The ordinary objects least worth saving can become the hardest daily lives to reconstruct.

The things nobody thinks worth keeping are exactly the things that describe daily life. Packaging, notes, worn shoes, cheap plates, the objects handled constantly and discarded without a thought. Because they were never precious, almost none survive, and reconstructing an ordinary Tuesday from the past becomes harder than reconstructing a coronation.

If you keep anything for the people after you, keep something ordinary alongside the documents. A shopping list, a photograph of a normal room. It will tell them more about how you lived than the things you would consider worth preserving.