Every engineer has (at least one) drawer, box, or shelf that slowly becomes a resting place for cables, adapters, chargers, and connectors whose original purpose is half-remembered at best.
Mine is no exception.
And I fully understand how irrational it is.
On paper, it makes no sense. Most of these things are obsolete, redundant, or easily replaceable. Any reasonable system would suggest throwing them away, standardizing, and buying new only when needed.
I know all of that. I agree with all of that.
And yet, I still keep them.
Because somewhere in the back of my mind lives a quiet, slightly stubborn belief: maybe next month or in ten years, I’ll need this exact thing again.
There’s also a deeper historical bias hiding underneath it. Not that long ago, components weren’t just “a click away.” Things were expensive, slow to replace, and sometimes genuinely hard to source. If you lost a specific cable or adapter, it wasn’t guaranteed you could just reorder it tomorrow. You kept things because replacement had friction—cost, time, availability, uncertainty. That mindset doesn’t really die easily.
Today, of course, it’s the opposite. Anything you want can arrive tomorrow morning, sometimes even same-day. The consumer world has optimized replacement to near-zero friction. And yet my habits still carry the memory of a world where “just buy a new one” wasn’t always the obvious answer.
Today was one of those moments.
A friend sent me a photo of a cable he needed. He didn’t ask randomly—he asked because he already knew the answer. If anyone still had this obscure piece of hardware, it would be me.
And yes, the rational answer would have been: just buy a new one. That would be faster, cleaner, and more efficient. But there’s something oddly unsatisfying about replacing a problem that feels like it should already be solved somewhere in your personal history of accumulated parts.
So I went to the drawer.
What followed was a familiar ritual: dust, tangled cables, adapters from extinct standards, artifacts from long-gone devices that still refuse to fully disappear.
And there it was. Exactly what he needed.
Not surprising to him. Not surprising to me either. That’s why he asked.
Still, there’s a small satisfaction in seeing something you’ve carried around for years—knowing it was probably irrational to keep—suddenly become the correct answer.
This is the contradiction I live with: I know this system is inefficient. I know it’s clutter. I know it violates every principle of minimalism and good organization.
And I still keep doing it.
Because occasionally, once in a very long while, the future arrives with exactly the problem that one forgotten cable was waiting for.
And in that moment, the irrationality feels briefly justified.
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