.
The trophy theme is most profound for large, bulky items. In my case, I had a computer that (I know this might be surprising) had some strong symbolic value to me. It was an old 386 and would never do anything useful again, and I carted it from house to house, never actually properly ‘displaying it’. Although intellectually I knew it was silly to have this attachment, I couldn’t discard it. So I removed the processor and a memory chip and the serial number, saved it for a little display or future plaque, and then discarded the case ‘hulk’. Both goals achieved - the symbolic value retained for me, and the physical space reduced by 98%.
Good luck, and let me know your success stories!