Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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