“Chunk of wire”… I’ve got all types of wires and cables and computer components from back when I built my own computers that I will never use. It’s cheaper now to just buy a computer and they get outdated so fast anyway, it’s not worth the time and trouble to build your own.  Besides my current office is too tiny, nowhere to work anyway.  But I’m having a hard time tossing that big reel of cat 5, old monitors, cases, spare wifi, power cords, adapters, etc etc etc.  “Some day I might need this!”  Yeah right.

I agree with so much of what you said that I am about to embark on an old cable-ectomy of my office.
I have dozens of VGA cables, 30 pin apple cables, RCA and Composite cables, scores of USB and Micro USB cables, computer power cords, RS232 cables, parallel printer cables, tons of cat 5 jumper cables, stereo audio cables and cables I don't even recognize any more.  Even if I were to find a use for two or three of them, I don't need hundreds of them cluttering up my drawers and shelves and boxes.

But one thing I'm not allowed to throw away.  My wife has an odd attachment to her '50s era Encyclopedia Britannica.  I counted it up and we have moved them 11 times, unless I forgot a move.

Last week I went through my file cabinets and cleaned out enough old paid bills, credit card statements, bank statements and tons of old health insurance, car insurance, house insurance, flood insurance policies along with hundreds of old warranty cards and more.  I filled up 4 old copy paper boxes and took them to the business I sold where they have a commercial shredding contract.

Several times I went to the garage to thin it out, but I can't identify more than a few pounds of stuff.  It never fails that if I throw anything out, the next week I will need it, even if I hadn't needed it in the past 20 years.  But perhaps I'll give that another try too.

When my mother passed away we cleaned out her house and it was amazing what she kept.  Old calendars from 20 years ago, phone books, teaching materials from when she was a special ed teacher many years ago, all kinds of other stuff.  Like an encyclopedia set from the 1970s.  Small jars of something that went solid.  Things full of memories, I'm sure.  Kind of sad.

That made me much more picky when we made our last move.  What to save, what to donate, what to trash.  We had our regular house, a vacation house (we got the vacation house fully furnished!), and a storage unit all to be compressed into one smaller house.  We set a limit of one moving truck for all our stuff including furniture.  Everything else OUT.  A couple of trucks of donations, a couple dumpsters of "who would want this?"  Actually felt pretty good to get rid of all that stuff.  Even after the move I'm ruthless in discarding old "treasures".  Like that chunk of wire that might be useful some day.  That hammer with a chipped handle.  A box of rocks that are kind of pretty.  Still slowly thinning the bins I couldn't decide on before the move.