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Comment by im3w1l | Hacker News Reader

Smaller living space means that you can't save the thing you will need once every five year anymore. A previously adaptive behavior becomes poorly adaptive.

Cheap disposable items. Where before you would have a few hand made item of high quality, you now get a lot of lower quality items. This is partially related to technological advancement. If things become obsolete fast, it doesn't make sense to build with quality. Anyway a consequence is that it's easier to acquire a large amount of stuff than before.

Anti-landfill propaganda. We are guilt-tripped for throwing stuff in the garbage. We are told to dispose of things in very complicated ways and then it may be easier to just not dispose of it.

Breakdown of community and family. Before we might keep things around by giving them away to relatives or friends. There is a satisfaction in passing the torch. But this option isn't as available anymore.

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>it's easier to acquire a large amount of stuff than before

I suspect this is the factor. A behaviour that is adaptive in an environment of scarcity becomes maladaptive in an environment of abundance.

When my grandmother was a child, practically the only thing that genuinely counted as "garbage" was ash from the fire. Pretty much everything else had a meaningful value. Scraps of paper could light the fire. Scraps of cloth could make a quilt or a rug. Vegetable peelings went to the pigs and not a morsel of edible food was wasted. Packaging wasn't a word anyone was familiar with, but boxes and tins would be saved for re-use. Furniture was repaired and re-repaired until it was only good for firewood.

A lot of people were essentially raised to be hoarders, either through direct experience or transmission of those values from their parents. That mindset isn't irrational, but it's a poor match for the 21st century. It's all too easy to lose sight of the purpose of those values and hoard for the sake of hoarding.

I think that similar factors explain a significant part of the obesity epidemic. The scarcity-era virtues of clearing your plate and being a generous host become vices in a world of supersized portions and supermarket offers.

This reuse, repair, until you really can't was still very common in eastern Europe in 1990s, now it's slowly going away ...

Your historical explanation is reasonable and rational. The problem is that compulsive hoarders and eaters aren't. I mean there are persons that like to hoard, persons that like to eat much, but the extreme cases involve a personality disorder.

It could be that the hoarders were always present but before modern abundance and throwaway culture, their condition never manifested in a way that made them stand out from everybody else.

Or the behavior has an adverse interaction with the environment considering that scarcity has been the driving factor for homo sapiens during 99,993% of its existence but now abundance and also items in general(trash) is everywhere to be collected.

eh? I dunno about hoarding, but I have feelings about eating.

At least for eating, most people don't operate rationally; can you tell me how many calories you ate and burned today? yesterday? I can, but I have been putting a lot of effort into this for some time now. most people don't know what they ate yesterday, unless they eat the same thing every day. Most people operate on instinct. I've operated on instinct for most of my life, too; I was super skinny as a teenager, healthy in my early 20s, then growing into overweight but not obese in my late 20s and early 30s... then obesity set in during the mid to late '30s

This really was pretty steady; my strength changed a lot; during that period my bench press would go from 50kg to 100Kg and back again multiple times, but my weight just continued to very slowly increase.

Clearly, whatever subsystem decides "I'm hungry" or "I'm full" is tuned to get me to eat just a little bit more than I need to maintain my body. And it's pretty good at it. If I work out? the more I work out, the more I want to eat. working out without caloric control simply doesn't work to lose weight for me.

I've been counting calories in and out (and trying to run a small long term deficit without otherwise spending a lot of effort on what I eat) for some time now. I have gone from a BMI of 31 to a BMI of 26 in the last year or so. This after trying a bunch of "eat this not that" diets, which have never worked for me. But I have been... slightly hungry for the last year or so, and thus I think about food and my relationship to food a lot.

My theory? My theory is that my farming ancestors found it advantageous to eat a little more than they needed when food was around; that it was better to carry that bit of a belly around all the time if it meant that you wouldn't die if you didn't stash away quite enough grain for the winter.

(As an aside "just eat less" "stop when you are only slightly hungry" also doesn't work for me; that ends up with me eating way less than I need to for some reason (I need to come within 20 or 30% of my maintenance caloric intake, from experience, or after a few days I enter a semi-fasting state where I'm tired and can't focus - I'm guessing this is also the farming ancestors. "Oh, there isn't enough food stored? Maybe you should take a lot of naps until this year's crop is ready to bring in")

Everything I've read about weight loss and eating recently points to the conclusion that physical activity has very little to do with burning calories or weight. Activity is good and will make you healthier in many ways, but losing weight and burning fat doesn't appear to be one of those ways. In own research and personal experience, the only significant lever with regards to weight is simply: what you eat. Eat less, but better, food. There's nothing magic about it, but that doesn't mean it's always easy.

If I can find the source I'll add it later, but I've also read research that suggests that even the most active hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa, who might walk 15-20km per day, still burn about the same amount of calories as the average American. Yes, they are certainly more fit, but it might just be that the stronger you get from working out, the less calories you burn anyway.

physical activity has a lot to do with burning calories; that doesn't translate into weight loss for most people because physical activity makes you hungry.

You are correct, I worded that poorly.

eh? I dunno about hoarding, but I have feelings about eating.

And quite a story. ConceptJunkie explained elsewhere in the thread what I consider to be a disorder: a behaviour that harms yourself and, even knowing it's wrong, you are unable to stop.

Most people has mild variants of self-defeating behaviour in some areas. The problem is when they mess severely with our well being.

You know you can't really blame your farming ancestors, they adapted to whatever changing conditions they found. You are expected to do the same. FYI limiting carbs is more convenient than counting calories and much more effective.

We didn't evolve to be rational, we evolved to survive. "Personality disorder" implies that there's something wrong with the individual, which I don't particularly agree with.

"Eat as much food as possible" and "hoard useful resources" have been successful evolutionary strategies for pretty much the entire history of life on earth. Abundance is very, very new. No species can fully adapt to a completely different ecosystem in a few generations. Most of us have at least some maladaptive responses to abundance. Some people eat too much, some people own too much stuff, some people drink too much alcohol, some people are scared or sad all the time for no obvious reason, some people lose their life savings to imaginary internet money, some people spend an unreasonable amount of time playing Candy Crush or reading Hacker News. We're just not built for the modern world.

I'm not endorsing hoarding as a lifestyle. I'm not saying that it's healthy or rational. I'm not saying that we should leave hoarders to their own devices. I'm saying that it's not crazy, just an obsolete strategy. Looking through that lens gives hoarders a means of understanding their behaviour and gives us a means of helping them.

Your evolutionary justification is cute, but you're ignoring a lot of counterevidence. For example, in what conceivable evolutionary tale is it adaptive to be surrounded by vermin, feces, and rotting garbage?

Hoarding useful resources is an important instinct. When the instinct is so strong it causes serious problems, and the person is unable to control the instinct with his will and intellect, or is unwilling to try, then it's a disorder.

I think that's a perfectly reasonable definition.

I honestly think it has a lot to do with mass media and advertising. There are some people who just can't handle near-constant and well-crafted messages to consume and buy.

One anecdote was a woman I know who (when someone cleaned out her nearly condemned) house became enraged that he was "getting rid of all her memories." The thing has supplanted the good feeling of having the thing.

"Nostalgia marketing" does this. How many versions of Monopoly do you need?? Well, here's one with the ORIGINAL TOKENS and WOODEN HOUSES!! And here's one with SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS!! and OHIO STATE FOOTBALL!!!! You need them ALL or your life is incomplete.

Incidentally, ash can be used to make soap. A generation or two earlier, and that wouldn’t always be garbage either.

Well it depends, you just don't want just any ash, not ash from burning random garbage anyway.

The best ash for soap-making comes from burning hardwood, IIRC.

I thought you used the ash to make lye-water, and that had other uses beyond soap-making, such as making noodles.

> Pretty much everything else had a meaningful value.

My childhood. And I'm not that old.

I still feel the urge to peel wrapping paper carefully off and stash it away for next celebration. (I don't do it though :-)

Oh, and I'm hoping to get some animals to eat the peelings and old bread.

it's both.

in Paris, everyone buys huge floor fans when the heatwave arrives in the summer, and then, because the apartments are tiny, throw then on the sidewalk/garbage. just to repeat the cycle next year.

My dad was brought up relatively poor by modern standards, food was on the table but would have went to school barefoot. Never eats less than five large potatoes for dinner and has a large shed(20mx20m) full of mostly metal scrap. He does use it for projects like making trailers/wood splitting machines etc but has accumulated more than he could use in a lifetime to the point where the shed is unusable.

I definitely believe this behavior comes from his don't waste anything childhood and to be fair he probably earned as much from his tinkering as he did from his main job which would have come from the same strong work ethic childhood.

It sounds like he keeps it contained, though, and he uses the stuff he saves (though not quickly enough). That doesn't strike me as hoarding in the mental illness sense.

In addition to being easier to acquire, it is also a lot crappier and most expensive things are only built to last 5-10 years. As the price of labor and our corresponding standard of living have increased, it has meant that hand built tables and chairs made from hardwoods are just not cost effective. Most people can't afford a $3K-$5K tables that can be passed down through the generations.

This is a great point, but, as someone who makes furniture, I think there is also great validity in owning temporary pieces. There are things that are good when they are heirloom pieces (I think good chairs and bookshelves are highly underrated), but desks, coffee tables, bars etc are frequently best when they are bought to fit the space they are in. if you move even once every 2-3 years for work, the availability of temporary furniture is both a serious convenience and in the case of stuff made from composite materials, it is an environmentally viable option.

I have made the exact opposite experience (friends, family etc), i.e. small space = a few, highly selected top quality items. Lots of space = hoarding of things you might need one day (usually never)

I read our OP as listing behaviors which may have been productive before, as mal-adaptive in today's society.

> hoarding of things you might need one day (usually never)

Until you throw it out, then you will need it a couple of days later

> Where before you would have a few hand made item of high quality, you now get a lot of lower quality items.

Hand made items didn't use to be of universal higher quality. Just the opposite.

It depends what we mean by quality. They could be of higher durability (although they didn't necessarily owe it to the fact they were hand-made in and of itself).

Jane Austen's letters include high praise for a hand-made dinner set her family acquired.

You can go and see it at one of the houses she lived in.

It looks terrible by modern standards - very poor and rough.

Industrial design and production create items with tolerances, precision, and (optionally) durability that are almost completely unimaginable if you're making things by hand.

The only items up to modern standards are suits of armour and later clockwork pieces.

If you're used to modern manufacturing they look professional. But every element was made by hand - literally hammered or pressed out - and the incredible precision in later jointed pieces is just jaw-dropping.

It’s generally durability that’s better with modern hand made goods not precision. A soda can for example is very precisely as weak as possible to still be useful. A hand made chair on the other hand tends to be excessively durable.

But that's just a result of economics. You can get excessively durable machine made good as well.

Oh come on. There are tons of things that are better handmade even in a modern world. Clothing, high end silverware, tables, rugs, knives, glassware, jewelry and musical instruments off the top of my head.

Specifically for many musical instruments, machine-made is out of the question. For example, violins - there's an enormous amount of money to be made, but the entire market is handmade (even the low-end ones are ultimately assembled by hand, at extremely low wages in China.)

Isn't all clothing essentially hand-made?

It's not like a chopstick that has 1 size, where you can press a button on an industrial chain of machines and end up with 10,000 chopsticks from 1 log of wood.

Depends on if you include sewing machines and looms as hand made. I personally don’t think they qualify making just about everything outside of knitting machine made.

Sewing machines and looms don’t result in hand made clothes.

High end clothing is generally machine precision with custom sizing not hand made. Hand made cloth is an interesting novelty, but rare.

My point was specifically that we have higher quality items today. Both machined and handmade.

The quality of handmade items has improved a lot. Partially of course, because machines have corned the lower end of almost all markets; so if you go to the trouble of making things by hand, it better be good.

I'll agree that things are better engineered than they were previously. But this often comes at the cost that modern devices, in particular, are very difficult to repair.

Growing up, when there was a failure in a refrigerator, television, radio, PC XT clone, etc - it was 95% of the time a simple matter of identifying the component or logic element that has black soot on it, soldering in a new one, and continuing on. You could follow the circuit logic and reason about how the system operates, and then shoehorn in CMOS TTL gates to modify operation logic to your heart's content.

With all logic moved to PLCs, MCUs, or black box SBCs, with components shrunk to 0402 SMD packaging - this is not longer a practical option afforded to consumers. We now throw the entire unit out and buy another.

The 1970s-1990s were a magical time when teenagers could disassemble, and fix or tweak their family's vacuum cleaner or phonograph, setting the stage for an early interest and foundation in engineering.

And now, that's gone.

probably means craftsman quality instead of mass produced.

Anti-landfill propaganda? Do you have any evidence whatsoever that anti-landfill propaganda exists in any capacity? I'm being totally sincere and I'm not angry at you whatsoever...this is just the first I have ever heard of anything like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_waste

There are cities and companies whose stated goal is to have no garbage service and (somehow) recycle literally everything.

I'm failing to see how this ideology has invoked any sort of propaganda to suit its goals? They seem like pretty decent goals, too- though my opinions on this aren't really relevant towards whether or not propaganda is being employed.

Reduce reuse recycle

I can see where you're coming from and it is hard to distinguish from campaign and propaganda but are you genuinely and sincerely suggesting that suggesting that humans

"Reduce, reuse, and recycle"

Is propaganda? What is the opposite action of that? What is a negative thing one could do counter to reducing, reusing, and recycling? It seems to me that the only propaganda that could come about would be counter to those goals.

It's propaganda. The correct solution is for the state to tax the externalities and let the free market solve the problem, instead of hoping people will solve it out of ethical duty. "Reduce, reuse, and recycle" instead of taxing waste is just giving the sociopaths/psychopaths yet another advantage. With correctly priced externalities there would be no need for such slogans, because it would be in everybody's best interest to do the right thing.

They do both. I pay the city per container to pick up my trash. They also run a relentless "reduce, reuse, recycle" campaign.

From Wikipedia

>Propaganda is information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is presented.

Propaganda doesn't have to be negative, it just has to be influential.

The "negative thing" about "reduce reuse recycle" is the thing we're talking about here: "Hoarding". It encourages people to keep things they don't actually need or want, which has negative effects on their living conditions and psyches, which in turn can be negative for society in general.

I'm sure it's great for the environment, but it's less than great for the humans.

>though my opinions on this aren't really relevant towards whether or not propaganda is being employed

Isn't such opinions the whole difference between "propaganda" and "legitimate concerns"?

People who adhere to some idea, see efforts to spread it as perfectly normal reasoning. Others would see it as propaganda.

Your link doesn't support your thesis, and I don't know of any place that have such policy, except probably shitty places that didn't have good services in the first place.

See the “Zero waste jurisdictions” subhead: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_waste#Zero_waste_jurisd...

Austin, Vancouver, San Francisco, Boulder. Can personally confirm that it’s a big public propaganda and policy thing in SF. You get people spending time washing out their bottles like we’re running out of glass or a place to put it.

Meanwhile others are so desperate for clean water to drink they are desalinating sea water.

Humans are very strange.

I worked for a place that removed all bins from peoples desks and offices, so the only bin left was in the kitchen.

I suspect the idea was to "remove the bins to reduce waste", but we still ate our lunches and just went for many walks a day to the kitchen.

They stopped the policy after several months

Same thing happened at an office I worked in: removed personal bins from desks, then returned them after the bins in the kitchen and bathrooms were constantly overflowing.

It's not propaganda like the govt brainwashing citizens. There are a lot of modern green movements that not so subtly implore you to not throw things away. Maybe it sounds weird to have that stuff called propaganda, but it exists. There are billions and billions of dollars on the green movements and movements don't come without some propaganda.

"Reduce, Reuse, Recycle"

Classic propaganda mantra. The term may have negative connotations to some people today, but if you're being technical the term is neutral. There is propaganda for bad things, and propaganda for good things. Consider that during WWII, both sides were producing unambiguous propaganda:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_propaganda_during_Wor...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_the_Soviet_Union...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_propaganda_during_Worl...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_Nazi_Germany

The last is obviously where the negative connotations for propaganda come from, but they certainly didn't invent it and the people who opposed them were using it too. Propaganda is just a tool, and like most tools, it's amoral. Neither moral nor immoral. What matters is what you use it for. A hammer is amoral, you could use it to build an orphanage or to hit an orphan.

How old are you?

In the 80s and early 90s, prior to "climate change" pushing out every other environmental concern, there was a big push to recycle due to the "landfills filling up". Accompanying video would be of a bulldozer maneuvering over a field of garbage that extended as far as the eye could see, which wasn't all that far since there were so many piles of garbage. You'd get videos of cities filled with garbage (garbage service strikes were particularly helpful here), footage from the famous Gar-barge [1], and vague intimations that we're all going to be in garbage up to our knees if we didn't recycle more. Random dumping was also quite a bit more prevalent back then, and I recall walking through state forests and just coming across an impromptu trash dump by the locals, so that helped make it feel more pressing. In more modern times, see the movie Idiocracy or the beginning of Wall-E, both of which were at least visually pulling from images floating around in the 80s and 90s, albeit exaggerated.

It made for good rhetoric, but ultimately, it was pushed out in favor of the other things you may be familiar with because it's basically ludicrous nonsense. Yes, there are absolutely some tricks to building a safe landfill and it's not free, and the risks need to be accounted for and taken care of, but it's essentially inconceivable that the world could run out of landfill space. (By the time that could happen, the technological landscape must have changed so thoroughly that your other predictions about what could happen are just useless.) The threats basically abused people's inability to think volumetrically, which anybody who has done a pool-building project, or a significant concrete project, or significant landscaping project, or anything else that involves trying to think volumetrically. You learn there's always more volume than you think there is. It's true that if we had to store trash areally, we'd be in some trouble, but landfills are volumetric, and society needs a lot less than you might think as a result. Yes, we have some impressive trash piles here and there, but there isn't all that many of them, and there can't be, because even if we tried to generate enough trash to become a problem with landfills, we'd long since have strangled ourselves on the other problems that would produce. (That is, you think we've got a CO2 problem now, wait until we try to produce 1000x more "stuff". We wouldn't get far enough into that process for the landfills to be our biggest problem.)

Energy usage and the corresponding pollution, care about contamination of groundwater and such, and simply straight-up the economic advantages of efficiency are all much better reasons to take good care of our trash and try to extract as much value from every unit of resource we take from the ground via reduce, reuse, recycle before getting the next resource.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobro_4000

>Anti-landfill propaganda? Do you have any evidence whatsoever that anti-landfill propaganda exists in any capacity?

For starters "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle"

https://www.epa.gov/recycle

https://www.wwf.org.au/get-involved/change-the-way-you-live/...

https://www.greenpeace.org.au/blog/beyond-reduce-reuse-recyc...

http://www.mygreenapple.org/reduce-reuse-recycle

https://www.conserve-energy-future.com/reduce-reuse-recycle....

https://kids.niehs.nih.gov/topics/reduce/index.htm

https://www.nrdc.org/stories/reduce-reuse-recycle-most-all-r...

https://www.reusethisbag.com/articles/reduce-reuse-and-recyc...

http://pantheonchemical.com/reduce-reuse-recycle/

https://recyclenation.com/2015/05/history-of-three-r-s/

https://www.veolia.co.uk/nottinghamshire/recycling/recycle-n...

http://www.ecokidsusa.org/3rs.html

Hell they even had a song in a Rocko's Modern Life episode 21 years ago (and every single time someone says recycle my brain goes "r-e-c-y-c-l-e recycle"):

"R-E-C-Y-C-L-E recycle

C-O-N-S-E-R-V-E conserve

don't you P-O-L-L-U-T-E pollute the river, sky, or sea

or else you're gonna get what you deserve

The ozone is in horrible condition,

from fluorocarbons in our atmosphere.

they are too small to be seen by normal vision

but there's getting to be more of us each year

we come from a variety of places

like Styrofoam containers & aerosol cans

we love to eat the ozone it's our favorite dessert

and if you don't have an ozone then the sun can really hurt

I must admit we make a lot of garbage

this dump is filled up way above the brim

if we don't make an effort to recycle

the future could be looking mighty grim

someone's cutting down the O-town forest

it's not enough to sit around and grieve

if we don't protect our flora and our fauna

then we won't have the oxygen to breathe

R-E-C-Y-C-L-E recycle

C-O-N-S-E-R-V-E conserve

don't you P-O-L-L-U-T-E pollute the river sky or sea

or else we're gonna get what we deserve!"

Not a '90s kid, I see: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/01/what-happened-to-90s-e...

There's definitely stuff I don't throw out when that would be the easiest path because I feel bad about it going to the dump. A dead treadmill with a working industrial motor that I'm trying to find someone who can use the motor. The kids' old swing set with perfectly usable pressure treated pine. All manner of electronic detritus (anyone need a 25 foot VGA cable? How about a 35 foot HDMI cable that's not current spec? Old component cables? An old Dell minitower? Wall wart transformers? ...). Etc.

Anti-landfill propaganda? Does that go along with throwing things in a garbage can propaganda? Flushing the toilet propaganda? Do people not know the definition of propaganda?

What he means is the guilt trip laid on people who don't recycle.

When I was a kid there was no recycling. Everything (except returnable beverage or milk bottles) went in the trash.

Now, the expectation is that you will sort your garbage by type and haul most of it to a recycling center where you have to handle it again and put it into designated bins. This is a lot of extra time and work and so some people (I'm one of them) end up with bags and bins full of cans, bottles, and plastic sitting around at home until I can work in a time to get to the recycling center.

I go back and forth on recycling or just throwing everything in the trash because it's too much trouble, and as one individual it doesn't really matter what I do.

I’ve never seen recycling presented as anti-landfill propaganda.

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