“Useful Junk” by jefftk

Occasionally people will get excited about a minimalism fad, where you figure out which of your possessions you need and keep only those. As someone who generally doesn't like getting rid of things, I've been thinking some about why, and the main thing I keep coming back to is that random objects can be helpful in unpredictable ways. Here are some things that I kept without a specific use in mind, but that ended up being useful. You could say they saved time or money, but often the biggest gain was from being able to do a project in one go with what I already had on hand: Ethernet cable. Back in 2019 if you'd asked me whether I would ever use ethernet again, I would have said probably not. WiFi was good enough for everything I was doing. But then I (like a lot of us) suddenly started working from home and got frustrated about how poorly my internet was working for video calls and ran ethernet to my desk. Having cable on hand already meant I could just set it up. Plexiglass. When I built my accidental electronic instrument I wanted [...] --- First published: November 5th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dYZrtZYty2CSCLjJS/useful-junk --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.