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Comment by foobarian | Hacker News Reader

I think we evolved to hoard stuff while stuff was really hard to come by. But the industrial evolution and especially last century messed up all of that by throwing a glut of near free objects at us and many of us are just not that good at dealing with it.

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My grandfather had a hoarding tendency as a consequence of growing up in the Great Depression. As a response to this, my father has a tendency to be too eager to throw things away. As a response to this, I have a hoarding tendency.

> too eager to throw things away

Curious about this. Does it mean he is throwing away things with sentimental value?

Just wanted to probe the idea of a self-proclaimed hoarder evaluating someone else’s tendency as “too eager”… by asking how you know.

My own family moved a couple of notches on the hoarder/junker scale after a few incidents of discovering that a document had been thrown away that turned out to be important.

There's no hard line. But there are some types of documents I've tossed in the fire box and other documents I put in a pile and figure after a year or two they probably don't matter.

Sounds like the anorexia-bulimia axis but for possessions instead of food

I attribute some of it to the Great Depression. My grandparents grew up during it, and it had an effect on them. They never wanted to get rid of anything because what if times got really hard again? You might be so poor that you couldn't reacquire what you got rid of.

They lived a comfortable middle class life, and that fear never materialized. But they were still prepared in case it did. And they passed that kind of thinking on to the next generation.

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