In my closet, there’s a stack of boxes. The one my boots came in, the one from a handbag I bought two years ago, the original packaging for a blender I’ve used maybe six times.
To anyone walking in, it probably looks like clutter. But every time I’ve thought about getting rid of one, the same questions show up: What if I move? What if I sell the bag? What if something breaks and they want the original packaging?
Most of those situations will probably never happen. But psychology has a name for the instinct keeping the boxes right where they are, and it explains more than just my closet.
You’re not deciding the box is useful, you’re deciding the regret isn’t worth it
When you look at a box you haven’t opened in a year and still can’t throw it away, your brain isn’t making a judgment about cardboard. It’s running a simulation.
It’s asking: If I get rid of this and it turns out I needed it, how bad will that feel?
Psychologists call that feeling anticipated regret, and it works like this: when you’re making a decision under uncertainty, you don’t just weigh what’s useful right now. You imagine how you’ll feel later if your decision turns out to be wrong.
And the version of the future where you regret throwing something away is almost always more vivid and more emotionally loud than the version where you never think about it again.
Marcel Zeelenberg, a psychologist who’s spent decades studying how regret shapes decisions, has shown that anticipated regret pushes people toward whatever feels like the safer option, even when the risk is small.
It’s why you go with the sure thing. It’s why you hold onto the receipt.
The fear of being wrong later carries more weight than the mild inconvenience of keeping something now.
So when you’re standing in front of your closet holding a shoebox and thinking But what if I need this, you’re not being irrational.
You’re doing exactly what your brain was built to do: protect you from a future version of yourself who’s annoyed, or stuck, or kicking herself for not keeping the one thing she ended up needing.
The calculation only runs in one direction
The habit is hard to shake because keeping something feels almost free. A receipt takes up an inch in a drawer. A box sits on a shelf.
An old phone charger curls up in a corner of a kitchen drawer, and you forget it’s there until the next time you open it.
But throwing something away? That closes a door. Once the box is in the recycling, you can’t get it back.
And the imagined consequences of not having it, like paying for a new one, losing resale value, or looking foolish at the return counter, feel potentially much bigger than the cost of just letting it sit there.
So under uncertainty, “keep it” wins almost every time. Your brain reads storage as cheap and regret as expensive, and the comparison isn’t even close.
This is how a closet fills up. Not with one dramatic decision, but with hundreds of tiny moments where keeping felt easier than deciding.
You’ve got spare cords whose devices you don’t recognize, extra screws from furniture you assembled three apartments ago, return labels for purchases you made last fall, and gift bags you’ve folded and tucked behind the coats.
Each one is worth almost nothing on its own. But each one represents a door you didn’t have to close.
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Keeping something is also a way of not deciding
There’s another layer underneath the regret, and it’s simpler than it sounds. Throwing something away is a decision. A final, irreversible one. And making final decisions takes energy, especially when the stakes feel unclear.
Research on what psychologists call status quo bias has shown this pattern across dozens of contexts: when people are uncertain about a choice, they tend to stick with whatever’s already in place, even when changing would serve them better.
The current state gets treated as the default, and moving away from it gets mentally coded as a risk. It doesn’t matter if “the current state” is a closet shelf full of empty boxes.
The shelf is the status quo, and the status quo is easier than the trash can.
So the box stays. You haven’t decided it’s worth keeping. You just haven’t had to decide anything at all. Keeping it lets you postpone a choice you’d rather not make, and postponing feels like nothing, which is exactly why it keeps winning.
There’s a version of this that isn’t about boxes on a shelf
It’s worth drawing a line here, because “I keep a lot of boxes” and “I have a clinical problem” are not the same thing, and the difference isn’t just volume.
Hoarding disorder involves persistent difficulty discarding possessions, not just product packaging, but things of any kind, regardless of whether they’re useful. It’s paired with real distress at the thought of letting them go.
And the accumulation is severe enough that it interferes with living in your home. The kitchen you can’t cook in because there’s no counter space. The hallway you have to turn sideways to walk through. The distress isn’t mild preference; it’s closer to panic.
If the boxes are on a shelf and the closet still closes, that’s not this.
What you’re dealing with is a brain that’s very good at imagining futures where it needs things. It’s very bad at imagining the one where nothing happens and it never thinks about the box again.
The better question isn’t whether you could need it
I still have most of those boxes. Intellectually, I know that the blender box is not going to save me from anything.
But keeping it has always felt like buying a tiny insurance policy against future regret, and the premium is just a few inches of shelf space.
The question I’ve started asking isn’t could I ever need this? Because almost anything could theoretically become useful, and that question will talk you into keeping everything you own.
The better question is if I throw this away and need it later, how serious would the consequence really be?
Sometimes the answer justifies keeping it. The laptop box with the custom foam insert that would cost real money to replace can stay.
But sometimes the worst-case scenario is that future me has to find another cardboard box, and it turns out the world is not short on cardboard boxes.
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