True story. This tendency is strong in my family. I know it because I have a bus ticket I kept for nearly 60 years and a vast collection of possibly useful empty cardboard boxes, stored in other cardboard boxes.
My sister was name called into a UK "your life on the lawn" hoarder reality show by friends. By coincidence she did some minor tidying and was that day called by the show producers and the dialogue went like this:
Them: Surprise! You've been recommended to us to be on a hoarder TV show.
Her: Oh great! I've just been dusting the video tape pile
Then
Them: Oh, sorry, if you can still clean, you aren't amusing for us. Bye.
Obviously at the extreme end, It's life threatening and has major issues for everyone involved. More casual semi obsessive "I cannot easily throw things away" is rife.
I feel that with very little effort I could get on one of those shows. Recently I have been holding off the entropy a little- even throwing a few things away, but hey, someday I might be able to use those 1970 transistors from the old equipment in the back room.....
I don't understand why people have such a problem with hoarding.
Clearly it is not a question of "too much stuff" but of "too little space".
If you have enough space, and you have a good enough category system to find your things, who cares what the likeliness of needing something again is?
I understand that the problem is that people live within limited space, such as apartments, and those apartments get stuffed very quickly. And life in such an apartment gets very crammed and dusty.
And that isn't really a problem, even. The problem of hoarding too much stuff in a small living space is that you have to share that space with your family, and your family does not appreciate the things you hoard as much as you do. So their quality of life goes down at the cost of your quality of life going up.
It seems to me that hoarding as a "disorder" is not sharing your limited space reasonably.
See how there is a layer of trash on the floor such that you can't even see the bare floor.
Thankfully the OP in this post cleaned it up after significant support from Reddit, but generally, the people who live like they did have more than enough space.
> It is not having too little space, it is feeling anxiety throwing stuff away.
But if you have enough space, you never need to throw things away. So why not say that it’s space problem rather than a problem with gathering things?
> This is an accurate picture of a hoarder's horde
You’re showing me pictures of very small homes where things are stacked on top of one another, as if the hoarded objects are the shelves of other hoarded objects. I just see poor inventory management, no wonder it gets dirty, too.
> the people who live like they did have more than enough space.
Either they don’t, or their category and shelf system is not very good. You could say they have too many things. And I could say if they had more space and/or a better archival system, you never have enough things.
Hoarding isn't like collecting where you have a good category system of finding your things, select objects to add to one's collection, maybe even curate the collection ie. getting rid of things no longer needed. Hoarding is a compulsive disorder that is irrespective of someone's capacity to manage their objects. It's someone who cannot stop acquiring and cannot manage their own collection of items, not even long enough to organize their space or their collected objects.
Consider the example of someone who is unable to throw away food long after it's expired, even if it's clearly no longer good to eat (like a molded over fruit). Or someone who is unable to stop acquiring clothes, not even only for the length to categorize their current clothing collection into something more reasonably organized.
> Hoarding is a compulsive disorder that is irrespective of someone's capacity to manage their objects. It's someone who cannot stop acquiring and cannot manage their own collection of items, not even long enough to organize their space or their collected objects.
That makes a lot of sense.
My mom collects records, and she will buy the same record two or three times, and will not care if she ever has time to listen to them. For her, the pleasure of discovery and acquisition is what matters.
In her case, her records fit nicely on one giant wall. But her only limit is how many records she can drag home at once.
> Clearly it is not a question of "too much stuff" but of "too little space".
Not too sure about that. In my anecdotal experience of people I have met or known, and barring extreme pathological cases, there seems to be a specific level of clutter per individual, irrespective of available space.
This becomes apparent when said available space varies, e.g when moving to another place. Have more space, get more things, until "desired" clutter level is reached; conversely being faced with less space would result in some things being thrown away without that much concern, until "desired" clutter level is reached.
Similarly: I try to keep the amount of horizontal surfaces (floor excluded) in my house to the minimum I can live with. Any available horizontal surface just accumulates clutter. Minimizing that means it never gets to the point of overwhelming.
Does this "good enough category system" exist, though?
At some stage, regardless of your system, everyone seems to eventually crack the shits, after tripping over crap one too many times while looking for the stuff they actually need/want.
And this is in middle class Australia, where your average house size is something like 200sqm (floor space, not land).
The author admits to feeling shame for his father as a child and pride as an adult. The only true difference is that he no longer lives with his father.
Yes, I’ve undergone the same shift, and I cherish my mom’s hoarding. I even named my holding company “<X> Hoarding” (since another family member has “<X> Holding”). This is with a degree of irony, but also an acknowledgement that desiring to gather things is a slippery slope when you don’t require things to be used with any real probability.
I mostly hoard small, rare objects of similar kind to manage, but I’m afraid the definition of rarity is both subjective and sliding. For example, I found a piece of scratched up ornamental wood broken off a piece of furniture that looks like a snail while I was having a conversation with a friend, and when I see that piece of wood, it takes me back to walking on that street: the trees in the picture get greener and the red hair of my friend gets redder every time I think back. I don’t care if I don’t see the piece for years.
It is very frustrating to share the space with a collector when you don’t share the dopamine rewards of acquiring the things, since the constant upkeep detracts every day.
Maybe I'm just rationalising my own hoarding tendency but I think society needs some hoarders to enable others to live there Kondō lifestyle.
Sometimes friends who know my habit try (often successfully) to offload their stuff to me. Just to ask me years later if I happen to own exactly the item they offloaded because they need it.
There's lots of Library of Things projects around the country, but they're usually informal mutual aid type events. I think something much better organized and funded (maybe even some nice software to go along with it) could make a huge difference in our waste crisis
Also, we should be charging people for their trash. Both companies and consumers imo. It's kinda ridiculous to offload so much waste as an economic externality. I live near a university and every year I get to watch a new set of students move into the student housing. Towards the start of the school year the dumpsters are filled with Ikea and Amazon boxes form all the new furniture. At move out time they have to bring these absolutely massive metal containers (like 3x the size of a shipping container) for the students to through out all their furniture (most of which has been used for less than a year). It's particularly bad with this university since a fifth are international students.
80% of the furniture in my house was "rescued". We used to hoard it and sell it on Craiglist and the like. We once sold a $200 marble table we got for free. Also have two pairs of working air pods and a bunch of $100+ shoes (including some Jordans and a pair of Yeezys) that we just haven't gotten around to selling yet. We also have a bench press and weights, 2 working grills, and too many office chairs. All this and we still save every glass jar and use them as our cups.
Unfortunately, my housemates are not big fans of the mismatched furniture look, but I find it quite charming :(
It's wild how much waste could be averted if all that furniture was simply stored on a plot of land over the summer until the next wave of students came in and then we let them pick through it. We used to pick up everything we could sell, but it just became too much of an effort because of the sheer volume of furniture
Trash service isn't free; it's usually included in a rental though. If you make it too expensive (in dollars, time or transit), people will find ways to dispose of items without paying. Mattresses have a way of showing up in public right-of-ways almost everywhere, but I live in a semi-rural area, and there's so much crap dumped in my woods and mine aren't that bad; one of my neighbors did some development work in preparation of selling some small parcels out of his land and had to have like 13 derelict cars removed that had been dumped in the woods; on my property, the larger things I've seen a really long radiator, a bath tub, a pressure tank from an abandoned (unmapped too) 10 foot deep hand dug well that I also had the pleasure of filling at my expense.
Are there any thrift store 'charities' nearby? maybe they can arrange to pick up some of the furniture and sell it.
We do pay for trash here, explictly. It's not "free", but I think every houshold is mandated to pay for some level of trash service as a form of a tax. You can pay more for larger bins, etc.
If we charged too much, it would encourage hoarding, wouldn't it?
If trash was expensive and cover the true externalities, we might more long-lasting products that are easy to disassemble, repair and recycle.
Maybe it's the general crappiness, the planned obsolescence in everything that makes us hold on to all sorts of "spare parts". Back in the day when producing items was hard, a wardrobe would be handed down through multiple generations. Hoarding wasn't feasible but also not necessary.
That said, I do think it's something best left to businesses rather than random people. Moving the eBay stuff out of our home and into a dedicated office/warehouse space has been one of the biggest stress-reducers in my life.
I have cultivated a habit of throwing away at least one possession per day, and this doesn't include generic household trash. I mean something that I deemed: 'One day this will come in handy' but they rarely do come in handy later on. It's a form of 'essentialism' where I trim away the excess and keep a curated and perfect set of tools to get things done.
I have a ton of these things, but the issue is most of them were rescued from the trash in the first place. I have 3 monitors, about a dozen pairs of really expensive shoes, lots of workout equipment, kitchen appliances that I've never used, and way too much furniture
Every time a friend moves somewhere and they go to IKEA I cringe a little. Go to any nearby university during move out season and they'll have giant trailers full of barely-used furniture and appliances. Unfortunately, manufacturing new things is just more profitable and the second-hand market goes against the core principles of our economic system of production
Yes, which is why they generally have no power over the production beyond eliminating their own demand. So how exactly are you suggesting that a consumer should zero out production?
Not really, no. The average thing you keep around because "it might be useful someday" usually once really was useful! As it passes out of usefulness, if you don't have something coming in to replace it, you're down one useful thing.
We're talking one item a day though. We all have things we needed, but don't anymore, but do you buy one of those things every day?
Plus if the thing is useful keep it, if it isn't get rid of it, you don't have a tally of useful things where you need a minimum number of useful things. An ex useful thing doesn't have to be replaced with a new useful thing.
If I have it, and I need it, but I've got so much stuff that I don't remember that I have it at the time I need it, then what good was having it in the first place?
It's unfortunate that this post doesn't have images because they are much more impactful when you see what a hoarder's actual house looks like: https://i.imgur.com/Gw9pfd7.jpg
See how there is a layer of trash on the floor such that you can't even see the bare floor. That's why this is not simply "having too much stuff" or "too little space." It is an actual medical and psychological condition that creates anxiety in people such that they cannot throw anything away, until they are left with a house overflowing with garbage.
I am about to clear my late uncle's belongings and I am extremely overwhelmed. Started out collecting (books, manga, vinyl, laser discs, tapes, CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray, comic books etc), and descended into hoarding eventually. Has storage units too.
Place is filthy, got a week and a half to clear it all before I need to hand the keys back.
For argument's sake, let's say 5% of your house's floor space is dedicated to storing crap that you might use one day in the future. At $1500/mo rent, that's effectively $75/mo you're spending to store crap, or $900/year. This doesn't include the additional stress that comes from the clutter and inability to find what you need.
So if it makes things easier, just consider the hundreds to thousands of dollars per year you're spending on floor space with negative utility, all to avoid a couple of <$50 purchases.
Clearly you don't understand the situation. I will buy that AliExpress S-Video even though I already have one - which I can't find. And of course I will enjoy buying another one.
I recently moved and did in fact whittle my cable collection down considerably. Gone are SCSI (multiple variety), VGA, DVI, SATA, any type of ribbon cable, RCA (kept one set). Also sold off all my Raspberry pis, donated old desktops and laptops to students (this was during pandemic).
But I still have a couple boxes of cables. Their usual use case is a friend or relative saying they have a problem that is cable related. Having them on hand allows me to solve their problem nearly instantly. That is emotionally satisfying so is clearly an emotional cable situation ;)
The other thing that resulted from the move is that I have label boxes :)
I think you're oversimplifying over a few important nuances:
- That cable will arrive in two months, and a future cable is less useful than a present cable.
- The marginal value of 5% of your house's space is worth far less than the average value of your house's space. This is in part because you can't easily end your lease, find somewhere 5% smaller, rent it for 5% less, and teleport your life there.
> I would place the room in which I’m writing this at level three on the CIR – a ‘standard’ amount of household clutter, according to Frost and Steketee.
If level 3 refers to the CIR living room image at the top, well, this level being "standard" sounds weird to me. I mean, 3 to me is a mess already. I keep my house at what would be level 0, level 1 is already pushing it (acceptable temporarily, but these piles of newspaper? make me feel nervous), level 2 is when things get way out of hand (e.g because life is a thing and sometimes time/energy comes short).
Most people I know would be the same, a few would need level -1 or -2 (that would be IKEA-like house, always clean and tidy in every way). I do know a couple of level 4/5 but while I'm empathetic, non-judgemental, and respectful that everyone is different, it blows past my "what is this I don't even" mental line, where it gets unsettling to me to physically be in such an environment.
> But like Falkoff, who first became interested in what she calls ‘hoardiculture’ because both her grandmother and her father were compulsive hoarders, I grew up in a house that was somewhere between level five (hoarding that might require some ‘professional assistance’) and level seven (which poses significant safeguarding issues, requiring ‘a collaborative multi-agency approach with the involvement of a wide range of professionals’).
Oh my looking at the pictures this sounds like the most horrifying experience to me.
Are there actual medically diagnosed levels for this disorder? I would think that for this disorder, you'd need at least ten levels. It would be instructive to see them spelled out with perhaps a dozen bullet points per level. I am of the opinion that photos would not help. They can only capture a snapshot and don't reflect something like a 200 day moving average.
I would also be interested in knowing where I sit on that ten point scale.
> Are there actual medically diagnosed levels for this disorder?
I don't really know, this CIR thing sounded like a medical diagnosis framework in the article.
Being confused by what this "standard" means (is it what the average population does or what the typical hoarder does?) I just extrapolated with what my personal feelings are.
The article also briefly mentions the aesthetics of it, which I kind of link to horror vacui.
An overlooked aspect: older or disabled people may not have the psychological situation of a hoarder, but getting rid of stuff can be physically demanding and some are just not up to it.
I think it was light hearted rather than dismissive.
My grandparents go to the dog's name before getting to mine. My parents just gets me and my brother's names mixed up.
My other nan, who actually had dementia, on the other hand, could still remember all the ins and outs of which great grand child was going out with who this week, until the end.
I think this is a wonderfully empathic view of hoarding. It’s a scale like everything, and the view of the scale is subjective. However it’s very difficult to live with one.
We treat thrift stores as our "off-site storage unit" and the amazing thing is it's a distributed storage site. When we don't use a thing we drop it off at the nearest thrift store. If we need it back we just hit the thrift stores around town until we find something close to what we were looking for and for a nominal fee we get it back.
My point is that it’s sometimes not just any chair that you need, but a particular uncommon kind (say, a bar stool). That makes it impractical to rely on shops to have an item like that available.
Wow. In Salt Lake, an online search for 10x10 units showed $200 (which is a lot higher than I expected), but $137 for a "web special", and someone else with $105. Even that's higher than I thought, but... $300 still seems unreasonably high.
Caiero,
I love your about statment. I was disapointed that you have no listed comments yet. A quite interesting list of submissions though! As a side note, it would be nice if folks put contact info in their about section. I think it would allow for some fortuitous connections to be made.
"Hoarder" like "psychopath" has ceased to be a useful layperson's useful medical term. I think the medical community would do us some service by coming up with a new phrase. How about "obsessive physical retainer"? Also of interest is that societies view of "obsessive physical retainers" is so negative. We don't generally view mental hoarding as a disorder. And as far as the physical sort, imaging how many thousands of years behind we would now be if those monks hadn't hoarded those ancient manuscripts. They could hardly read let alone understand them but kept them anyway. We wouldn't know that Lucretius had theorized the atom among many other wonderful things.
I have a acquaintance who society would probably consider a hoarder. Some of you may know him. Many will know people like him. He likes stuff. Definitely far along on the hoarder spectrum. He acquired an abandoned rail station to give a home to all his stuff. He has hundreds of cars. He has every game ever made. He has more knickknacks than any antique store I've ever seen. There is no garbage. There is no stench. So I'd claim that he doesn't suffer from "obsessive physical retainer" pathology.
Collecting is different from hoarding. Collecting a lot of stuff is fine. Hoarding is when you cannot let any of that stuff go, even if it's soiled, useless, or hazardous to your health. Hoarding is grabbing more things, without knowing even why you're grabbing them, like an emotional eater.
My sister was name called into a UK "your life on the lawn" hoarder reality show by friends. By coincidence she did some minor tidying and was that day called by the show producers and the dialogue went like this:
Then Obviously at the extreme end, It's life threatening and has major issues for everyone involved. More casual semi obsessive "I cannot easily throw things away" is rife.