Clutter- Why Do We Keep This Junk?

I spent Monday night in a hotel in Portsmouth, VA. I turned on the Discovery Channel at 10 and watched Verminators. I've really started to enjoy that show for some reason; perhaps for the educational aspect. I hated reality TV when it focused on Survivor, but I really enjoy reality TV in the context of The Apprentice, Dirty Jobs, Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers, Verminators, etc.
The point I hoped to make in this entry is that the owner, Mike, went to visit a client. The client was the friend of a woman who was not in the apartment, but had accumulated a ton of clutter. This woman had so much junk in her apartment that an entire bathroom, including the tub, was full. The problem is all that clutter caused her a vermin problem, like cockroaches and some kind of carpet bug. The only room in the entire house that could be treated was the kitchen.
The friend made a comment about the clutter "It's all worth a million dollars to her." Where do we (I count myself in here) get the idea that all this junk that we bring into our houses is or will be worth millions of dollars someday? Most of the stuff we bring in is little more than trash.
There are two kinds of energy, as any grade school science student can tell you: kinetic and potential. I'm sure this can be applied to finances: there is kinetic value and potential value. The thing is, potential value is only useful when converted to kinetic value. If you happen to have a 1987 McDonald's happy meal toy that you believe might be worth a million dollars, it's absolutely worthless just sitting in your house collecting dust. Chance are, the way that you're storing it is costing you to lose any value that the darn thing may have had, if any.
Consider this as well: an item's value is determined only by what somebody is willing to pay for it. I'm having a huge problem with that right now. I'm trying to sell my house, but at the moment, nobody seems to think my house is worth what we have to price it at just to break even on the balance of our mortgage plus closing costs.
Just throw the darn junk away. Get rid of it. It's costing you energy and storage space. Just get rid of it. If you believe that you may have something worth money, contact a collector. Just because you find it worth a million dollars doesn't mean I'd give you a quarter for it. Obviously, this rant/post applies to me as well. My ATI video card driver disks for some old card that I used on a Windows 98 system will never be worth money, and are only taking up space. I'm not likely to ever need to use them again.