“Your happy envelope is on its way!” This was the title of an email that appeared not long after I’d sent two dead laptops and two dead cellphones to Gazelle, an online gadget reseller. More thrilling was the $397 check that followed. It was a happy ending that sent me burrowing into my closets, hoping to find more expired booty to sell.

It’s been 21 years since the founding of Craigslist and eBay, both of which transformed so-called “person-to-person trading.” In the last decade, companies like Gazelle have refined that process again by removing the messy human factor. With sleekly designed websites, mailers and labels for free shipping, e-resellers handle the sales of your goods themselves, often paying you up front. As the life spans of your things grow ever shorter, and you are increasingly overwhelmed, to paraphrase a Kate Atkinson character, by “the relentless culling and resolution that the material world demands,” selling your stuff without having to leave home would seem to be an enchanting innovation and do much to dull the sting of an object’s obsolescence.

Clothing resellers like Material Wrld, Crossroads and thredUP propose to make “refreshing” your wardrobe more joyful, with their own trade-in kits and cash incentives to shop their wares to keep the cycle going. Ethical elimination is a theme (a corollary to ethical consumption). The manifesto of Crossroads, a favorite of college students who worry that their Urban Outfitters discards may end up in a landfill, is that “fashion shouldn’t come at a cost.” Material Wrld aims to alleviate “fashion guilt” with its own promise: “We’ll handle yesterday’s fashion so you can focus on tomorrow.”