What’s causing the rise of hoarding disorder? (2019)
daily.jstor.org
daily.jstor.org
She bought multiple Saabs when I got my driver's license, because they have good crash survival ratings. She bought damaged vehicles at auction so the neighbors could repair and sell them. So there were just a bunch of busted cars on the property.
Once when I was a kid Dad tried to clean. She begged him not to throw away a small screwdriver, saying "it's my friend."
Nobody was allowed to come over because the state of the house and the property were so disgusting.
I'm not a psychiatrist, but for her it seemed to be a combination of totally absent executive function, emotional attachment to inanimate objects (to which she ascribed feelings of their own), and a desire to have a stockpile from which to provide. Add to that the happy side effect of protecting all of us from visitors and the massive inertia of the hoard that made it impractical to clean up even when she was lucid, and you've got an effectively permanent state of being.
This I have heard is a common element amongst hoarders and observed it in a hoarding family member as well. Throwing things out was like killing a pet in front of them.
Even as an adult, I still have my few favorite stuffies from childhood. I'd never part with them (it's not hoarding, just one box), but I have no idea what happens to them when I pass on. Can't bear to dispose of them or leave instructions for that, but for anyone else to keep them they'd just take up space forever.
Interesting, I get the same, but for electronics/anything mechanical. Also the longer I have some device the more attached I get to it.
"Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That is because you're crazy; it has no feelings! And the new one is much better."
Here's the 2002 original and 2018 redux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecTUnfHyj8k
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamp_(advertisement)
I keep thinking I'll boot them back up one day and show my kids.
If that emotional twinge were too much stronger, or if that voice was too much louder, I'd be in real trouble.
Anyways, I forced myself to get used to throwing stuff away because I saw where it was going and got freaked out. Maybe I would've been a really minor case had I not tried to intervene at all, if such cases exist.
It is true that some earnest comments can innocently be read as sarcastic.
Growth of issues in society should not be relegated to whispers in back rooms, the way baby boomers do it. That’s how you hamper scientific progress for psychology. How can people investigate an issue if it’s hidden from view? Bringing light to issues for society allows them to be solved as people understand it better.
Shame on you for perpetuating toxic behavior that shames people for looking for insight into our world.
He was uncritically supportive, as my mother found fault with each new apartment or neighbourhood, making up reasons to move again. He also accepted her reasons for moving us to yet another school. And he obviously financed this very expensive habit, so there was never much left over for clothes or anything recreational.
The only condition was that his routine would remain undisturbed, and he wouldn't help in any way. So for example, he'd have all his breakfast gear at the ready in the new house, amongst the piles of boxes, from the first morning. And go to work as usual.
Other than that very large elephant in the room, they were great parents, no complaints.
I shouldn't laugh, but I'm just picturing your dad sitting amongst the chaos casually eating his breakfast cereal totally unphased by it all.
He'd have his own milk and pot, coffee and filters, toaster, breadboard, breadknife, butterknife, teaspoon and mug. He was a very generous man, but these objects he didn't share.
The breakfast ritual took several hours, and involved a Swedish exercise routine near an open window, interspersed with reading the news and breakfast itself. The reading was not strictly passive, as it involved marking various articles with a thick red pencil, and then cutting them out, folding the cuttings, and saving a select few into his wallet for later reading.
What led to his death?
> The only condition was that his routine would remain undisturbed, and he wouldn't help in any way.
This is totally where I'm at. I can't keep up with the churn and refuse to facilitate it anymore. I started to suspect a disorder of some kind once moving countries altogether became the new goal, but outside of cults moving around to sever family/community ties I've never even heard of this being a thing before. I know I will kill myself if this started up again after going to that much trouble.
I don't know if this is hyperbole, or an actual assessment of the situation you're in, but... please don't. Get out if you have to, but don't get out that way.
[Edit: fixed spelling.]
Fuck me. I have all 3 of those warning signs. At least the emotional attachment isn't strong for most things and can be shaken with a well-placed "Will you realistically ever get around to that?"
It led me to spend a lot of time considering what causes their behavior.
Not only do they hoard, but the process of hoarding also inflicts psychological damage against their close family.
I think it is a combination of self delusion and obsessive control.
Self delusion: The hoarder tends to believe each item they have kept has value or will be valuable someday. Almost as if for each item kept, it is the equivalent of having an unclaimed lottery ticket that will win eventually. Now, try convincing someone to throw away a lottery ticket before the date of the draw.
The interesting part is the hoarder would not sell the item, even if it was found to be very valuable (most 99.9% is junk). It is about the items perceived value.
Strangely I've seen many instances of hoarders have something of real value only stashed amongst a heap of junk and not stored appropriately (damaging the item in the process through neglect over time)
Control: This aspect is about controlling the situation and those around them. They are not interested in anyone else have a say in the matter.
There is a complete lack of empathy toward those affected by the consequences of hoarding (family etc)
The hoarders I've met tend to be very intelligent and manipulative (and verbally abusive) if they suspect someone is going to try impress change upon them. (A situation they perceive to not be in control)
My own experience with several people has all involved older folks and this line from the article caught my attention:
> Childhood poverty, interestingly enough, does not seem to be connected with hoarding.
The folks I know who have been affected by this did not experience childhood poverty but rather their parents all survived the Great Depression. Generally they’ve been born in the late ‘30s, ‘40s and early ‘50s and from the stories they tell about growing up, a lot of their behaviours seem to be based on their parents’ behaviours that seem to have sprung out of young adult extreme poverty in the 1930s.
Although I don't think the depression era or poverty as the only answer.
I see the grandchild exhibit similar behaviors. There is an awareness of the problem but a disconnect in the brain to organise physical space. It is easier to cram objects (squirrel) than tidy up. And a resistance to tidy or organise physical space.
I'm fortunate that most of the people I know who have trouble with this are capable of somewhat keeping it in check, although there are certainly some garages/basements in my extended and in-law families that are going to be an absolute nightmare to deal with down the road. At least for the folks who live on farms, it has occasionally come in handy; while a ton of it is just straight up junk, they do seem to have a pretty good mental model of where things are even though it isn't really organized and can often dig up very old obscure parts for equipment (farming or electronics) relatively quickly.
Sounds about right. All my grandparents were young adults during that time frame, and my family keeps a lot of stuff around. Not clinical hoarding disorder level amounts of stuff, but quite a bit more than anyone else I know. I honestly think that it makes sense to keep a fair amount of “supplies” around so that you can do what you need to with what you have, rather than having to buy new stuff.
But I also struggle to adapt to (what I consider to be disgusting) present day consumerism, where most things are disposable in economic terms. I prefer to spend my money and time fixing nice things than replacing mediocre things.
It makes the most sense to me to look at this from a slightly different angle.
Most things have value. What hoarders can't seem to grasp is that each item they own also reduces the value of every item they own by a small amount. Every item that someone owns is an item that they have to store, organize, clean, etc.
So, those "junk" items aren't worthless per se. They're just not worth enough to balance out the cost of keeping them, at least for most people.
This right here is the crux of what defines hoarding, at least to me - when that work isn't being done.
I do many physical hobbies / DIY. So the characterization that keeping anything you don't have an immediate use for as hoarding doesn't ring true - some times you really will need that 1x2ft scrap of drywall in the future, or those bits of lumber or exact valued resistor/capacitor/etc. Or wanting to get all the materials for a project in order and ready to go even though you might not do it for a few months, which then turns into even longer.
But the stereotype of extreme hoarding with food wrappers and animals crapping in the piles doesn't ring true either. Because hoarding can exist long before that type of squalor, and long before the DSM would make a positive diagnosis.
So to me it's about whether one is doing the effort to organize/clean/use the stuff. It's ultimately about whether that complexity is being managed or being brushed aside. Like the part in the article about hoarders being more familiar with ad-hoc organization rather than categorization. That's a necessary skill, but it also creates a precarious situation that can fall apart when things change and that information gets flushed.
This, and a lot of what you outline in your comment, reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_demand_avoidance
Getting rid of items is like throwing away something specials d apart of oneself.
The rise of this mental disorder tracks the rise of all mental disorders in the west (eg. >60% of our communities girls HS volleyball team last year were on antidepressants). There are known microcauses for this: isolation, not enough physical activity, little vitamin D/Sun exposure, family structure, etc.
Decades of advertising might have something to do with this. Plus the fact that hoarding money, houses, cars... is highly praised.
This is not at all like the type of hoarding that's described here. You're referencing essentially greed, which we've been told is good at least since the early 80's
What about the type of hoarders who collect stuff for monetary reasons? I don't think there are memories involved, and I don't see a direct emotional connection. It's just people who believe that someday this stuff is valuable, or the other side, it's something they might need some day, for repairing or building, or something like that.
Lets not forget non-trivial part of population is on spectrum of one/multiple psychiatric disorders, but say 2 out of 10 doesn't get you to mental asylum, rather on lifelong medicines if you get diagnosed properly, but most people do not get that luxury. So they often end up a massive pain in the A for basically everybody around them.
Yes, and the root cause for all of them is the increase in, and the inability to handle, oxidative stress:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10051630/#:~:te....
There’s likely a U-shaped curve regarding the benefits of exercise and mental health.
As someone who struggles with mental health issues, and frequently not getting enough of many of those things mentioned, I've worked to try to do better about some of that; and it can sometimes help a bit. But the whole "get more exercise, touch grass, see a friend" isn't the magic cure-all that some people make it out to be; and worrying about doing enough of it can become a stressor all on its own. Additionally, seeing them as the solution can sometimes lead to harmful obsessive behaviors of trying too hard to seek them out, at the expense of other things like work or family time.
Anyhow, not saying that getting more of these things is bad, or that they have no effect. Just that a lot of times discussions of mental health online feel very reductive. More exercise, more outdoor time, more time with friends, more antidepressants; each of these could potentially have positive effects, but they can also have negative effects, or be unobtainable, or there could be one of myriad other issues that need to be addressed, or there could be situations, either mental, physical, or social that are so broken that they can never really be addressed, just lived with or in some cases not even that.
I'm a typical IT pack-rat with cables, old PCs, laptops, many old parts. Hard drives are a risk since I don't want to toss due to not know what is on it (Bitcoin?) or have my personal data stolen, or just something I may miss copying from it.
My Dad died so much of his stuff is now essentially junk. But to me it's sentimental even things that I have no need for like his shoes, his clothes. My Mom tossed a lot of it out practically the day after his funeral. He has piles of tools, paint, gloves, coveralls.
Recycling rules. The local company makes it very hard for people to get rid of items. Much of it means you need a car to take it and drop it off. When there you enter a large building and some guy points to a pile and you have to drag it there. Anything big like wood has to be less than four feet in length and less than 40 pounds. Any elderly or those without a car or even a truck in cases like old mattresses are out of luck.
Just age and lack of stamina too or mentally not wanting to do the work of sorting through it. Mu Mom is nearly 80 and doing "The Big Cleanout" as older people do when they are nearing that time in life. But she tosses or gives away things at random without asking a family member if they want it.
There can be many layers to hoarding if it is that or just too much stuff or just being lazy I'm not sure where the line is.
Its all a burden, on your body but much more on your mind. I understand that it brings back memories, but you shouldn't remember given person by keeping their hoard. And that 1 in 100 items that is actually useful doesn't change any of it.
I've seen it done countless times, last time few months ago my parents were cleaning whole apartment after grandparents died. We each picked few small items to keep, and literally everything else went to dumpster. So liberating.
Good rule of thumb for anything, anywhere, anybody - if you can buy it with a reasonable sum, item is worthless long term and should be no burden to you. Cherish those things that are not replaceable - photos, gifts handcrafted for you. The rest, whether you have it or not doesn't change anything long term in life. Thus is largely meaningless for your happiness. Thus it can go anytime, no big deal.
-- You just need to get into a mood sometimes where you go to your attic, garage, or whatever and get rid of the old computers and stuff you're never going to do anything with. Yes, there's some nerdy kid who might want that old laptop but I don't know who they are and I'm not going to waste a lot of time finding out.
-- Try not to let things get to the point where even contemplating doing some sorting and winnowing is so painful that you just lie down until the feeling goes away.
-- Digitize as much as you can. OK, you're still something of a digital packrat, especially without good metadata, but at least it doesn't take up space.
-- I've found leaving some larger objects out by the road with a free sign can be pretty effective.
At least where I live, there are junk removal services but that presupposes being organized enough to have a big pile that can be taken away some day.
ADDED: It's almost certainly true that people in the US, especially outside of urban cores, do tend to live in larger homes so it can be very tempting to just hang onto stuff rather than going through the work of sorting and disposing.
It doesn't matter how convenient it is to rent a van, when neither you, nor the people inside your social circle, know how to actually drive a van. I've had a regular car driver's license for decades. An EV van is a whole different beast, as I found out the hard way while helping a friend move between apartments.
For example, they have big side mirrors, so you have an excellent view of where the back corners are.
Today you can buy a 20T drive for under $300. You can copy all your old drives to it, and then get rid of the old drives. As for stolen data, you can:
1. put it on a drill press and run a 3/8 drill through the platter
2. put your safety glasses on and give it a mighty blow from a sledgehammer
I suppose the NSA, at great expense and effort, might still be able to retrieve a few bytes from it, but even they aren't that desperate for your copy of Oregon Trail.
BTW, I'm a hoarder myself and understand the problem.
You could also literally wipe your data by using a little sandpaper on the platters if you really wanted to.
I'm a big fan of recycling old electronics wherever possible. Would the cost of compute to virtually destroy the data on the drive so it can be safely reused as storage exceed the cost of physically destroying the drive and then recycling the raw materials?
I know for some cases true destruction is the best way to mitigate data theft in this case but... That's a bit heavy handed for an 80% use case, innit?
Edit: personally I always check what's on my old drives before decomming them but I think I'm an outlier here
8 times rewrite.
One of these days though I'll get around to zeroing out a drive and then running Autopsy on it for shiggles just to see what comes back up. Should be a fun experience!
I recommend overwriting with an endless loop of the freeway scene from "Solaris".
I briefly worked IT for a federal police agency and that is what they did.
I don't think I'll do that though plus I don't have a metal bit sharp enough. I'd research how to sharpen a metal bit on a grinder. Get sidetracked and look up how to harden metal bits. Then metallurgy and different metal and what exactly is hardening how does it change the crystal structure. Is metal actually a crystal? and so on....
You don't need a special bit for this. Most of a hard drive is made of soft aluminum; a standard drill bit will go right through it.
You can get rid of all of that real quick by dragging it to the curb and leaving it near a fire hydrant (don't block it though). Call it in yourself and say that someone left an item that is blocking the fire hydrant.
Yes, it's illegal and dishonest, but not enough is done to help people actually get rid of this crap. There's no accountability in the other direction. You call Waste Management for a large item pickup and you're lucky if they ever show, or when they do they leave without picking it up because of more arbitrary rules (too heavy, too bulky, too many pee stains, whatever). Yet leaving it near a fire hydrant ensures someone shows up with whatever it takes to load the item and leave.
It is a paid service, hence my complaint-- they bill you after pickup. To get them to pick it up, you have to leave it on the curb, where you remain responsible for it. When they fail to pick it up as scheduled, you eventually get fined by the city or the HOA for dumping-- and you still have to deal with it somehow, like lugging it all back into your house.
This is the sort of situation you don't win (all risk, no reward), so there's no point in playing by the rules. The city makes it WM's problem. WM makes it your problem. So make it the city's problem again and stop them from passing the buck. I'm not saying it's right, only that it's a solution.
My tendencies towards keeping things definitely revolve around 'I can't get this again if I need it'. Especially since if I need something and reach out for it, I am likely to be shamed by society for 'not planning ahead'/'not making better decisions'/etc. The margin of error is so small at the lowest ends of society that making any permanent decision is costly. It is rational to avoid doing so.
By the time this person was born, both parents had good income, but they continue to live as if in poverty (extreme frugality, never replace anything if they can spend 10x more time/money to repair, dumpster diving, etc).
The parents are low-level hoarders. The child is even more so.
It seems born of the trauma and uncertainty.
> The hoarders I've met tend to be very intelligent and manipulative (and verbally abusive) if they suspect someone is going to try impress change upon them. (A situation they perceive to not be in control).
I'm sorry, but this is just a horrible way to characterize a group of people with clear mental health issues. The reason extreme hoarders are extreme hoarders is probably because their drive to hoard stuff is stronger than literally every other emotion they have, including any empathy they have for those affected. Maybe the hoarder you know is manipulative and has low empathy, but the hoarder I knew was very empathetic and not a manipulative person. She had a ton of shame about it and refused to talk about it or address it.
I finally understood that hoarding is a breakdown in the error monitoring circuits of the brain. Error monitoring is the feeling that you would get if you almost throw your passport or wedding ring in the trash. Hoarders have been found to be more creative in being able to see alternate uses for everyday objects and also to see more emotional connection to objects than people without the illness.
For me it was important to realize that hoarders motivations aren’t different than mine, just stronger and in other scenarios the difference would likely have been helpful.
In an age of abundance the amount of packaging produced is enough to manifest clinically significant hoarding cases which wouldn’t have been recognized in the past. Think of people whose houses are piled up with old newspapers, magazines and empty cereal boxes. In most cases however clinically significant hoarding cases also require a concurrent issue with acquisition of material goods. Often this tends to fall more towards the traditional OCD behaviors where a premonition or feeling of dread can only be mitigated through a purchase.
Addressing hoarding in these cases requires both addressing the OCD behaviors and the problems with the error monitoring circuit. OCD is difficult to treat and there are no treatments that I’m aware of for misfires in the error monitoring circuits of the brain. That assumes there are no other concurrent issues such as financial pressures, physical disability or depression.
Society collectively displays some hoarding like behaviors with collective misfires in our error monitoring behaviors. We tend to attach more significance to objects we spend a lot of time with which creates an interesting scenario for companies like Apple. While companies like Kellogg’s can produce thousands of pounds of packaging which gets tossed without a thought we require (demand) to Apple that they carefully recycle our tiny but hopelessly outdated device lest they pile up in our houses due to our faulty error monitoring circuits.
It was coupled, for my dad, with extreme frugality. He seemingly willfully deprived himself (and his family) of any fun or comfort by acquiring cheap versions of everything, or rigging up odd simulacrums of things, like the whole-house "air conditioner" he made from a cleaning bucket and some coffee cans. He bought a boat, then put such an underpowered motor on it that it was a joke. We had water skis, but they were rotted and just sat sadly against the wall, unusable.
Oh, my time's up? See you next week, doctor.
I know some quasi-hoarders who are similar, too: I know a person who has 30 guitars but they're so cheap and badly maintained that they're probably less worth than a high-end one. And the "next guitar" they buy is only good for a couple days.
My buddy's dad moved his boat from the water to his driveway to do a bit of work on it. Over the course of a decade, it went from "we can probably sell this for $15k" to "we can hopefully still get $5k for the engines" to "we gotta pay somebody to haul this away now".
So yeah, they got lots of old engines lying around on display now. And a box of compasses and other crap.
Where did his money come from?
That sounds kind of cool.
But yeah, I'd still be pissed if my dad left me a mess like this to clean up. The property is nice and all, but a lot of it may need to get torn down if hoarding caused any structural damage (it can, houses aren't built to be filled to the brim with stuff), and that's not cheap work to get done up front. Probably not that easy to sell if you decide not to clean up the messes either.
I've seen some genuinely nice people who only turn vicious when their hoard is threatened, but I ascribe that reaction to their illness.
Hoarding seems to have a large overlap of traits with narcissists.
I think some (much?) hoarding is driven by a basic emotional loop that seems adjacent to agorophobia. Acting on an impulse to gather things around and live in the resulting "warren" seems to give them comfort.
In hoarders in my family, I've also seen something like the "self delusion" you mentioned. They fail to acknowledge the time-varying value of most things, decay processes, negative externalities, or sometimes even opportunity costs. They almost seem to think they can avoid realizing a loss by never disposing of an item. Kind of a HODL (hold on for dear life) investment plan applied to material objects.
If you had empathy, you would see that attacking their hoarding is both devaluing them and trying to remove what they perceive as safety so yeah, they are going to respond as such. If I pushed hard for you to give away your bank account and that you are crazy for having it you would probably push back in the same way. Maybe approach from empathy instead of judgement and you'd get a better response.
I can assure you, I am empathetic as are the rest of the family. The person in my life (my father) is not forced to do anything and they continue to do as they please. They don't want help, so we do not pressure them needlessly.
I believe people have their habits and we must accept them to an extent. Unfortunately sometimes ones way of living can negatively affect others close to them. My mother is the one who had to live with this. She is the one most deserving of sympathy.
I did write my original comment in a distant and judgmental tone. It was to write what I had observed through experience about the behaviors related to hoarding.
It may sound negative but, my father is my father. I don't dislike him.
She always said that she can't throw anything away because there might be something important in there, now I'm thinking that she did it on purpose.
They don't seem to be completely aware to the problem of decay (water damage, perishable item mixed with valuable item etc).
Perhaps their brain remembers the 'original state' of the item and glosses over the decay happening in front of their eyes.
But, there is a cost to all of that stuff. Monetarily because I have paid for moving and storing all those boxes over the years, but more so the mental tax of "I should really use these 5 extra laptops that aren't worth enough to bother ebaying but I can't just throw them out because someone else (that I don't know and have no easy way of getting in contact with) could use them and darnit I spent lots of money on this crap."
The best solution for me was taking the time to reduce all of those boxes of cables/parts/etc down to one well organized box. It was actually much easier than I thought. So much of it was old tech that I would never realistically use like SCSI/parallel/serial cables, etc. For everything I kept, I grouped like items together and put them into ziplock bags so I could easily see inside. Now, instead of dreading the box dig, I find it gratifying. The laptops and old phones are still a problem and I keep thinking that I'd run into some techie kid who would use them, but I think that techie kids these days are into different stuff...
No need for an organizer for me as I go into the box maybe 2x a year so it is easy enough to pull out ziplocks until I get to the right one.
My recent scheme (I organized during Covid): everything goes in covered Sterilite transparent containers with labels from a brother printer. The containers are cheap, stackable, somewhat waterproof and I find it helps that you can see a bit inside them. There are many sizes to choose from, I tend to use the 6 qt. and 16 qt. sizes the most.
They do crack if you drop them, but this is mitigated by the price.
The key is that occasionally I go through and toss obsolete items. Recent casualties: all Micro USB, when the last Micro USB device died. RCA audio patch cables: all the speakers are smart now and don’t hook up to old-school receivers. Nearly all telephone wires. USB chargers less than 5 watts. Miscellaneous video cables, like VGA, DVI, composite video, component video.
For me, identifying obsolescence is secondary to deduplication. It seems like USB cables breed if not monitored. Thinning the herd keeps things fitting in the small boxes.
It was all easier once I abandoned my lifelong dream of saving the day with a null-modem cable.
Everything man-made is tech (books, old SCSI cables)
Things you find in nature are aesthetic (shells, rocks, driftwood)
The challenge knowing which of the first to should be moved into the third. Everyone fall somewhere on the hoarding spectrum. I am guilty of keeping things that may some day be useful. I have a pretty good track record of being correct. For my tech, I do a purge every few years or when I move. If I've not found something useful in over four years, and it doesn't have great sentimental or historical value, then it goes into the trash.
My opinions anyway
I mean, sure, but there's a pretty stark difference between "oops, this didn't turn out to be useful after all" and someone who keeps hundreds of dirty plastic takeout containers "just in case". Maybe to some extent it's a spectrum, but it feels like there's a hard line between someone who keeps things that legitimately might be useful vs someone who is literally delusional.
Technically you could have a pile of dirty takeout containers and be healthy, but it is just extremely unlikely because a series of things need to happen to arrive at that outcome and the distinction is almost always in the process not the results.
It's not “hoarding” until it crosses the dysfunctional line. This is the problem with using technical terms in nontechincal discussions.
My parents own an epic amount of mostly useless junk. But they also have an enormous house with a storage room in their basement the size of my entire condo. Actually, bigger. The useless stuff is all in the storage room. It is neatly organized into bins. None of it is gross or unclean, but most of it is of questionable utility. The storage room has no other possible use; their home is already way bigger than what they need. There's no reason to keep all the crap, but there's also no good reason to throw it out before they die either (they'll pay pros to schlep it all out either way.)
If I kept that amount of crap in my condo it would be straight up hoarding, since there wouldn't be space in my condo to move around! But for them, it's roughly proportional to the one closet in my condo that has old cords, some left over paint, sentimental books from grad school that don't fit on my shelf, my wife's wedding dress, etc.
If I kept that amount of crap in my cabin it would be a that weird mid-point where it's not quite hoarding but also taking up a slightly unreasonable amount of space.
Based on decades of sampling, Manhattan "fucking gross throw your old shit away" very much is midwestern "totally normal amount of stuff in basement storage". The price of storage does matter and we're talking about a range from $1/sqft to $2,000/sqft. Storing extra wrapping paper you got on sale at $2k/sqft is insane. Storing them at $1/sqft saves you a 20 minute drive to the store during holidays for the next few years.
About a decade ago, my childhood home got raided by the DEA because my brother allegedly ordered precursors on the darkweb. My father consented to a full search. DEA agents opened up his garage as our neighbor pulled out his lawn chairs to watch the affair. The garage was the crown jewel of my father's hoard, filled with ancient technology and useless crap. One of the DEA agents, frustrated from hours of searching, screams out "Why does he have so much fucking shit?!"
They found nothing and completely trashed the place, likely a little upset. Thankfully I didn't live there at the time. I did find it comedic that the cops were there way longer than they wanted to be just going through my father's shit.
Part of it was also growing up poor. When I did get something it was a rare event and a treasure I had to be certain to take super good care of it because the odds of me getting a replacement were basically zero. I get so irritated when I see people treat their things like crap. If you take care of them you could have them your entire life! I fully understand that’s not most people’s goal though.
It wasn’t a problem when I lived alone, I am extremely organized. Everything in labeled bins and what not.
Living with my wife though who is not organized has made it something of a struggle and a strain on our relationship. To this end I have been working with a therapist for about a year to help me among other things just generally reduce. For instance I have popped the hard drives out of 8 computers and donated them to FreeGeek. Each of the hard drives is labeled and catalogued into a special anti-static storage container. Space wise that alone was a big win.
People who were born in the war era and experienced hunger and other shortages in supplies have had the “waste not want not” mindset drummed into them from birth.
Throwing away something that “might still be useful” is illogical and psychologically painful to them. Couple that with available storage space and you have a recipe for what we in the “modem” disposable society now call “hoarding”.
“modern” western society has be trained by consumerism to throw away things that no longer serve us. It’s what drives the economy. Planned obsolescence. Things designed not to last beyond the warranty period. To the “normal” (indoctrinated) consumer, throwing away the glass jar “packaging” their pasta sauce came in is perfectly normal. But 100 years ago, throwing away a perfectly reusable sterilisable food container would have been insane. It’s our modern abundance and disregard for the true (environmental and human) cost of the natural resources used to make everything that means people think it’s OK to throw everything away.
Sadly, these people take it to what is - to them - the logical conclusion: they keep everything including broken or junk items that they might someday fix and use again.
As an adult I’ve fought hard to be a an anti-hoarder - some might call it “minimalism” - but actively donating old clothes, recycling broken electrical appliances and selling anything of value that I no longer need/use.
But I totally understand the psychology of keeping things that might be useful.
What is a “prepper” but someone who is hoarding materials (food, medicine, weapons, land, etc) that might be useful in the event of a zombie apocalypse. People that society looks up to - like Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel - to are hoarding resources. We just don’t call it a “disorder” when it’s a billionaire.
Note: I’m definitely not suggesting that this is not a compulsive disorder for many people. But it doesn’t start out that way. It starts with people saving useful things and gradually slides into keeping junk because the line between useful and trash becomes blurred. Yes, the extreme cases need professional help.
- “Never know when I might need it”.
- Selling things sucks. The market is really unpleasant. Even donating things is a challenge, find an interested recipient, and arranging transportation. And then throwing things away is morally corrupt.
- It’s a sign of failure. A failure to fully utilise an object, a failure to pursue a hobby, an interest, a commitment. So I just keep it, because I haven’t yet failed if I still have the potential.
This is the big thing for me. I have a medium-sized hoard that I believe could probably fetch a few bucks, but taking the time to list everything individually for $1 here and $3 there on eBay, and then ship them one by one is infeasible.
I'd probably be willing to use some kind of consignment service where I can just box up all my crap and send it to them, they'd sort it out, figure out what works and what doesn't, list and sell what they can, and give me 10% of the revenue or whatever. I can't be arsed to do all that myself.
If I was you I would look to getting rid of other things so you can keep your books or I would impose some artificial rule like "if I haven't read 10 or more pages in 3 years the book has to go."
Like, put the stuff in a box, slap "throw away before X" date on it. Take any stuff that you need now, on real need, out of it, anything left goes to trash after the date.
But with that being said, winding anecdote: Last month I was helping my folks clear old boxes that pretty much contained my entire childhood. Aside from 3 books there was nothing I'd remotely thought about keeping for well over a decade and I was happy to give or throw away whatever I found. Old toy cars, action figures, way too many PS2 cheat book and magazines to count, I had no connection to anything as we sorted out charity deposits.
I'll admit the Lego was a fun nightmare (I admit that I never should've opened the box!), I'm still scrounging through a mountain of bricks putting together which sets I can, but I won't be keeping this myself.
But then there was a box containing a wooden train set.
The last time I saw it I was ~4 years old. And there I was, looking at something so innocent that hadn't crossed my mind in over 20 years and I immediately broke down in tears on the spot. It felt raw and even thinking about it is still overwhelming. I was laughing with tears streaming down my face as I talked to my mum about it, and even though I won't touch it ever again, I can't help but feel thankful that she decided to keep it for me.
I wish I could make some poignant point about memory and the human condition, but it's weird and odd the way we can have such different emotional attachments to things, and don't take it too hard if some things are too hard to throw away.
The last time I really tried to declutter felt great. I had a big box of Goosebumps and Animorphs books that I loved as a kid. I loaded them up in my car and drove around to all the Little Free Libraries. I hope some kids had as much fun reading them as I did.
I have a whole bunch of books I'm never going to read gathering dust on my bookshelf, and I've only really noticed them now that you've said that. Thanks for the reminder!
As much as I couldn't part with the wooden train set, it's a lovely feeling sharing something you once loved. When it came to all my childhood books we found a local teacher who was more than happy to come around and take them off our hands.
There was food stashed all over the apartment. Like you mention, canned food in odd places, hard candies hidden everywhere imaginable, boxes of crackers behind books on the shelves, etc. Also, small caches of coins or other valuables.
It was both impressive and pathetic.
Her son helped her pack up everything. When he opened a drawer, it was shock full with matchboxes.
He asked „Anya, why on earth do you keep thousands of matches in that drawer?“
She just calmly said: „I lived through one war without matches, I will not live through another war without matches.“
Now, with mass production and vastly increased purchasing power, this is what we see in America. You cannot tell me that a mental health issue in places like Yemen, Syria, or Guatemala can manifest itself in the same way, because people do not have the money, available goods, or social stability for this disorder to become widespread.
If there were poor hoarders, would they be noteworthy enough to write stories about?
Anecdotally, it seems to have affected a high proportion of the Silent Generation -- those who grew up in scarcity (Great Depression, etc.) but then experienced in their adulthood the social pressures toward consumerist abundance. Being afraid of suffering what is seen in retrospect in such societies as an undignified and painful life, they seek to collect things (value, utility) that will ensure they never again experience the same feelings of destitution.
So it makes sense in the current climate of economic precarity ("one bad accident away from total ruin") that such feelings are surging again.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/ocd-obses...
I think this was front page on here a while back.
Well, no. But it can get to situations where the declutterer does not have a pen but needs a pen, so they buy one, and then throw it away. But when they next need a pen...
Or situations where they harm their interpersonal relationships, by throwing out other people's treasures/belongings or not having enough furniture to host them, etc.
> And people who buy less and consume less show less depressive symptoms, so there’s a positive mental health effect.”
My ex was a hoarder. Not as bas as you see on TV, but I wasn’t allowed to throw away “stuff” of which hadn’t been used for years, so the garage became a tad scary. My ex took everything and I started fresh. I haven’t felt this good in 20 years with so little “stuff” in my house.
“Stuff” is truly mentally taxing if not overwhelming for me, personally.
Eh. For me personally I think there's probably some equally depressive behavior going on, as the reverse-hoarding is a result of specific trauma. But in general I agree that consumerism brings on depression.
Being excessively optimistic about how useful things will be, and how quickly they can be put to use, lead me to buy a lot of components at Radio Shack when I was a kid, for projects I never finished. I threw a lot of them away recently, along with many other purchases of stuff I never got around to. This scales to full on life disasters, or down to the boxes of parts.
I was just reading an article about America's booming storage industry, and now I wonder how much of the boom comes from storage "addicts," similar to how a substantial portion of gambling and alcohol industry revenue comes from a relatively small subset of addicts.
Nothing wrong with storage lockers for a specific purpose but a lot of people have them because they have too much stuff and put it in a locker absent any real plan.
There's probably some kind of connection there, but I'm not a hoardingologist.
My armchair version of the main driver of this phenomenon is very simple: we just acquire too much junk. We produce too much junk, we buy too much junk, we throw away too much junk. Or we throw away not enough junk?! It's in the best interests of most companies and their marketing departments for us to want to do this.
One other human psychological effect I've observed: Trying to get people to recycle for the last 50 years or so has left us with a breed of "Garbage-averse" (my term) individuals. These people do completely irrational things like set half-empty bottles of water beside the trash can, because there's no recycling bin nearby. Now it's somebody else's problem. I understand this, because I was brought up this way as well. For now, I mostly overcome the aversion. Hoarding by older people is the same. "I'll just keep this until it becomes someone else's problem." It will always happen eventually.
In Germany we do this because there's a 25c (for plastic) or 8c (for glass) deposit on those bottles, so we leave them next to a bin in a public place (street or train station) for a poor person to pick it up.
Some of it is in the lie that things last. I remember being appalled when a colleague pointed out that the point of consumption goods is that they are consumed. I thought that was too simplistic to cover all of consumerism. It really helped break a lot of my habits there, though.
Back to the marketing point, though. We are simultaneously told that we are bad because we don't find ways to make our shoes last longer, and that we probably need more shoes. On a regular basis. Shirts? Realistically, how many does one person actually need? How many have so many of us purchased in the last year, alone?
Then there is the "collection" aspect of things. We pour so much effort into making collectible copies of things. But then, if you collect too much, you are a hoarder? But, what is too much? Just more than you can financially keep clean? Is this just a "poor people should feel bad about their habits" kind of thing?
I don't think that follows. Hoarding isn't fundamentally about desire to acquire junk, it's about the inability to get rid of it.
People who buy too much garbage they saw on social media or wherever are just "consumerists". It's arguably a mental illness too, I guess, but they aren't hoarding. Generally they just throw stuff out, or into a closet, etc... Though "thrifting" is suddenly an en vogue activity, I assume partly driven out of collective guilt over the amount of junk in our lives.
For those cases it's not the hoarders to blame IMO. It's the flood of cheap Chinesium garbage sold new on the shelves of big box stores like Walmart and Amazon. The moment this crap enters the US it belongs in a landfill, you might get a single use of it first.
I can't get rid of a stupid camping coffee pot because I have good memories of it. Same with old glasses we used for breakfast long ago. I've been working on this, getting bolder as I go, but now I understand why some people just get someone to come in and clear everything out when someone dies.
I (like u/presidentender) had a mother whom was a hoarder.
The major cause of this disorder and many like her was the following:
A) Huge Economic disadvantage. (especially a sudden one).
B) Depression. (a vicious cycle that causes more hoarding because you feel bad about not being able to keep your hoards organised; thus not permitting visitation or social interaction with people... also the feeling of being looked down upon causing even more depression as you self-isolate)
C) A feeling like passing on any opportunity means it might not come your way again.
Thus, my house was filled with absolute junk, unorganised, uncategorised. Often we would have useful parts hidden amongst everything but would have to buy new parts because we couldn't find them.
I've watched a lot of hoarding on television as an adult and nearly everyone suffers the same, it's always borne from economic instability and a huge economic shock.
So, to answer the title: the fact that so many of us have reached the end of capitalism is the reason that hoarding is on the rise. It couldn't possibly be more clear to me.
Old PC's get sent to a new home or junked if they have no use for me - old drives and broken phones get's smashed with a hammer and then binned - that useless firewire cable or USB-1 long gone.
I only keep kettle (3 pin power) plugs around.
Moving homes I gave all my books to the local library. I read them already and a kindle is more efficient.
My dual core Mac Pro PowerPC G5 went to a metal recycler as nobody wanted it and sold my Dual Xeon Mac Pro cheesegrater (still miss the damm thing) for the same price I paid for it 2 years earlier.
Substituting electronic formats for physical has nothing to do with being an anti-horder, in fact you could have very few possessions but be extremely upset (i.e. clinically depressed) over the loss of any items that is not inline with their monetary or emotional value, and be closer to a hoarder than somebody with "lots of stuff". It's the OCD-collecting and misaligned value/ownership perspective; you can easily do this in a spartan room with a big enough hard drive.
Digital hoarding does not have the same consequences for those around you i.e family friends neighbors or your property. Real life hoarding destroys homes and can blight a neighborhood.
Here's a list of impacts one law firm posted regarding harmful "collection behaviors":
Mold growth
Pest infestations
Structural damage
Fire hazards
Tripping hazards
Respiratory diseases and infections
I did get rid of all of my Old World hardware at least.
I offer to help out and often remind them that "the stuff you own eventually owns you".
Oh, and I forgot about my uncle who is also a hoarder. I think I'm going to head over to his place and re-possess a Vic-20 computer that I gave him ~35 years ago. It would be very fun to refurb that thing (and then use it or sell it; ain't gonna become a hoarder myself!)
It is remarkable that with a species which has undergone scarcity so often that a strong instinct isn't activated in more people and that when it has, more people haven't succumbed.
Some people may experience this as the digital great depression. I think other factors in the digital world may also cause this feeling.
Liberated of most of my possessions, a few months later I accepted a friend's offer of a job in another country. I'm almost certain wouldn't have happened if I'd still had all that stuff, and I'm very glad it did.
(I was not a hoarder. I could only have filled a small moving van. But even that amount of stuff had a strong inertial effect.)
Severe economic inequality and lack of resources.
This doesn’t mean that everyone who had experienced economic inequality and lack of resources became hoarders, only that this figured prominently in almost every hoarder I came across. They hoarded because they had so little that every item was treasured and kept “just in case”, regardless of how useless it actually was.
TL;DR: Behind most hoarders you will find economic deprivation and limited-resources trauma of some kind, either current or historical.
I feel that throwing these things away, especially the stuff with batteries, isn’t the correct way to handle it.
So I’ve kept it around meaning to do research to understand how best to get rid of it all.
Does anyone have pointers?
The root cause of mood disorders is an inability to cope with oxidative stress.
Absurd thing to say.
As such, throwing things away municipally has become increasing difficult. When I was young you could throw anything you wanted away to your heart's content. Eventually a cost was attached to the volume being discarded. Recently, now, there is a limit to how much you can get rid of each week.
There are solutions when you have more, like employing the services of outside disposal companies, but I can see how that quickly becomes a "I'll contact them later when I have time" and soon the things are piling up and it is not long before you have a daunting task on your hands that you don’t want to touch.
No offense, but naïve is the right word, because this wealth is invested, not hoarded.