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I've known someone close who is affected their whole life. I'm talking extreme hoarding, cramming junk into any space available.

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)

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I'm bordering on it. But many reasons cause it not just one.

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.

In Europe, and I mean literally anywhere in it, renting a van to move, or even just throwing out big useless garbage is a normal thing. You pay a bit but win much more (space, freedom etc). Having to do this additional step should not be good enough reason to no throw something out.

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.

A few things I've learned (mostly) as I've become less of a packrat than I once was.

-- 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.

>In Europe, and I mean literally anywhere in it, renting a van to move, or even just throwing out big useless garbage is a normal thing.

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.

The U-Haul vans are made to be easy to drive for regular drivers. I haven't had any trouble with them.

For example, they have big side mirrors, so you have an excellent view of where the back corners are.

I don't understand. There's nothing special or difficult about driving a regular van or moving truck. I've never had any special training and I just went and did it when necessary since I was 16. We're not talking about a commercial heavy truck here.

Yes, just make sure to take corners wider than one would in a car.

I assume you live in the US. In Europe, streets are usually narrower, parking spots even more so, in urban areas there will be more pedestrians crossing the road randomly, and many people don't even possess a driver's license in the first place, or don't own a car. My original comment was just to point out that getting rid of clutter isn't as easy as "just take a van and dump the clutter in a landfill."

> 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.

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.

Dissolving in acid seems like the safest/most overkill option: <https://youtu.be/L0bcNm1gfpU>.

I recommend disassembling hard disks and keeping the magnets, they're super useful to have to capture loose screws and the like. Glue one to the end of a stick or telescoping pointer and you have a way to retrieve magnetic things that fall behind furniture.

You could also literally wipe your data by using a little sandpaper on the platters if you really wanted to.

Is there a way to reliably scrub the drives to make sure they're reusable? I know storage is cheap but it's destroying the drive really the only way to ensure data integrity?

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

Nuke it.

8 times rewrite.

"She's dead, Jim." No kill like overkill!

Just overwriting once with all zeroes (or anything else) is enough; for modern drives (where “modern” means “last 25 years”). It’s basically impossible to recover data after that.

That's what I figured- I've never actually tested it though because I don't have any spare drives sitting around anymore.

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!

> or anything else

I recommend overwriting with an endless loop of the freeway scene from "Solaris".

i would have gone with meatspin or ytmnd but to each their own

>1. put it on a drill press and run a 3/8 drill through the platter

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....

> I don't think I'll do that though plus I don't have a metal bit sharp enough.

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.

> 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.

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's unfortunate that you blame Waste Management, a private company that is simply doing what they are paid to do (or not doing what they aren't paid to do). If you are expecting them to do something that you or your city hasn't paid them to do, how is that possibly right of you?

> If you are expecting them to do something that you or your city hasn't paid them to do, how is that possibly right of you?

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.

This is insightful. My father died 2 1/2 years ago, leaving my siblings and me with 6 houses and 3 commercial properties, all full--basement to ceiling--with junk (except one of the commercial properties, which was rented). "They are not interested in anyone else have [sic] a say in the matter," is exactly right. My dad wouldn't even have a conversation about it. He didn't get angry or anything, he just passively refused to engage. It's a gigantic mess for us to clean up now.

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 people with similar stories. The frugality ends up being a cause for purchasing too much cheap stuff, with the hopes that "the next" will be as good as something top-shelf. Or it's stuff for their DIY project. The reality is that they don't need any of those things, it's just aspirational. Throwing them away kills the aspiration.

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.

Oh, boats and hoarders are a bad combination.

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".

Dad had 6-8 boats of various descriptions, but one part of the description of each was, "unusable." He also collected outboard motors, which sat on stands in the musty cottage basement. Never thought to combine the two, I guess.

My friend's grandfather ran a marine business, so had many engines and accessories in stock. After he died they left his shop untouched for a couple decades. At that point, they had grown a sentimental attachment to those things even though it was just "inventory"; not the grandfather's prized possensions or anything.

So yeah, they got lots of old engines lying around on display now. And a box of compasses and other crap.

A few years before dad died, I flew up to help him "clean up some stuff." I did make some progress against the poison ivy in the back yard, but he wouldn't let me in the house and, in the end, we took two phone books to the recycling center.

Amusingly, this is exactly something that happened to me (cleaning the yard and overgrown trees then not allowed in the house)

This is interesting. So your dad was both incredibly wealthy (9 houses in total, boat, etc) yet oppressively frugal?

Where did his money come from?

Well, not incredibly wealthy by American standards. Working man. No college. Worked at an oil refinery in the Toledo, Ohio area. But he was so frugal that he accumulated stuff, including real estate, throughout his life, and was the beneficiary of a great economy, overall, in the last 70 years. He wound up with a decent nest egg, which amused him greatly.

> whole-house "air conditioner" he made from a cleaning bucket and some coffee cans

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’m curious how old your friend is.

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.

Yes this is a factor with the particular person I know.

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.

Definitely agree it's not the only answer. As far as the grandchild goes, that's where epigenetics and generational trauma can play a very interesting part/confounding factor. There could be a straight up heritable trait that causes this, or a genetic+environment mix, or even just a straight environmental influence.

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.

> young adult extreme poverty of the 1930’s.

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.

I’ve had a similar experience with someone who is close and was a hoarder. Hoarding can cause distress for loved ones both from the impact of simply having too much stuff but also the impacts of living with someone who has a mental illness. In my case the person passed away a few years ago and so it is less directly pressing.

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.

very intelligent and manipulative (and verbally abusive) if they suspect someone is going to try impress change upon them

This, and a lot of what you outline in your comment, reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_demand_avoidance

I've often consider autism or adhd spectrum to be an underlying possibility. I hadn't come across PDA before, thanks for sharing.

> 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).

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.

Hoarding does have extremes and a multitude of rationalizations. I have several hoarders (I am the oddball thank god) in my family and the rationalizations are across the board from the “saver of past relics” to “the gatherer of all matter” to “the engineer hoarder of tools and hardware”. At the core, they do seem to be related to a sense of insecurity either about oneself or about the stuff being “wasted” and them being the “rescuer”.

If we were to judge by the historical standards of human life, to the intuitive human brain, it all seems wasted. Everything was scarcer back then. A cereal box? Don't waste it, you don't know when your handmade clay bowl will crack. (Not an exactly apt example, but I think you got the point.)

As an adult child of alcohol and drug addicted parents, I can say that the interplay of empathy and anger for a parent with a destructive mental illness is a pretty complicated and personal thing.

That's fair, I'm not saying it's their daily persona. It is what happens when family try to intervene. I agree it may not be the same for every individual

> The hoarder tends to believe each item they have kept has value or will be valuable someday.

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.

As the illness progresses, the hoarder will hoard anything. Even trash that is arguably a hazard and burden.

> Every item that someone owns is an item that they have to store, organize, clean, etc.

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.

Hoarding is a mental disorder where the individual makes extreme connections between items, memories, and emotions.

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.

> Hoarding is a mental disorder where the individual makes extreme connections between items, memories, and emotions.

Decades of advertising might have something to do with this. Plus the fact that hoarding money, houses, cars... is highly praised.

>> 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

It is actually very similar.

60% of the girl's volleyball team is not experiencing many (or likely any) of those microcauses.

Yea what teenager feels isolated especially during lock down /s

True. Some of them watched a TikTok for example of someone who got sad after they broke up with their boyfriend and then took antidepressants to “calm” them down. These drugs are overly prescribed along with a cavalier attitude about using them amongst the public.

Or maybe the knowledge that a climate and economic crisis is imminent and the political reality is that it will go unsolved, ruining their lives before they have had a chance to live them?

We've had "imminent" crises going as far back to when I was a kid in the 70's, and long before that, too. Nuclear war, pollution, stagflation, the ozone hole, savings and loan crisis, smog, acid rain, AIDS, terrorism, and probably more all happened during my lifetime. Each of them had varying levels of doomerism, but I don't think anyone really believed their lives were pre-ruined from any of them. Not sure why this generation thinks their lives are.

Do some people not value mementos at all? Is that not abnormal too? Seems like a sliding scale to me.

> Hoarding is a mental disorder where the individual makes extreme connections between items, memories, and emotions.

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.

I don't think thats largely the case here. Otherwise you would be able to reason with such people, which is definitely not the case here. I'd go with that extreme emotional attachment and some form of autism / other disorder.

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.

>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

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/PMC3964745/

I am skeptical about that being the root cause. Competitive endurance athletes undergo a high level of oxidative stress during daily aerobic workouts. This doesn't seem to trigger mental disorders.

Who says endurance Athletes don’t experience greater problems with mood disorders? Because they do.

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.

I think it's funny that the majority of causes you list (isolation, not enough physical activity, little vitamin D/Sun exposure) wouldn't apply at all to the group you cite as having widespread issues (girls HS volleyball team).

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 think for people under 30, reducing social media exposure would help a lot (in general, for all ages - but many of those under 30 seem to live and breathe social media esp. girls/women)

My mom left me a home packed to the gills. She was the most empathetic person I ever knew, to the point of paralysis. She purchased things to be gifts for family, to show she had value. So yes, if someone is hoarding to try and have value, and you tell them they have zero value, they will get defensive. It might be you that is controlling and lacking empathy. And I don't think it's obsessive control they have but rather obsessive lack of control so they purchase these things as protection/armor.

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.

It's easy to judge without knowing the situation.

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.

I suspect it varies by case, and expands if you try to analyze too much and wade into what may be rationalization after the fact. People don't always plan their actions logically, but come up with (sometimes plausible) explanations as part of coping.

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.

I'm not sure if they are innately manipulative or abusive, or if it's more like a "cornered animal" thing where the claws only come out when they are backed into a corner.

I've seen some genuinely nice people who only turn vicious when their hoard is threatened, but I ascribe that reaction to their illness.

Most low to mid level hoarders I know come from a background of some form of scarcity. They usually grew up poor or were there during war or something like the great depression. Their paranoia that they need to cling to every item they come to own because they might need it and never be able to obtain(afford) it again is less crazy in that light. Less commonly I see people with unusually strong attachments to memories an item invokes, or a desire to treat an inherited item with religious reverence to honor the deceased. Upper-middle and above class people who were always able to buy whatever they needed/wanted rarely seem afflicted by hoarding.

I'm someone who has had a great variety in my financial security and that will likely continue into the future. This has included great scarcity (my state's computer system errors have just lost me healthcare and food help for the foreseeable future and I will be living on free food for the next month+ which is going to suck).

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.

My tendency is 'i may need it'. Even though logically I know 100% for sure I will never need it. I have been curbing my tendency by not buying things. I put it into digital hording. Which fortunately fits on a couple of HDs. Which reminds me I have more boxes of cloths from the late 80s to get rid of (hope I have the will to do it). What helped me one day was I was hording bottle caps that had points on them. I had put off cashing them in. Then I realized they were expired. I was able to throw the whole lot of them away. It was SO liberating. I was free of that junk. I was literally running around the house going "IM FREE". I have been very careful to only buy/take things that have a shelf or box to go into. I do not buy more shelves or boxes to put more junk in, and rule #1 nothing on the floor or tables. I think I got this from my mother. That house has many closets full of stuff that has not seen the light of day in decades. Floor to ceiling full. The rest of the house is okayish. But it is one disaster away from full on hoarding. the gp comment about the burden of it rings very true to me.

Yup. I know someone whose father was the son of refugees who lost everything and whose mother's family lost everything the Great Depression.

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.

My mother is an extreme hoarder and can confirm also obsessed with controlling others. In fact, she seems to have a severe lack of empathy for people, even her family, while having tons of empathy for her belongings.

Hoarding seems to have a large overlap of traits with narcissists.

My aunt was a hoarder and I'm currently emptying her apartment. Its really weird how you can find random ads and newspapers from 30 years ago, handful of egg shells and family photographs in same plastic bag, right by exterior door. Whole apartment has been like that, trash and important items in same bag, stuffed behind cabinet.

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.

I think the brains ability to organize items becomes overwhelmed. hence you get this strange situation like you described.

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.

It will sort itself out, once the tribe breaks camp and moves to greener pastures? Dad has the same emotional attachment to things.. It's all connected to some wild future plans that never gonna happen..

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