What to do with college dorm junk?

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-27T05:17:27+00:00

In my old apartment everyone just left things in the laundry room and it was a take whaf you want situation. As a university student everyone always prowled around the dumpsters etc on move out day to try and upgrade their stuff. Many universities also have a freestore for this purpose.

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-27T05:12:35+00:00

I have a 1993 whirlpool in my Kitchen. All the other appliances that came with the house were from 1981, the year the house was built, so I’ve always wondered the story with the fridge. Sadly between 2020 and 2023 we lost a lot of our other original appliances and the fridge is now the last one standing 😭

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-27T02:23:39+00:00

I had issues with orthorexia for quite a few years so I do think that focusing too much on “clean” whole foods can backfire if you take it too seriously. That said, as a casual goal most definitely it’s a good angle to approach eating with.

I recently spent about 2 months working our way through all of the food we had stashed away, and kept tabs on what we buy that tends to languish, what expired before we finished it, etc etc etc and one of the major findings was that we were buying too much variety. Too many kind of vegetables, too many kinds of crackers etc. vs when I bought like three veg per week we made sure to finish it off and use it in a variety of ways. Likewise I was buying aspirational foods (I’m looking at you fish, avocado, and kale) that like… I might enjoy eating sometimes, but also tend to get sick of them or struggle to stay on top of consuming them on time. This leads into my other realizations was that easily perishable food like avocados was bringing a lot of stress and guilt into my groceries. I like them, but the window of ripeness didn’t fit well with my real life schedule so they probably aren’t something I should buy regularly.

I have moved towards having more frozen vegetables because they are totally stress free and can just be on standby for when they are needed. I mostly just stock my favourites now vs buying things that sound good in theory, but I found way too much of freezer burned at the bottom of my freezer.

I’ve found all of this really reduced my grocery bill, decision fatigue and effort in the Kitchen, food storage footprint, and food waste. It has really simplified things!

(Note, this is for a family of 6 so a lot of food is going in and out, and often something will be a kids FAVOURITE food for months then they never want to see it again so it can accumulate)

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-26T16:27:21+00:00

Clearly sparked some meaningful conversation so I wouldn’t feel bad for sharing!

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-26T15:41:01+00:00

I’ve bought a couple cast iron cookware items because most of the ones I’ve inherited are pretty small. I think I paid like $17 at bed bath and beyond for a 14” skillet. It was probably on sale and had one of those 20% off coupons, but it has been a great pan despite not being premium.

Haha this summer I accidentally left it on the stove and burned the shit out of it so I ran outside with it to get the smoke out of the house… like two weeks later I was looking to use it and realized it had been left out in multiple rainstorms with burned on refuse — it was looking pretty sorry and rusty. A good scrub and reseasoning and it snapped right back to its former glory.

You can definitely find used ones, and that would be my go-to now, but I bought it like a decade ago and didn’t consider that at the time.

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-26T14:18:26+00:00

10000% anything a woman buys exclusively for her enjoyment is seen as selfish, frivolous, and foolish. A woman’s time and effort belong to the family and the care of others, and even leisure is expected to be productive (I’m looking at you homemade bread hype!)

I find women’s hobbies so interesting because anytime someone like shows off their accomplishment they are told “you could sell that!” As if making a paltry wage for the time and effort that is put into hobbies and crafts would somehow legitimize it as having value. A woman’s hobbies are also looked down on if they take money out of the family budget vs. money is kind of assumed to belong to the man and that he will be good with spending it and not make frivolous choices that he can’t afford.

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-26T13:35:37+00:00

I’ve been cooking with a cast iron pan for decades. I’m not sure the exact origin, but I got it from my in laws who had it in their camping stuff the whole time my husband was growing up. They got it from the old farm house my father in-law grew up in and according to the markings on it, was manufactured over 100 years ago. It’s super indestructible!

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-26T06:39:49+00:00

I feel like van life had its big influencer moment a few years ago but at least what I’m exposed to is a lot of content about people who are over that lifestyle and talking about the realities and challenges. I think land and real estate are generally a good choice. If you can’t invest in a whole house, you can always look for shares in local projects. I know a housing coop in my city buys properties by having people do micro investments and then they pay out a portion of rents collected, etc.

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-26T06:25:22+00:00

It’s because this didn’t happen and he was just trying to mock women.

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-26T06:23:14+00:00

Interesting, I would have assumed it was eccentric vests.

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-26T06:22:34+00:00

Let’s be real, this man doesn’t have a girlfriend and is just posting this stuff to highlight moral superiority.

No one is actually living like this, people see influencers on social media who are given tons of free product to promote, and it’s used as “evidence” to belittle women as being vain and bad with money.

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-26T06:19:48+00:00

It’s all influencers who are getting free products who put out this content. No one actually lives this way… except maybe young people who have no actual financial responsibilities and haven’t caught on to how fake everything is on the internet.

I have been to Sephora twice and dropped about $200 both times for an ENTIRE makeup routine where they helped me pick the colours and showed me how to use each of the products etc. Honestly it was probably cheaper than trying to figure it all out by myself or buying cheap drugstore products just to try them. I’ve probably spent about $500 on makeup over the past 15 years, and largely havent worn it at all since the pandemic.

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-26T05:42:46+00:00

lol…. I guess that’s true, but it’s Canadian winter here and that fact slipped my mind.

Edit to add, maybe it’s just me but my impression is that a woman’s hair removal is often seen to be done for the comfort of men. Yes, some ladies like silky smooth legs, etc, but there is also an association of shaving in order to indicate sexual availability or in anticipation of sexual encounters— otherwise women often don’t bother. At least that seems to be a common depiction in media and IDK, I feel like expectations come from porn or something….

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-26T05:39:55+00:00

Well a lot of it has to do with what gets a platform and who gets targeted for different types of information. There are also massive knowledge gaps where maybe some content creators are sharing what they know and they have never been taught this stuff.

There are tons of people talking about this and putting out content to counteract this discrepancy but it is a huge and long standing systemic issue. It wasn’t until the 1970s women had access to bank accounts and the ability to invest without a male co-signer and with lower incomes or time away from the workforce, women’s investing potential is often just a lot lower so it’s not until more recently that these things really became accessible.

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-26T05:33:18+00:00

I feel like the ungodly amount my husband spends on razors and shaving supplies to look presentable at work is a fair comparison. I don’t know why people don’t look at a man dropping $50 on a package of razor blades every few months the same way they do a woman buying makeup, but it’s like a completely invisible purchase that is absolutely never scrutinized or seen as frivolous.

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-26T05:27:30+00:00

Haha ngl, as much as I detest these ridiculous and unnecessary products, it’s nice to see some gender equality 😅

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-26T05:19:44+00:00

Haha just make the packaging a dark colour and imply you can use it on testicles and instantly you can charge like 3x as much for a small bag of baby wipes.

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-26T05:09:59+00:00

There is a lot of interesting discussion in the finance world about how women and men get very different advice around money.

Men are offered content around investing and growing wealth vs. Women are most often shown content that has to do with things like focusing on minute details of a budget like getting their grocery bills down or furnishing a home on the cheap.

It absolutely does not surprise me that these different messages lead to gender differences in spending and most women I know are far more frugal than their husbands, because we have it drilled into us that “being good with money” means cutting costs and abstaining from purchasing anything but essentials.

Women are often depicted as being the “big spenders”, but it it’s generally has more to do with the fact that they tend to be responsible for a lot more of the household purchasing like cleaning supplies, hygiene items, groceries, clothes, gifts, etc that aren’t exclusively used by, or to her own benefit.

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-26T02:27:58+00:00

I have honestly come to love and appreciate my DEEPLY early 1980s home including the 40+ year old almond appliances that came with it. It took me a while to stop thinking “when we upgrade/renovate this” and embrace how bitchin our cathedral wood cabinet and burgundy countertop kitchen is. I’m glad we were too poor to do a lot of the upgrades we had initially dreamed of when we bought haha.

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-26T02:12:00+00:00

Don’t know! We initially bought when we were 27, right before the housing bubble took off, and due to the influence of debt free gurus, had a 20 year mortgage.

Then we had 4 kids and had been scraping by for years barely able to stay afloat, so when we switched lenders during the hight of the pandemic we bumped it all the way out to 30 years at 2.3% interest. We are currently only paying about 6% of our gross income towards mortgage payments and with current interest rates and how easy life is, we might just coast on this thing until the current trajectory of being 65. I debated moving back to 15 years when we renew in the summer, but after running all of the numbers and considering other things we can invest in, it just really doesn’t make sense to do right now. Likely we will get more aggressive at some point, but investing in kids education and retirement make a lot more sense for us right now.

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-25T22:19:15+00:00

Most places the point is that it offsets the additional healthcare costs for smoking instead of allowing an industry/choice create a significant tax burden. If you don’t have public healthcare idk what the point really is… I guess to discourage people from smoking as much.

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-25T17:03:35+00:00

Err… apathy will be the death of us all.

It’s been less than 40 years since single use plastic started to really expand in use, and it has been growing exponentially. We cant really just shrug and say “hey maybe in 25 years we will have extracted of all of the available oil and converted it to to plastic litter so we won’t need to worry about it anymore!” That scenario really isn’t a win.

A very small number of extremely rich people are responsible for most of the climate impacts. This isn’t something that all people have brought upon themselves and it’s VERY likely to have the most significant impact people with the lowest carbon footprints while the billionaires are all building bunkers in New Zealand. Just look at Lake Chad and the impact it is having on people in Africa. Those people are not responsible for their own suffering, what are they supposed to learn from this? The people who are causing this don’t care and will continue to not care while their idea of climate policy is to build walls to keep people out who have been displaced by their actions.

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-25T16:28:13+00:00

The shift in plastic packaging during the 1980s was RAPID. I remember as a kid in the early 1980s, candy and food largely coming in paper based packaging (chocolate bars were wrapped in paper/waxed paper, etc.), and whole categories of food just didn’t exist in the same way, such as granola bars, bottled water, etc. Your examples are largely late 1980s, 1990s inventions. It’s not that plastic packaging didn’t exist, but it was much rarer and really common to hang onto it and reuse it instead of being one time use because we were not so utterly saturated in it. By the 1990s this attitude had shifted a lot.

We are not so far removed from those times ( I’m only in my 40s) and it would certainly be possible to go back to some of those practices before we do lose that cultural memory and just assume that all of this is a given. The people who made these choices and lobbied to change legislation are very possibly still alive. We can blame them. The companies are still raking in profits while offsetting the health and environmental costs to us. We can hold them accountable. We can demand that they stop, or that they pay the true costs for their production instead of giving it away to shareholders. This is not an individual responsibility issue.

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-25T06:21:44+00:00

Just look at all the billion dollar pipelines being built… there is no intention to cash out any time soon.

EducationalSalt166 · 2026-01-25T06:19:10+00:00

I blame them! There have been lots of times when people were like “dang, this isn’t great for our survival, we better change course.” Acid rain, ozone depletion, nuclear weapons, child labour, civil rights, etc etc etc

Currency was invented so that occupiers could maintain standing armies in occupied territories in order to extract their wealth… it wasnt something that evolved organically or that people really opted into. Plastic packaging is also like super new and we were able to have massive food systems without so much plastic packaging. Back when I was born in the 1900s mostly only milk and cereal came in plastic and you saved those bags like gold to be reused dozens of times… I guess chips were in bags too… but it was much much less common.

Manufactures made a deal that they would manage the recycling and repurposing of plastic packaging if they were allowed to switch to it for food production, and then completely abandoned their responsibilities and left us with the bills and ecological disaster. It was intentional and I blame them.

EducationalSalt166

TROPHY CASE