Wisdom from estate sales

My wife and I have a weakness: estate sales. There is so much cool stuff out there that old people collected that just gets auctioned off when they either pass away or go to an old folks home. Stuff that tells the story of an entire life. Have we been asked if we have our own antique shop because we are frequent buyers?

Why yes, we have.

My favorite things to collect besides guns, tractors, and John Deere riding mowers (listen, three is not that many) are books. If Kelli sends me a lot of books from an auction, the odds are pretty good that I’ll try to win them.

Will I ever read them all? Doubt it. But I love collecting them.

But last night, it made me think about something. I was sitting on the couch from an estate sale, reading a book from an estate sale, and petting my second-hand bird dog from the pound. These old folks whose stuff we’re pillaging had diverse interests. These were largely working-class people. Since a lot of the pickups were from the house itself, you can see where they lived. They probably bought modest little places when they were young and lived a full life there.

The books are fascinating. The same sale will have everything from a book on rough carpentry and framing, to Aristotle, with all kinds of things in between. Books on the American West. Books on gardening. Books on everything.

These people had hobbies and played games. We have scored probably dozens of vintage board games, card decks, chess sets, and so on.

What will estate sales look like when my generation dies off? A stack of old iPhones? I don’t really even know. But I do know that I see the remnants of interesting lives every time we look at an auction.

Everything I talk about ultimately comes back to writing and freelancing in some roundabout sort of way. I’m not sure this one ties in directly, but it is more of a general observation. If you live your life in analog like these folks did, the odds are good that you are a deep thinker who wrestles with deep thoughts.

Am I going to give up digital money to chase an analog life? Of course not. The internet gives us more opportunities than anyone can imagine. But there are powerful lessons all around us about how people lived and thought before the internet age. And I think you can do both: restrict your dependence on the digital realm and increase your intake of interesting things that actually make you smarter. Not only can you, but you should. See the internet for the tool that it is. It is a tool and nothing else.

The internet isn’t going anywhere. Good or bad, it is the most powerful force on earth, so you might as well leverage it for your own good. One skill that is only growing is SEO, and you should learn it at https://learningseo.io/. I am not affiliated with this site at all (although I plan to emulate it with some ideas of my own), but it is a great resource to learn SEO. Once you learn a useful skill like SEO, get on Upwork and start making money.