Hoarding: Classic or dud?

(sorry...)

Other stuff... Kinder Surprise toys (I never play with them, yet I keep buying the overpriced chocolate because assembling is something to do in the car), spoons for McDonald's McFlurry (I keep thinking I might make a similar dessert at home one day and this exact spoon type will be mandatory for eating), "ambient" mp3s I keep in my drive to feel cool but never ever ever EVER *EVER* listen to.

(That couple were soooo nice. Having too many books and cds and board games and comics = having your priorities right! I felt PAIN when he sold his father's old camera for half what he expected and when he chucked that computer keyboard into the crusher. At least he didn't crush any cds or I would have been heartbroken. I wish I'd been at the jumble sale, I bet there was some great stuff there. Mmm, more clutter to buy! Er. Anyway.)

Does anyone want some rubbish scratched cds? No, thought not.

I'm not nearly as bad as most of my friends, though.

BUT.

When I'm called upon to perform an emergency tracheoctomy, I'll *know* that I have just the right tools for the job!

erm... somewhere!

I have 3 friends who are world-class hoarders - books, records, videos, comics, magazines, newspapers....When I see all their *stuff* it begins to make me uneasy after a while. I start converting it into cash, which is a bit crap really, isn't it?

I am a hoarder by nature, but recently i got rid of a couple of hundred books just to give me some more space. I asked myself over each one, 'will I ever read this again?' and the answer came back yes or no. Keep the yes former, ditch the latter. This can be applied to everything, even sentimental trinkets like the beermat where some lover from years gone by wrote her phone number in eyeliner.

It's kind of sexy, throwing out loads of your shit. Like a step into the unknown. Even if that unknown is merely what your flat looks like without a load of crap in every available space

to which i replied "HAH you'd know all about that, RECENT BUFFY CONVERT!"

which duly sent him scampering off into his little DEN to read up on C++ or something.

Reason for PURPLE WALLS = TV interior designers are goffs.

However purple walls are not a good idea.

Hoard records obviously but beyond that very good at getting rid of other shit. I always keep old letters people sent to me though, I like shit like that. But no baby teeth, old magazines, books or videos....

But, you see I got rid of this old broken toy battery powered saxopone that I bought ages ago, it was out in the yard. For the past couple of days I would hear a mournful tune, and couldn't quite figure out where it was coming from, it was the saxophone on autoplay, obviously trying to get my attention so that it would be saved. It's back under my bed. *sigh*

If only I had sorted stuff out in 2002 or 2005 :(

Hoarding is a massive massive dud, because one day you'll actually need something and you won't be able to find it coz it's in a pile of tat or under a mountain of stuff. I might even buy an external hard drive and put all my CDs on it, and get rid of the majority, and all single issue comics!

I strongly encourage you to do so. Past a certain point collecting possessions turns into mania and drudgery.

Do it. I am in the process and it's seriously liberating. So much STUFF.

It's already begun! I am going to return my friend's ancient Nintendo and games to him tomorrow! And I'll pick a load of books for the charity shop too!

i've been working on my bf - he's quite the hoarder, and i'm slowly encouraging him to throw stuff out. i LOVE getting rid of stuff. it's such a weight off the shoulders. i went from owning a big-sized room full of stuff to just 2 suitcases and about 3 boxes before i moved to the US. very liberating. also, it makes moving so much easier. i dread having to pack up all my bf's stuff next time we move house, which is why i'm slowly clearing out now. i don't mind stuff like books etc, because that stuff is easy is box and sort, it's general clutter that i despise.

Hoarding is one of the few traits that really just MADDEN me. I don't mean like collecting a type or types of things. I mean people who fucking save EVERYTHING. "This juice box reminds me of eighth grade. I can't get rid of this interesting looking pebble! I know I haven't LOOKED at this stuff for two years but I know I don't want to get rid of it!" Like my grandma has BOXES and BOXES of sewing patterns she never, ever uses/used/will use and it just drives me fucking nuts!

The WORST was this old Santa Claus-looking bear who I worked with at Kinko's. Basically any time someone brought in a document (or such) to be copied that had a bear on it, he'd make a few copies for himself. Whatever, okay. Then after a while he told me he couldn't sit on his COUCH because he's stacked so many of these images of bears on it over the years. He told me about when he first moved to town how overloaded he was with stuff. He sorted through about 1/3rd of his stuff for a few days and just gave up & called a garbage co. (or someone) to pick it up, and they picked up, literally, FIVE TONS of shit he had stacked up in his house. I have never seen his house but I felt almost nauseous hearing about his hoarding.

Most of the beautiful deadstock and unworn vintage items I've scored at thrift stores and ebay over the past 10 years have been thanks to the insanity of now-deceased hoarders, and the frustration of their descendants who just put the whole she-bang up for sale/auction. THANKIN U, CRAZIES!

A good way to curb hoarding AS much stuff: live in the smallest quarters possible.

The problem is my husband is a hoarder. I'll sometimes get rid of shirts and stuff he hasn't worn once in the four years I've known him. Other things, too. The only time he noticed was when I threw away his iRiver charger, but that was bcz it was full of a box of shit peripherals like a bunch of 12 volt AC adapters and USB to PS2 converters that no one would ever use, esp. us.

Ha, mine has a massiiiiive box full of random cables and stuff. Srsly it takes up like half our storage space. I keep threatening to chuck them but last week we actually found one that was useful so I am not allowed now.

http://www.childrenofhoarders.com/bindex.php

wow wow wow that is a site to get sucked into.

I really do have a morbid fascination with this thing that pisses me off so much.

http://www.houston-imports.com/dirty/dirty.html

http://plonkmedia.info/crazymum/

I remember seeing this second one some years ago and thinking how odd it was that most of it was 'collections' - but all mixed up with other crap, too.

haha i feel yr pain abbott! i politely asked my bf to clean out his desk drawers, with the excuse that i need space for all my bookbinding stuff, and he did stuff - there were a few things he wanted to hold onto, but i'll get rid of them eventually (lol he still has his first 'laptop' from like 10yrs ago). i probably got him to chuck about 2 large garbage bags of paper out (he was hoarding all his grad school notes).

tbh, clutter actually causes me some serious anxiety. when we were doing a big clean out last weekend, i was feeling super anxious being surrounded by all this stuff just piled everywhere, as we rearranged/put things away/threw stuff out.

xpost

dirty/dirty.html is more complete emotional collapse -- just completely having given up. that's not really what hoarding is.

crazymum/ is classic hoarding. everything haphazardly organized and stored in spots that used to serve social functions -- chairs, couches, guest rooms, dining rooms all inaccessible due to encroachment. but more suspended than abandoned, just temporarily crowded. these people still function at high levels even though family can't come over & their front door doesn't open all the way, it's a level of sustained bad faith within someone you love that seems to slowly be tipping the line over into madness, but never quite.

I live close to it, so I will just simply say that if your partners have a box of old power supplies they won't let you throw out, you are making light of the term 'hoarders' by applying it to them, and count your blessings

Draw next to me:

Tons of CD-Roms, Darth Maul action figure, bauble, notebook from 1991, Pan-Am playing cards (from circa 1984), Bumblebee transformer (headless), plastic scraper thing I made in craft class, a stack of Xmas and birthday cards, Empire Strikes Back postcard from my sister dated 1997, compass, a conker, bunch of keyrings, Pokemon Sapphire instruction booklet, sew-on patches from the Lego club, Transformers skectch pad (from circa 1986), fruit mahine game, large paper clip with St.Bernard on it, Earache Sampler cassette (might listen to this), load of photographs, stuff from Xmas crackers...

I am screwed :(

I'm thinking the Lego club sew-on patches might be worth something!

Should I just hire a skip? But the thing is I'll feel bad if I don't try and recycle this junk/sell it/give it away.

what about sorting your stuff into 'levels'? like, stuff you know you can definitely part with (bin it), stuff you're not sure about (box it up for a few months, revisit it and then bin it), stuff you're really not sure about (same deal as previous)?

and yes, putting stuff up on ebay/similar is a great idea - as long as you know you'll actually get round to posting stuff out to buyers

n.b. i am a total slob, so minimising clutter in my life means minimising the amount of carnage i live in on a day-to-day basis (and the same applies to my bf)

Yep, that's what I shall try and do! Thanks!

Lego club patch = £4.95 on ebay, I have three of them...oh and Lego Yoda mini-figure going for £12! (with 13 bids)

I live close to it, so I will just simply say that if your partners have a box of old power supplies they won't let you throw out, you are making light of the term 'hoarders' by applying it to them, and count your blessings

Oh no for REAL. I don't have it bad at all. I am just afraid of anything that looks like a tiny step toward hoarding behavior (my grandmas on both sides were pretty bad hoarders, I guess, so it was just drilled into my head as a kid that you don't keep around things you won't use).

crazymum/ is classic hoarding. everything haphazardly organized and stored in spots that used to serve social functions -- chairs, couches, guest rooms, dining rooms all inaccessible due to encroachment. but more suspended than abandoned, just temporarily crowded. these people still function at high levels even though family can't come over & their front door doesn't open all the way, it's a level of sustained bad faith within someone you love that seems to slowly be tipping the line over into madness, but never quite.

All well too aware of this. Currently have a family member who's like this (her father was the same way) and various siblings are afflicted in one way or another (one has the reverse - she's extremely OCD about cleaning). At this stage, it's impossible to manage - I just try to help where I can. Fortunately there's no animals/food hoarding issues to deal with.

Needless to say, I'm *addicted* to shows like "Clean House" or similar.

God reading that children of hoarders site is 100% perfect motivation to clean. *vomits*

Already making money! £3.20! F.U poxy Fleet Foxes!

foxy pleat poxes

i'm moving in with my gf and i have so much shit to get rid of and its hard :(

know this feeling

i am getting a hefty (and pretty welcome tbh) push by my gf to get rid of a HUGE bunch of junk i keep carting from house to house

and not just because she helped me move it just recently

Draw next to me:

Tons of CD-Roms, Darth Maul action figure, bauble, notebook from 1991, Pan-Am playing cards (from circa 1984), Bumblebee transformer (headless), plastic scraper thing I made in craft class, a stack of Xmas and birthday cards, Empire Strikes Back postcard from my sister dated 1997, compass, a conker, bunch of keyrings, Pokemon Sapphire instruction booklet, sew-on patches from the Lego club, Transformers skectch pad (from circa 1986), fruit mahine game, large paper clip with St.Bernard on it, Earache Sampler cassette (might listen to this), load of photographs, stuff from Xmas crackers...

I am screwed :(

― jel --, Saturday, 14 February 2009 09:25 (2 years ago)

beautiful :D

Congratulations, WGW! Just fucking pitch that shit. Set up an ebay store. Set up a blanket on the street. Give it all to Goodwill and use it as a tax write-off. We are continually purging shit from our house and it feels so good every time. Pretty soon it'll just be me and a loincloth that doubles as my pillow.

I like the idea of making some economically strapped person happy with cleaned up appliances my parents hardly used. Now the unemployed or under-employed can eat more healthily.

Hoarding Disorder now defined as a psychiatric condition

Perhaps the most convincing evidence for hoarding being defined as a unique disorder -- a separate entity from OCD entirely -- comes from current research that suggests it is rooted in a brain dysfunction that occurs during the decision-making process. A new study in the Archives of General Psychiatry was the first to use fMRI scans to look at the brain functioning behind the compulsion to hoard.

The study identified subjects with distinct diagnoses of hoarding and OCD, along with a control group exhibiting neither disorder, and had them bring in papers from their homes that they had not previously sorted. The subjects were shown an image of each item on a computer screen, interspersed with similar objects that they were told belonged to the experimenters. The difference was made as clear as possible: the word "yours" would appear on the screen immediately before they were shown items belonging to them, which were surrounded by a red border. The other items were introduced by the word "ours" and were bordered in black. They were given six seconds to decide the fate of each item.

Whenever patients with HD had to make a decision about one of their possessions, researchers observed that their anterior cingulate cortex and insula, parts of the brain thought to be involved in error-monitoring, risk-assessment, and emotional-based decisions, became hyperactive. At the same time, the patients reported experiencing indeciveness and "just not right" feelings. The same did not occur in the control group or in the group with OCD.

The researchers hypothesize that this hyperactivity in the brains of hoarders creates a condition of outcome uncertainty, rendering the decision-making process nearly impossible. Dr. David Tolin, the lead author of the study and the author of the book Buried in Treasures: Help for Compulsive Acquiring, Saving, and Hoarding, explains that while people with the urge to hoard may claim to be sentimentally attached to their possessions or express a fear of being wasteful, such justifications are likely made after the fact to rationalize their behavior.

While the brains of patients with HD went into overdrive when making decisions that directly affected them, they significantly slowed down in the face of the experimenters' possessions. "This might help us understand why someone could sit in a cluttered or even filthy home and seem not to be bothered by it," said Tolin. "They only get bothered when they have to make a personally relevant decision, and then they get overwhelmed." The cleaning process, which is composed entirely of such decisions, would for them be much more distressing than their present reality.

today my mother received 13 magazines/newsletters/catalogs in the mail

the desktop of her computer is completely filled with icons, 19x11. some of them are saved email messages that are three years old

she bought some beer for my visit, but it has to stay outside on the porch because both of her refrigerators are full

uh oh
the beer part is what stings
how are your sleeping quarters?

last time i went home my bed was covered with "information"

the bed itself was clear, but difficult to make because the floor on the far side and at the foot are covered with things. the highlight is the two artificial birds nests

a really significant portion of my mother's 'information' is (possibly contradictory?) stuff about 'eating healthy'

ugh
carve out a little spot and always remember where you put your keys and your wallet, it's the only way to cope

my wife's parents have major hoarding issues. A garage full of old newspapers and expired coupons and weird things hanging from the ceiling. Newspapers and magazines stacked everywhere in the house. Fridge covered with useless information scrawled on post its. The living room is neatly organized but reminiscent of a waiting room. The sound of a slowly ticking clock can be heard but eventually I realized there was no clock in sight. Not sure, I may be imagining it. Anyway the bedrooms are a hoarding tv show level nightmare. My wife's old bedroom looks like a garbage bin. Everywhere readers digests.

I am intrigued by this "information." I kind of picture the bed is a version of one of those conspiracy walls with lines connecting a bunch of articles and pictures.

My parents have a rather large home but I think they hoard pets now. Not as badly as my sister, though

I'm not going into any detail about my situation online because I think it's kinda mean/a betrayal, but I will say that my mom constantly refers to the things she's keeping as 'information' because that means that it's valuable to her, it's useful. It's information for her to know and use; it's not piles of pamphlets from conferences she went to or old newspapers. (It is those things, but to her it's valuable information)

I feel like your mom is a kindred spirit, as this is exactly the sort of things I hoard and occasionally arrange into groups by affinity for a certain topic I am thinking about.

Me too.

Hmm. I am still a hoarder. I mentioned CDs and books upthread but tbh my room also has a layer of old post I haven't quite got round to, err, dealing with (i.e. putting in the bin, because most of it is either junk mail or no longer relevant) yet.

And yes, drawers full of crap I accumulated during high school or university which I've still got because I can't admit to myself that those days are long gone. And there's a layer of general debris at the bottom of my wardrobe which was basically everything I didn't know what to do with when I moved in 3 years ago and haven't looked at since but it's all long since collapsed into a structureless sea of junk.

Someone bump this thread in two days when I've got time to tidy and maybe it will make me feel ashamed enough to do something about it.

I am p. doomed, towards the end of her life my Nan's house had piles of post everywhere. She signed up to every possibly scammy mail order catalogue going and kept buying stuff she didn't need to stay on their books. The airing cupboard was full of enough mail-order soap to last decades.

Though in a way she was still doing better than the state of my bedroom, given that the soap was at least stacked neatly out of sight in the cupboard nearest the bathroom and not just abandoned in a heap wherever she opened the package, which is more my style. :/

my mom asked me to see if her flatbed scanner was properly attached to her computer, because it wasn't working. i went down to the basement and found two flatbed scanners and a printer (there's another wireless printer in what is serving as my bedroom).

'why do you have two scanners?'

'well, i wanted a color printer.'

'so you got a color printer that *also* scans, but kept the old scanner just in case?'

'yes'

'of course you did'

well yes, it's probably not as good of a scanner as a printer, but it'll do in a pinch when you don't want to deal with the old one, right

* hoard hoard hoard *

So I finally got to see the inside of my mother's house after not having been inside for six or seven years. Looks like every mailbox in town has been emptied into it. Not sure how long my she's going to be in post-surgery assisted living, but the amount of stuff is comparable to the worse cases of Hoarders. Can't do anything about it though... she just cut people off if they mention "the stuff." It's hard being around her too... since she's 88, the filter that most normal people have between brain and mouth has eroded away, leaving much of her conversation centered around racist, ultra-right talking points.

Saw some letters from my dad talking about their split, non-divorce, and how their marriage was basically loveless throughout their entire lives. Thanks for the emotional non-gifts throughout my life guys. Merry Christmas!

More than 400 snakes found at Santa Ana home

(really should x-post to The not quite rolling Orange County, CA - suburbia of doom thread

Hoarder dies after 1st floor falls into basement

Hoarder found dead on Santa Ana porch, 40-plus stray cats recovered

https://gs1.wac.edgecastcdn.net/8019B6/data.tumblr.com/e7d252caa67d5f4ac32abc296ccb2812/tumblr_nhj1eyPqKI1u411nno1_500.gif

I'm impressed by how it's a continuous rope of poop

― Team Foxcatcherwatcher (Sufjan Grafton), Tuesday, March 10, 2015 4:41 PM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark

Your Favorite Poo: Polling the Bristol Stool Chart🔗

Really doesn't help anything having the letting agency decide to change over from a convenient bin at the bottom of my stairs to having one communal set of bins that I have to unlock a lock to get to. meaning that I have to consciously go out with the key to get to the bin. Previously I could take rubbish down any time i had to go out, now it tends to accumulate a bit more.
Also doesn't help with fruit flies.
I've been meaning to springclean in here for months and tend to drift into making another garment or watch another series on tv instead. So do have heaps of things needing to be sorted through. Need to get on top of things.

Unanswerable question if the end of hoarding (whatever that might be; maybe just pride in ownership of rare or old stuff) justifies the financial cost and psychic weight?

Thoreau had an answer to that question. I tend to side with him in this regard.

In my twenties I just amassed insane amounts of books, comics, records and DVDs, which I now almost never return to but the thought of getting rid of them fills me with sadness.

It's made worse by the fact that society as a whole has moved away from physical media so I feel like twenty years from now my collections will seem more egregious.

My mum recently told me that, when she was a young philosophy student, she bought all of these books thinking "hey, I'll read them all once I'm sixty and have the time". She's there now and has less time than ever.

i don't think it's justified in the end. I look at boxes full of CDs in my room and they only provide me with joy when I give one away as a gift or need to re-import the album via iTunes. if i wanted to sell CDs I would get nothing for them, and I've spent an inordinate amount on music in life.

tend to agree w

"Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories." - walter benjamin

for various reasons, i always sleep terribly when i visit my mom

unconvinced that i had the 'correct' variety of melatonin, she said she'd pick some up for me at the drug store. later she presented me with four bottles of the stuff; when i asked why -- it will take me years to use it all -- she said well, they were buy one/get one free

take this rationale and multiply it by every damn thing in her life

I feel like your mom and my mom subscribe to the same newsletter (physical newsletter about being healthy that she will never, ever throwaway). She also says she keeps all these things for the grandkids to draw on. I have volunteered several times to organize things and take things to goodwill, she won't allow it. I try to not encourage it by not taking anything she has bought as extra (just in case one of us needs it). I told her she's a bad buddhist, because she is not taking these things with her when she dies and will leave it behind as chaos. She agrees and giggles. Sigh.

At one point I was totally taking stuff from the house, saying it was for me and selling it on ebay. My parents still ask me to this day if I have been playing my oboe and saxophone from junior high. SURE MOM.

i have a friend who has an amazon book/cd/dvd business and he has these huge one dollar cd/dvd sales to get rid of the crud he buys in bulk and tons of people come for it and he says sometimes the smell of cat litter is overwhelming.

just an anecdote i thought i'd throw out there...

I feel like your mom and my mom subscribe to the same newsletter (physical newsletter about being healthy that she will never, ever throwaway).

I believe I have seen this newsletter and my wife's dad subscribes to it and also subscribed us to it (and Consumer Reports and Reader's Digest...)

If anyone wants any late-'90s issues of TIME magazine I know where I can get dozens of them btw.

I'll always take free melatonin.

In a possibly related matter, I think some of my apartment's floorboards are buckling upward from the weight of newspaper piles.

I feel like your mom and my mom subscribe to the same newsletter (physical newsletter about being healthy that she will never, ever throwaway).

oh hell yes

while cleaning out my dad's house i had to work hard to convince her that a) no one wants a 40-year-old electric blanket, b) even if they did, it would be for like fifty cents, and c) you do not need the 50 cents and it is not worth anyone's time, let alone that of a 74yo woman, to attempt to sell it

I am too lazy to look it up but there was that article in the NYT or Wapo or wherever last year about how estate sellers and goodwills can't even accommodate all the furniture, dishes and goods. Like, no one wants that heavy furniture anymore and keeping household items around to pass down to the children, those days are gone, no one wants it. I get anxiety thinking about my parents dying and having to deal with all that shit.

i was just talking about that article this weekend while visiting a friend's house....she had taken, like, a piano, an old card catalog, and some other shit into her not-big house since her dad was downsizing.

work hard to convince her that a) no one wants a 40-year-old electric blanket, b) even if they did, it would be for like fifty cents...

My wife has this general mindset. So long as an item could conceivably be regarded as having a value under any circumstances, she thinks someone will want it. I just sneaked a broken 25 year old boom box into the garbage can not half an hour ago. She was planning on donating it to charity. She also finds it nearly impossible to throw away printed material because each item must be individually evaluated and the thought overwhelms her.

I get very frustrated with her hoarding tendencies, but at least it doesn't rise to horrific levels. I act as a check on her. Could get worse when I die.

I get so anxious reading this. People's stuff! Imagine if there was a tv show where hoarders and neat freaks/minimalists had to swap houses. MELTDOWN.

right on cue: http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/03/27/years-into-war-clutter-and-still-overwhelmed-stuff-what-going/R9jktrIH2ySut5cMCHOSoM/story.html

Ha, I like the pic of the garage. I go to my brothers' huge ass houses and their garages are filled with so much crap (no room for the car).

dud until you need to sell items to live, then totally classic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w46Dwh4TMGA

https://i.imgur.com/cCx6DFx.jpg?1

pfft that fridge was nearly empty, call yourself a hoarder? (not pp)

She also finds it nearly impossible to throw away printed material because each item must be individually evaluated and the thought overwhelms her.

This is me, sadly. I have a lot of old magazines, mostly music related, but quite a few New Yorkers and Atlantics and Consumer Reports and even some random National Geographics and Scientific Americans I stole from dentist's office waiting rooms over twenty years ago.

Sometimes I tell myself that if there was a fire or a flood in the basement, I wouldn't even know what had been lost, and I wouldn't miss a single thing. But obviously logic plays no role in this particular disorder

Weirdly, I am very selective about what I hoard. Is that part of the deal? Because I keep ketchup packets and writing pads from hotels but I feel zero attachment to things like clothes, furniture, household items, DVDs. I think I like things that a) can potentially be of use (yes I live as if I survived the Depression) and b) remind me of things I don't have the space in my brain or memory to actually remember

At one of my past jobs people were doubled up in offices and we were moving buildings so everyone was going to be shuffled around. There was one notorious office hoarder whose (shared) office was just atrocious. I found out that I had been assigned to share with her in the new building because I do a pretty good job of getting along with almost everyone at work, work hard to remove my personality. There was no way I would've been able to survive in that office without setting everything on fire. I hustled and got transferred to an entirely different part of the firm . Office hoarders are the worst. This is also when I started being disgusted with office potlucks. Like, I know you have 6 cats and don't wash your hands after using the bathroom. I am not eating your dish.

pfft that fridge was nearly empty, call yourself a hoarder? (not pp)

When he started to wash the char marks from the sausage with soap...

National Geographics

In about 1994, I went up into my grandmother's attic and found National Geographics from 1917. They were in pretty good condition, yellow border and everything.

Grandma died and Mom set about cleaning out her house. It was a long process for her, since she too wanted to keep everything. After about ten years, she started giving up and saying fuckit.

The house just recently got sold. I asked Mom if she had found those magazines, now over 100 years old. "Yes! And I threw them out!"

It took me a moment to process that. They had to have been valuable, right? But would I have taken them? Would my wife have enjoyed watching me carrying in a box full of National Geographics that had been stored in an attic for 30 years? Was my mother's sanity perhaps a little more valuable?

Like I said, it took me a moment to come to peace with it.

i feel like i lucked out by being a hoarder in the digital age. i'll throw out anything for any reason but i will never delete a file from my hard drive.

100 year old national geographics are not valuable because _everybody_ hoards those, for some reason i've never been quite able to comprehend. when i was young i worked in a fairly ordinary suburban public library and there in the unfinished and fairly musty basement were 100 years of national geographics.

I have several shelves of National Geographics up in my attic which I never, ever look at, and keep purely due to fond domestic memories of several shelves worth of national geographics in my home growing up which I used to love perusing as a kid. At this point in my life I've pretty much perused all of the National Geographics I ever need to peruse, but I still keep my own stash of them bc something about seeing those yellow spines all lined up is v comforting & represents domestic tranquility to me.

I used to keep a set of encyclopedias around for similar reasons but I eventually came to my senses and ditched them.

Moving houses quite a lot in recent years has killed off any tendency to hoard - something I def had when I was younger. I'm moving again in a couple of months and want to be even leaner.

he says sometimes the smell of cat litter is overwhelming.

Connections between toxoplasmosis and hoarding or other disorders aren't as robust as the media would suggest. But the idea is one of several reasons I haven't gotten a cat. (Also, the family assumption is that I will take in her cats if she dies or goes into a home.) The more I think about my mother's house, the more I dream of living in a hotel room without much more than a high-end laptop and a few changes of clothes.

^ ...I will take in my mother's cats...

Not a hoarder as such, though I've got books/CDs/comics collections eying me sideways. The older I get, the more benefit I see for me to deal with them versus relatives having to sort and sell. After reading _What Matters Most_ and noticing that a few closets' contents have been untouched since a 2009 move, broke my house down into bite-size tasks in a Powerpoint file, printed them, cut them out, and pick out one a day to go do. Four big bags of clothes already set to donate, one dump run made, and feeling noticeably less stress in that area. Will redo this effort when finished, just to keep culling down the unused items.

A box full of bootleg CDRs that I haven't listened to in 10 years? Maybe there's a show or ten worth retaining there, plus any tour CDs mixed in, but do I really need the boots with folk talking near the sensitive mic? Toss. Several boxes of cassettes that may / may not be playable? Probably 1/2 I can toss outright. VHS tapes? DVDs I haven't watched since buying, and may not ever? An incomplete collection of Comes with a Smile magazines? Building a collection is fun, but looking at actual / future usage, less so.

Today, cleaning three storage racks in the garage, and thinking I'll dump my stereo component packaging. Does anyone save those boxes for the next move? That's what kept them around, but seems like a long time of storage for a day of use.

What to do with photos, college souvenirs, etc. that only matter to me? Feel like I want to keep them, but if I never look at them, why? Still readjusting my brain to it, I guess.

Scan the photos? Keep a personally-agreed on percentage of souvenirs?
Some junk is worth selling but it's time-consuming to go through it all, you have to balance the value vs the effort to realise that value.
VHS tapes? Dump!

Timely revive. I’m reading this at the moment https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stuff-Compulsive-Hoarding-Meaning-Things/dp/0547422555/ref=sr_1_1?crid=ETNRNMRK020T&keywords=stuff+compulsive+hoarding+and+the+meaning+of+things&qid=1573749898&sprefix=Stuff+hoard%2Caps%2C148&sr=8-1 and am in the twilight zone where I recognise aspects of hoarding behaviour described in the book and a relief that In general my home space is mostly navigable. The story about the woman who buys three copies of a magazine, so it can stay in pristine condition is by turns depressing and jaw dropping.

man I love going to the dump. it's crazy how much you accumulate quick from having your own house. my last move while renting a furnished place, we did it in a Honda Fit with 3 people in it.

after some successful decluttering I'm slowly getting rid of a bunch of things I kept around cuz "oh it's kind of valuable". If I can profit $20 or more on eBay (according to sold listings), up it goes. I'm glad I did hang onto this sort of stuff, it's good to have some material reward from cleaning out your crap.

xp *3* copies of a magazine? Was she scratch DJing two of them?

That book Stuff is invaluable for understanding the varied reasons why people hoard instead of treating them (us) like disgusting freaks.

I got some storage boxes this summer and divided my boxes of personal detritus into papers (letters, other paper), photos from childhood/adolescence, and photos after I left home. That’s how I divide my life so I divided the photos that way and it was really helpful. Coming up w storage systems does not come naturally to me.

Nice. I'm trying to get there digitally. My heap of files is what's bugging me these days. Let it build too much, too scattered. I could easily get rid of a couple of computers and a couple more hard drives once I've sorted it out. I find that a lot more tedious than physical things. There's not even the release of pitching the damn stuff into a dumpster. Maybe could come up with a more satisfying "empty recycle bin" system sound (more clutter!)

i have three huge stacks of The Wire magazine in my loft from 198? onwards and every now and then it pops into my head that i need to send off for another copy of a particular issue from ~2012 because my own copy (currently buried somewhere up in that very loft) well it's got a torn cover where i made a very bad job of removing that month's cover-mount CD. wtf brain? (i kinda do want a fresh copy though tbqhwy)

Xp sadly not. She started buying a magazine as she wanted to keep it, but wasn’t happy as it had been touched by other people so wasn’t immaculate. She went on to only buying the ones from the middle of a pile, but then the cashier would touch it. So she persuaded the cashier to let her ring up her purchase, but then somebody had taken them from a box and put it on the shop floor. This lead to her persuading the store to let her open the delivery package and on and on....

Most of the time she wouldn’t even read them. Fortunately I’m a long, long way from being so fastidious about my possessions.

Clearly that woman has emotional issues that are directing her behavior — the details don’t really matter, it’s the obsessive-compulsiveness driving the train.

aw mannnn

Yes, absolutely. There’s often other issues which trigger the behaviour behind a lot of the stories in the nook.

*Book*

yes clearly. I thought twice of even posting in a thread about "hoarding" when I'm just cleaning up a not-at-all-remarkable amount of things.

I sold my Nook

I just looked up Hoarders and see that there was a new season just this year. I watched a bunch of episodes at my brother's house years ago, it being a whole world that I wasn't aware of, and kind of want to covertly watch the new episodes.

maffew12 upthread mentioned computers. I just found in my basement SIX laptops dating back to my Dell in 2005. Putting aside concerns about personal information and security and blah blah blah, what the hell do I do with these? There is almost definitely stuff I didn't back up (music, photos, writing) on each of these. I guess I could wipe them and try to sell them (four are iMacs) for parts or whatever, but I doubt that would be worth the time or effort.

Magazine Lady, as has been pointed out, clearly has a psychological problem that transcends mere hoarding, but I used to buy 'spares' of things, too. While I don't relate to the germophobe aspect of her neurosis, I do relate to the idea of having a safety or backup copy of things. I've mostly gotten over this, but I'll still buy a record I already have if it's cheap enough (usually under the auspices of "I'll give this to someone as a gift!," even though I never, ever do)

The show Hoarders made me feel terrible and I had to stop watching it. So much human misery. It’s too sad.

It’s like watching traumatized people get confronted about the coping mechanisms they developed to protect themselves from xyz trauma. Like Intervention minus drugs, plus trash ;_;

The only thing I remember from the show was maybe one of the pet hoarders and a lot of Target bags.

Would you consider yourself a hoarder? or just a clutter/collector/waiting for that rainy day that will never come? I feel like my parents fall in the second one although it could've been worse if they didn't constantly have grandkids at their house.

xp I'm not sure how far back the Windows "shred" command goes, but that's a good, handy, built-in way to overwrite empty space on a drive and prep for selling/donating/recycling.

I wouldn't bother using the old computers to clean up the data. I'd put the drives inside of my current machine or use a USB enclosure to look them over. But I do tend to overthink these things. Thus the periodic avoidance and mess I've got right now :D

or power up and share the whole drive on my home network or something

I'm going laptop only once I can decently "declutter" my current tower, blurrg

xpost: That's good advice. But like most things relating to hoarding, such chores--easily postponed--can seem insurmountable

fwiw I don't consider myself a hoarder, just a person with hoarder tendencies. I'm actually something of a neatnik and every ridiculous thing I save is either stored in stackable boxes and bins or tucked away neatly in the basement. I actually can't stand clutter, which I'm sure is probably also a symptom of a certain type of hoarder profile, given its links to OCD, but it seems like the people on that show are almost always messy / slovenly / pack rats. Maybe I haven't seen enough episodes.

I get overwhelmed when I consider that I'm approaching fifty and I know, at some point, I'm going to have to go through all those bins and boxes. The very idea of that makes me tired!

of course if there's a drive you need nothing from and isn't big enough to be of any real value to anyone anymore, just put a good dent into the platter before sending for recycling

The mental illness aspect is just inarguable when they're wading through disorganized chest-high piles of random, cheap stuff. Watching the helpers try to coax items away from people who can't give up a single thing makes me feel terrible, as well. I avoid that show.

Though honestly, not much different than watching an episode of American Pickers. Particularly when the pickee is 70+ and loves everything too much to sell. Can't take it with you, and the fact that your several barns-worth 'collection' will be dumped on your spouse or kids to clear is selfish, imo.

Re: But like most things relating to hoarding, such chores--easily postponed--can seem insurmountable, I felt the same way. Being a procrastinator doesn't help. So really leveraging the "it's a marathon, not a sprint", breaking all the work up into :40-:60 minute chunks allows me to see progress and feel some accomplishment.

Safe to say that very few people self-identify as hoarders (it’s extreeeemely stigmatized!). However, many people exhibit the hallmarks of hoarding as a form of self-soothing.

late capitalism consumer mumblemumblemumble

xpost I was wondering about the hoarder categorization because in the beginning of this thread there are so many self declared hoarders.

i am very much in the symmetry, organizing, cleaning routines as self soothing ocd area. Like it doesn't disrupt my life because I can let it go as long as I know when I can return to it. But it was hell having roommates. And I have good friends subletting my apt in the US and I know I have developed hostile feelings towards them because they don't take care of stuff and there is so much clutter in there. I have stayed there a couple of times after they moved in and it was so stressful.

Afaict ppl self-identify as hoarders hyperbolically the same way they talk about having PTSD hyperbolically. The people suffering from debilitating forms of these disorders sometimes don’t even know what’s wrong with them. 😢

but I'll still buy a record I already have if it's cheap enough (usually under the auspices of "I'll give this to someone as a gift!," even though I never, ever do)

I used to buy cheap second copies of things until the Avalanches becoming globally famous traumatised me: having recently bought a spare El Producto and given it to someone who'd never heard them, then suddenly copies were going for $100

That's about the point I sell my one copy

but then I wouldn't have been able to listen to it

use some of the profit on CD or iTunes. Granted there's *some* records I wouldn't part with for 100

Moving houses quite a lot in recent years has killed off any tendency to hoard - something I def had when I was younger. I'm moving again in a couple of months and want to be even leaner.

― Le Bateau Ivre, Thursday, November 14, 2019 9:04 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is precisely the opposite of my experience. I moved almost incessantly for the first, what, 35 years of my life? And never accumulated all that much and often tossed out a ton whenever I picked up stakes again. Now I've lived in the same apartment for almost seven years (roughly double the maximum length of time I'd ever previously lived in any one place) and...boy, do I ever have a lot of stuff.

hate having stuff. having an apartment that is < 500 sq feet and living with another person in it helps, but i felt that way when i had more space too

im an anti-hoarder, and it also seems slightly like a mental illness thing tbf

That is not up for debate. Hoarding is not just “has a lot of stuff” or “is messy” or “likes to keep items for nostalgia” — it’s a debilitating life-shitting real problem.

Aside from human relationships, all I require to subsist is access to a good library, a decent computer, an internet connection and a suitably large pair of speakers. Marie Kondo HATES me.

She hates no one. She may pity you. She probably would also be willing to help.

I resisted her show for a long time and now that I’ve watched it, I’ve adopted her T-shirt folding. It’s much better than what I was doing before!

She hates me in the sense that she has nothing to teach me (I'm sure she does, I'm just exaggerating for effect).

Also riffing on those ridiculous 'doctors HATE him' ads in case you haven't come across them.

i've realized it brings me joy to be a slob. i'm not disorganized, i just put things in places based on momentary improvisation and my deep love for doing as little work as possible.

i can NOT watch the hoarding shows. for me it's worse than watching surgery footage.

like, so interesting that you can't stop watching?

haha NO

How does Maria Kondo fold t-shirts?!

Nevermind, I'll Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kZUWkB7eZE

As a side note, I'm not convinced that my natural preference for minimalism sparks joy. Perhaps it keeps a greater misery at bay.

xp Sheldon's shirt-folding board.

I got lucky that my spouse has a mother with excessive clutter AND compulsive disinfecting tendencies so he's fine letting me do my own thing and helps keep stuff clean/organized.

use some of the profit on CD or iTunes.

iTunes a) didn't exist and b) 128kbps files suck, and buying a different CD still means I can't listen to the CD I sold!

so idgi, Marie Kondo's t-shirt folding trick is basically...folding it into as small a rectangle as possible? I've been using this "trick" my entire life. What do other people do?

Good for you! I folded in a square (sometimes) and crammed as many into the drawer as possible. Now I can see them.

and then she also puts them spine up in drawers?

xpost I know a lot of people still lugging cds around for years (despite moving residences regularly) that don't even own a cd player. But if it 'brings you joy' keep them. I worked in two record stores and was a music director at a community radio station. I had a fairly large collection of music. But shit weighed me down and became way too stressful logistically for me. I have two small cubes of vinyl now and that is it.

i also definitely don't tuck socks into each other now because of Kondo. I hate droopy socks.

I've sold and given away at least hundreds and hundreds of CDs in the 21 years since that one came out. The anxiety / pathology trigger about buying second copies to give away is a different matter.

my mom does the same thing with housewares. she gets everything in duplicates thinking it will be for someone's household but I think she's more into it for the thrill of the purchase since they all sit in one bedroom.

xp Sock animism is how they get you

I bought the Marie Kondo book and got as far as the clothes stuff. The t-shirt folding was revolutionary (I have been rolling them up) and I still do it.

I've been in my one-bedroom flat for 12 years now, I've accumulated a lot of stuff and lack space to sort through it. Had considered getting a storage unit for a couple of months help me sort through things.

Storage units are nice until you realize you are paying half a month's rent every month to store useless things that the Goodwill won't take for free

Then all those "omg dollar bin book / CD / record score, whatta deal!" items begins to really look like an albatross

full disclosure: I've had offsite storage units for most of my adult life

That's pretty much why I haven't done it - if I could trust myself to take the stuff up, sort through it, get rid of what's to be gotten rid of and take the rest home then I would.

i am definitely a digital hoarder and spend *way* too much time making my audio/ebook files 'just right'. fortunately digital storage technology has kept up (i haven't switched to flacs . . . yet) and it soothes my ocd tendencies in a way that doesn't make a physical mess

pretty much threw out everything that was in my dad's house when we cleaned it out last year, including magazines/college stuff. felt i should keep the high school yearbooks, not sure why

of all the things i've ever thrown away, i only genuinely regret the loss of two items: a sega with an nhl 94 cartridge (i could probably find this on ebay if i truly cared) and a calendar on which i kept track of all the shows i'd been to. that one still hurts

the experience of cleaning out my dad's house seems to have impressed the scale of her own problem on my mom. she wants to sell her house and move into a senior community with escalating health care options in the next year or so; the time frame may depend on her ability/willingness to get rid of the Stuff

i'm not much of a hoarder but i'm kind of in love with the Collyer brothers.. i have a book about them called Ghosty Men

xp 94 hell yeah. And yes sports games are plentiful and cheap.

A box full of bootleg CDRs that I haven't listened to in 10 years? Maybe there's a show or ten worth retaining there, plus any tour CDs mixed in, but do I really need the boots with folk talking near the sensitive mic? Toss.

― the body of a spider... (scampering alpaca)

what are they bootlegs of? at least they might be worth ripping and tossing (before they go bad).

i'm a little conflicted about being a digital hoarder, which i am - i'm already at the point where i can't find stuff that i know i have, somewhere; i can't commit to the time to organize the useless files i never look at. i recognize intellectually that it's not a super healthy method of coping with my problems, but the thing about all the stuff in the ICD is that for it to be a disorder it has to hurt someone, and my digital hoarding just isn't hurting anybody. the people on that tv show, i relate to them, i do the same thing they do, but i don't think i'll ever be on that tv show, because i have a compact black box, and when i am dead whoever is looking after my estate can just throw out that compact black box, and that will be it. i'm not even worried about somebody finding stuff that would embarrass me, because seriously who's even going to bother looking?

maybe i'm not actually a hoarder. i dreaded going out to the nursing home where my dad lived to pick up his stuff because i know how much crap he used to keep around - turns out he had damn near nothing. don't know if that was by choice or just that, you know, there are plenty of employees who will blatantly just steal all your shit when you're in a home and accuse you of being senile when you confront them on it.

This Marie Kondo t-shirt folding thing is all very well but how do you know which is which without leaving the printed side (if there is one) facing out? Means you have to unfold them all to find the one you're looking for, she didn't think of that did she?

This might actually be from la Kondo's book, but I find that if you have some object you don't really need but can't bear to part with, give it a little blessing. "Thank you for your good work, you are now an inanimate object once again and can be disposed of without guilt," with clasped hands of course (maybe just say it in your head, thinking about it). It's like a little funeral for the meaning it once had in your life, and if you like you can picture its soul rising to heaven with tiny wings on.

Then throw it in the fucking bin.

that ^ is from marie kondo and also Shinto which she says influenced her.

I kind of relate. I don't think things (inanimate objects) are imbued/possessed with spirits but I try to imagine the work that goes into producing something, the work i put into acquiring it and the work that will go into destroying it divided by/my length and degree of pleasure from owning it.

xpost, the way she folds things you should see the middle of the t shirt design, if any, on the spine if you have them filed in a drawer or on a shelf.

Yeah I can tell from what’s showing which shirt it is. Actually not that hard which is why I can manage to do it.

To my shame and bewilderment, I usually spend a couple of hours each weekend organising, correcting the metadata and finding better artwork for the files in my lossless music library - I painstakingly ripped my 3000 disc collection a couple of years back (took about 8 months of a few a day). I call it "track gardening". It is demonstrably true that I have spent more time curating some music than I have listening to it.

oh, I have several external harddrives that have misc ripped music and photos that I will never ever try to open/locate. it happened. I prefer organizing physical things but I can see how some people would find digital organization fulfilling as well.

I want to buy your library, MatthewK

track gardening

my man <3

To my shame and bewilderment, I usually spend a couple of hours each weekend organising, correcting the metadata and finding better artwork for the files in my lossless music library - I painstakingly ripped my 3000 disc collection a couple of years back (took about 8 months of a few a day). I call it "track gardening". It is demonstrably true that I have spent more time curating some music than I have listening to it.

― an incoherent crustacean (MatthewK)

i try! it's futile, but i try! my years are all wrong (who cares if the record got reissued in 1990, good lord) and it's a struggle to keep my genre list down under 500 (what is some of the crap people put in there, what the fuck why is Cult Leader tagged as "rock", what fucking good does that do anybody). i mean i should just get a spotify account because their files are presumably tagged properly and i know the enormous pile of crap i listen to isn't a "library" in any meaningful sense, there's no curatorial philosophy beyond "oh that sounds nice i think i would want to hear that again". but it's useless because i get lost and start listening to the songs instead of filing them.

i was a really bad library page too, for the record.

The long kon, amirite?

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/nov/19/marie-kondo-sparks-consternation-with-online-homeware-store

on the bright side, if my mom gets quarantined/society otherwise collapses, she has enough food to last for months on end

fap at your mom's house???

fap at your mom's house???

― Yerac

not since i moved out

Bloody hell!
https://metro.co.uk/2020/10/07/britains-biggest-hoarder-dies-suddenly-leaving-behind-4000000-treasure-trove-13386396/

(Excuse Metro link, you might want to check your adblocker is on)

Lol at this book clearly shown in one of the photos
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/24/e1/de/24e1de9bd1ffebf49cd754a2ca18fb1e.jpg

" and 12 Rickenbacker guitars from the 1960s and 70s."

today my mom told me 1) she took a bunch of my dad's (moldy, old, dusty) clothes to a charity shop and 2) walked out the other side with some new-to-her clothes. she sees what's going on and then defends her behavior by 'splaining to me that a $2 shirt never hurt anyone...sign. the churn is real.

proud to say i have kicked my own habit, though i am genuinely still quite messy compared to my peers.

I visited mom today. We were supposed to sort through dad’s clothes … but she wasn’t ready yet. The fact she needs a walker now and orders groceries for delivery most of the time has helped solve her problem of buying a lot of weird canned and packaged food at the grocery store that sits in the pantry for years.

My dad’s father had a large “collection” of math textbooks that after he died, his wife wanted to gift to my father, who was also a math professor. My father had enough math textbooks and no desire for more. My mom did not want boxes of textbooks taking up valuable space in the garage that could be used for canned food. It was an epic passive-aggressive politeness battle that my mother eventually won. This was a very impressive victory, as my dad’s stepmother was the undisputed champion of pass-agg politeness.

i'm not sure what the cutoff is between hoarder and just-never-getting-rid-of-er. I feel like there seriously could be a genetic component. My uncle (and his wife) never get rid of anything, consequently their house is almost uninhabitable. For years they could never invite anyone over except to sit on the porch. Finally when my mom died they really want to host people and they made a herculean effort to clear out the living room and they really did it, it was great.

This uncle is the one who moved into his mother's place near the end of her life, a beautiful house with judiciously chosen little touches, sculptures, little bottles of dried grasses, it all worked together so harmoniously and was clearly the result of someone with a lifetime of putting thought into little details (my grandmother). He moved in and almost instantly the place was transformed. All his stuff went into the upstairs rooms, so they were a no-go-zone. My grandmother's sewing room became another dumping ground. The area around the big recliner filled with odds and ends, projects of my uncle's (who is a cabinet maker). My grandmother started calling it "the boar's nest".

Anyway, my sister, who looks very like my uncle, hasn't let anyone into her place in years. I shudder to think about it. She's incredibly touchy about it, has rejected all help no matter how delicately offered but of course is deeply ashamed of her place, which is stuffed to the gills. She's begun staying at my dad's house pretty much all of the time because it's essentially unliveable. Mail sent there gets returned. Because of the shame it's hard for me to see how she could possibly allow anyone in to, say, fix a window or a leaky pipe. I've long since given up trying to help her with it. But I dread the day when she will actually need to live there.

We're in the process of trying to trim down our possessions so that we fit better into our house. Two big projects accomplished so far this year:

1) organizing all our children's toys and putting them into storage in grandma's attic
2) donating most of our children's books to charity

There's more to do - at present, I'm working on shedding 20-30% of my record collection.

We've never considered ourselves hoarders, because even though we've accumulated so much stuff that it's verged on being unmanageable, we've always tried our best to keep the house clean. Vacuumed, dishes done, toilets scrubbed, but a lot of huge rubbermaid containers (the toys) stacked up in a corner of the room. Everything on a shelf, but with few unifying principles as to why. We really want to change that, but it's a momentous effort.

After the rubbermaids were moved out, we bought our first couch in years (the kids had destroyed the last one through repeated jumping).

I look at hoarding as a spectrum disorder. Yes, there is the pathological version that you see on those TV shows, but I have a little version of "you know, this will come in handy someday" (screws, ziplock bags, scraps of leather etc.) and also the "I DO plan to read this someday" (for the books I haven't cracked in years and probably never will). So while I don't consider myself a hoarder, I do kinda understand the impulse that drives the behavior in its more extreme versions

(I've gotten better at just avoiding flea markets and garage sales and book stalls and record stores because I just really don't need any more shit at all, period)

Oh yeah I'm not allowed in antique stores anymore. I went in one in July, found a silverware pattern that I liked, bought all they had which was only a few things, not enough to have 4 people over for dinner. Found the pattern on ebay over the weekend and bought nearly a full set to go with my 10 pieces. Now I have 1930s silver plate service for 8-12 people but I also have to store it. :/

I mean I plan to use it daily but it also has to GO somewhere.

Now I have 1930s silver plate service for 8-12 people

when do we all come over for dinner

Good refresh of a lot of things at my place lately; for my part, holding to a plan to let go a number of books I've finally read. (I've been able to hold off purchasing more for a bit with only a small slip or two -- a couple of low piles tucked on the floor near my bed I still need to work through.)

xxp my last day in Stockholm in July, I found a couple charity shops in Södermalm and I was like 'dude get the fuck out of here now!' because everything was so awesome and cheap. Still ended up with a rad copper cauldron and a handmade wooden butter box, neither of which I need and barely fit into my rucksack

Yeah there is a difference I guess between too much stuff, aversion to dealing with it etc and the people who have, like, 10k+ unopened packs of chewing gum or whatever. I remember seeing some video of dudes, I dunno estate auction guys or somebody, hacking their way through rooms filled to the ceiling with thousands of boxes of mass market poker chips.

I've watched a couple of those hoarder 'expose' shows and it seems clear to me that most of the individuals know there something seriously wrong, especially when you have rooms full of cat feces and the like... but I was impressed by how kind the social workers and firemen were, they had seen this stuff before and know how to speak to the residents.. I think the show was in Ontario Canada or somewhere like that

when do we all come over for dinner

― Andy the Grasshopper

I wish! I also don't have a dining area or a table and my roommate hasn't unpacked half of her stuff (since Feb) so speaking of hoarding, part of our common area looks like a tip full of supplies and piles of costuming. I'm not psyched about it.

NYC lyfe

Speaking of NYC lyfe, I stumbled upon this Wikipedia article a few weeks back, and it's stuck with me:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collyer_brothers

There's this acquaintance who is definitely (or at least sheepishly admitting to it) capital-H Hoarding which really amped up with the death of his spouse to the point it's difficult to physically navigate his apt. but the perverse thing is a good portion of the stuff he has stashed away ended up being legit $$$ collectibles so the "let's haul all this out en masse" conversation is a non-starter.

Like the obvious thing is to sell enough choice items and use that to pay to move everything to storage but that's also not happening...

I think I had some sort of hoarding thing going on back when I was cooking a lot and first discovered great grocery stores in Atlanta, and would come home with $500-600 in pantry staples and fresh veg and proteins that can't be gotten in MS. I wanted to be able to cook any cuisine on the slightest whim, and wound up tossing a fair amount of stuff. Now I don't cook much at all and still have pantry items gotten years ago. I've encouraged my daughter to take whatever she wants, so it's not hoarding in the sense of not being able to let it go.

Similar has happened with my booze collection when I started getting into cocktails — I bought scores of bottles to taste and to be able to produce thousands of different cocktails on demand. Problem is, I don't drink much. I call the wall of bottles a research library now, because that's what I use it for more.

I wouldn't say I'm a hoarder as such but I maybe end up with random junk in closets or cupboards. Not keeping it deliberately just kinda the detritus of life, old stuff. I've made a big list of these places in my home and resolved to empty them all this year, but it's slow progress.

I definitely do a bit of prepping type behaviour but more just for my own convenience. Like why not buy 24 cans of tomatoes or whatever, means I don't have to think about that again for a time. Same with other long-life things.

I do know tho that these full cupboards, even when you can't see them or don't open them, maybe have take some kind of mental toll, the sense of unsorted masses of things existing. And on the positive side, there is a really good feeling in emptying these spaces. Been trying to focus on that.

maybe take*

I call the wall of bottles a research library now, because that's what I use it for more

please let us know if you decide to dispose of this library, I might, errm, know someone who'll take these off your hands

If you walk into my apartment, it doesn't look hoarder-ish, relatively clean... but open a closet or cupboard and it's like *BOING!!* cartoon explosion of junk

Also there are books behind books that I haven't seen in years, I'm sure there's some good shit in there

If you walk into my apartment, it doesn't look hoarder-ish, relatively clean... but open a closet or cupboard and it's like *BOING!!* cartoon explosion of junk

haha this is my exact situation too. tho been trying to work on it. i'm never gonna be full kondo but it is a relief throwing shit away and knowing places are neat, even the invisible ones.

xxpost New ILX FAB (Fancy a Bottle)

Also there are books behind books that I haven't seen in years, I'm sure there's some good shit in there

Had a bit of this lately but also a fair amount was from the depths of the pandemic -- extra cash and some likely looking books for a buck each and the like via Alibris? Sure! So I need to work on reading and pruning those too.

Similar has happened with my booze collection when I started getting into cocktails

I'd say the collector's urge is a distinct mentality from hoarding, but the two behaviors share what you might call a porous border.

random junk in closets or cupboards. Not keeping it deliberately just kinda the detritus of life, old stuff.

This sounds to me like simple procrastination extended over a long period where your dwelling hasn't changed, so there was no urgent need to clear away the "detritus of life". I think that happens to many of us who don't move residences for decades.

^^^^ yeah this

yep that's it really. nonetheless i think it's good to do a spring clean or whatever.

also felt that attitude sometimes prevalent in other parts of my life also, so fixing it where fixable has become important to me, albeit i don't expect to succeed entirely.

please let us know if you decide to dispose of this library, I might, errm, know someone who'll take these off your hands

Somebody's going to have fun going through all this stuff when I croak. If anyone throws a wake for me, there's the booze sorted.

i'm lucky in that most of my hoarding is digital, same concept, it's just that everything i've hoarded over the past 30 years is in a discreet black box. occasionally i open up the box and swap out one chunk of metal for another.

my physical space is... cluttered. last time i moved was when i broke up with my ex. we argued about what to keep - we both wanted to give the other everything. i actually threw out some stuff that apparently has some value, like the novelization of "the evil of the daleks". i don't regret it. it wasn't a very good novelization!

i mostly have what i need. what i don't have i do without, until it shows up and i find out what i do need. somebody gave me a dustbuster. we had one as a kid, and god, it's so great for keeping the dust bunnies and hair from out of under my computer desk.

sometimes i try to organize the things in the black box, but it's exhausting and time-consuming. the thing is that i don't know what i _have_. i'll go through my files and say "oh, i forgot i had this, this is cool". of course i could have done perfectly well without it but it is COOL and now that i KNOW i have it i don't want to throw it out.

at any time the black box could get hit by lightning and everything in it could be destroyed and i probably wouldn't mind much, except for my personal writing. i try to keep cloud backups of my personal writing, but, well, i can't quite get my head around the software. text documents are insignificantly small. i had a local hard drive die, actually, and i lost my entire curated music library. i'd spent years curating a collection of dead music. the curation itself is the loss. i still have all the music, but the collection was of the stuff i _particularly liked_. now i have no idea what was in that collection. it would take years to recreate, and it's not worth it. everything passes.

another part of it is growing up as a doctor who fan - the disappointment i felt when i realized that NJN would _never_ be showing the daleks' masterplan. we do live in a New Ephemeral Age, I've learned over the years. stuff disappears all the time. i don't know what, can't predict what. i try to save what i can. i like to think that some of it might be useful to donate to some queer archive in the future. at some future point in time maybe i'll have the only surviving copy of "she/they car wash". it doesn't seem likely to me honestly, but who can say? you don't know what you got till it's gone. sometimes not even then.

no cat feces for me - not just cuz i'm allergic to cats. i grew up in unsanitary conditions. my living space may be cluttered, but i draw a line at filthy.

i guess one of the other things that prevents me from hoarding is that i am a bit of a shut-in. sure, whenever i go to a thrift store i leave with _something_. last time it was a luchador bottle opener and a plush squid. i also definitely do the thing - i've seen it called out among gen x-ers - where i have a hard time getting rid of the original packaging.

Hoarding is both acquisition and keeping. It is both genetic and learned. It’s way more common (esp in the US) than anyone thinks. It is a spectrum disorder and, above all, an attempt to exercise control over one’s circumstances. It is also frequently set off by unprocessed trauma. When you think about all the unprocessed traumas out there, it’s no surprise that some people react by constructing a fortress, even if that fortress is made of shit. No one wants to admit that this is the case so we get a lot of “is it or is it not?”
My belief is that most of the time both acquisition and keeping (or a combination of the two) is a manifestation of profound grief.

As for me, I have stemmed the acquisition. The pull is strong but I resist it. The keeping is another issue but it hasn’t gotten in my way (yet, as an adult) so I’m trying my best to keep it at bay. It’s def still a strong pull to save things, whether for offering proof or not forgetting who I am to maybe I can give this to someone. Seeing my mom laud her churn made me despair bc she obviously thinks she gets it but she doesn’t.

got rid of a lot of clothes, books, dvds, cds this summer that had been boxed on the never-never up in the attic for years and it felt great

xpost yeah, the long-running reality show Hoarders (and to some extent its rival, Hoarders: Buried Alive) tries to trace the roots of each case study: the origin is indeed trauma, often if not always, though results can vary quite a bit, if with somewhat predictable results, in terms of property etc crises, but then somewhat volatile cycles of reactions to those who are trying to help, personally and professionally Inc; divesting the hoard, as hoarder already agreed to(cycles recognizable to professionals, but still requiring very careful response in the moments)
And yeah, for me also, it's now more about the keeping---but also, if I could just stop buying books---

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” - William Morris

I need to get into this 'Swedish Death Cleaning' trend.. just removing shit on an almost constant basis

All of your CDs and records and cool books take up too much damn space please let me help you with that especially the CDs: Cow Art's Hoarding Solutions

Yeah I have watched every ep of Hoarders trying to get an idea of how to talk to my mom/parents to get them help. Have failed continuously ! But it reinforces my will to not be like them.

I watched one episode of one of those shows and it was all this unused purchases from like Big Lots and Amazon... just random things, still usually in their original packaging, just piled in corners or plastic bags. She didn't seem to value any of the stuff but definitely was not up to the task to do any kind of serious cleaning
And yes, there was plenty of catshit all over the place as well

I have literally watched all seasons — the people vary, the stuff varies, the grossness def varies but the motivation and delusion is virtually all the same.

I watch mainly to see subtle variations in what works and what doesn’t. This one lady was irate that she didn’t have a chance to sort her stuff in its original place — usually they make you sort on the lawn and she found it humiliating — so they let her do it her way. The show is quite humane imo.

I don't actually wish this at all, but if a catastrophic fire were to destroy my apartment and all its contents, I might just go full on Kung Fu and start wandering the western states with a bedroll and a can of Spam... I think I mostly have a job to fund the housing all my bullshit stuff

Probably this is one of those threads where I mentioned a good book, rec. by Elvis Telecom and quincie: Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, by Gail Steketee and Randy Frost, who have worked a lot with hoarders, well as studying and teaching about them. Steketee (quincie's teacher) has also written work and teacher's guide editions of Treatment For Hoardng Disorders, but I'm trying not hoard the hoarding books, as some people do (why these authors have stopped bringing printouts to discussion groups).

has written *workbook* etc.

Oh wow:

The Hoarding Research Team at BU School of Social Work, led by Dean Emerita Gail Steketee and Associate Professor Jordana Muroff, engages in activities that include the study of hoarding and its background features, relationship to other disorders, and possible etiological factors.

CLUTTER IMAGE RATING TOOL
The Clutter Image Rating (CIR) tool was developed as an objective rating scale to assess hoarding and clutter. In 2007, the paper-based measure was first introduced in Dean Gail Steketee and Professor Randy Frost’s Compulsive Hoarding and Acquiring: A Therapist Guide. Professor Jordana Muroff and a team of students led by Ann Ming Samborski and Sophie Lehar developed a downloadable CIR application for iPhones and iPads.

Click here to download the CIR application on iTunes.

today my mom told me 1) she took a bunch of my dad's (moldy, old, dusty) clothes to a charity shop and 2) walked out the other side with some new-to-her clothes

when we cleaned out my dad's house seven years ago, i had to insist to my mom that absolutely no one wanted his 40yo electric blankets. tbf i made her throw out the chest with all my childhood stuffed animals (most of which she had sewn for me herself) because i didn't want to do it myself

when my mom's house got cleaned out two years ago i was in no place to deal with it, but thankfully there was enough money to largely sort it out without me. never has money been better spent. i don't know how many dumpsters were involved nor do i want to know.

I have a little version of "you know, this will come in handy someday" (screws, ziplock bags, scraps of leather etc.)

It’s taken me forever to realise it, but having a terrible memory helps with this. The same thought process for me now goes “this will come in handy someday…but when that day comes you probably lay won’t remember you own it. And even if you do remember you own it you won’t be able to remember where you’ve put it, and you won’t have the time or the energy to look for it. And you now live in a world where you’ll be able to buy a replacement for very little money and get it delivered next day. So even if you keep it, you’ll probably still end up buying a new one when you do eventually need one. Just throw it away”. It still feels terrible and wasteful, but the alternative was drawers and drawers full of stuff I might or might not use at some point in the next 20 years.

A month ago I actually needed an XLR cable for the first time in, like, 20 years. I'd given them all away so I got a new one for like, £6

I have one older friend who is a bit of a hoarder and a prepper. It's not that she won't let go of things, but she definitely shops on impulse to make herself feel better in the moment. Like, when we first got our Aeropress, she wanted to have one as well, so we got her one. She only drinks instant coffee, so that's another piece of plastic crap that's just gone into the general mess in her house. Similarly she buys things like soup makers, which she will never use. It's an impulse I understand, this idea of "everything is so awful, maybe buying this will fix me." This, combined with her lack of mobility, means that all her stuff just accumulates in bags and boxes, and nobody can go into her house, which means she has had no cable television and no central heating in all the years I've known her. She also has a leak in her conservatory roof that she can't get fixed because she's too ashamed to let anyone come inside. I never want to be like that.

Yeah I have watched every ep of Hoarders trying to get an idea of how to talk to my mom/parents to get them help. Have failed continuously ! But it reinforces my will to not be like them.

Absolutely this. I look at how my parents' stuff is arranged, and yes, their house is full, and it shouldn't be, but the big thing for me is that there's no flow to anything. Any time my mother needs the ironing board, for example, she has to move stuff from out of the way of the press it's in, then open the press, then move more stuff, then take out the ironing board, with all that extra stuff piled around, and then she puts it all away again in exactly the same way. It makes no sense. My parents have their dishwasher in the utility room off their kitchen, which means that putting away their clean dishes means having to move them from one room to another. It seems crazy to me.

nobody can go into her house, which means she has had no cable television and no central heating in all the years I've known her. She also has a leak in her conservatory roof that she can't get fixed because she's too ashamed to let anyone come inside. I never want to be like that.

this is my fear about my sister.

It's very hard even to see from the sidelines. I can't imagine what it's like to be living inside those houses and those feelings.

My mom’s canned and packaged food is nowhere near hoarding based on everything else in this thread. I think she is ashamed of her paper storage. Bank statements, receipts, other financial records. They are kept in the back bedroom (which was never used as a bedroom because it wasn’t needed). Shortly after my dad died, I visited her and suggested that I could start sorting the things in that room while she was at work. I had not seen her as angry in … decades. She came close to threatening to disinherit me because of it.

Fwiw (and I told her this) when she was in the hospital 2 1/2 years ago, I went in that room to look for important documents to scan and it was fairly well organized, a bit cluttered, but nothing to be ashamed of. I found the things I needed fairly quickly!

Like my mom has a fear of being diagnosed as a hoarder, when she is actually pretty normal and healthy!

So I told her about the guy who had been illegally living at the leftist community center who had stockpiled over 200 computer power cords (and much more… I did a lot of the disgorging).

I've been assisting with the outcome of several animal hoarding cases recently - backyard breeders that get overwhelmed when no one wants their kittens/puppies, farms with all species of severely neglected animals, folks who feed hundreds of feral cats but don't do TNR then lose their homes to foreclosure or eviction. Conditions have been horrific. It's so easy to become overwhelmed and people are so loath to ask for help, until it's far too late.

That is really depressing. Thank you for doing this work!

I was thinking it couldn't really manifest as a group, but with the animal cases do you ever see things get out of hand on a scale that wouldn't be possible for one person alone?

Yes - individuals certainly, but also families with multiple folks who could take on the animal care. The dynamics are rough in the family cases.

there's a creepy apartment building down the street from me where one unit has shelving cabinets backed up to all the windows so they literally can't see out, and no light can travel in... and black mold on the glass. God knows what's inside the place

Is it possible they have the shelving there so if a bullet goes through the window it would likely not hit a person?

I suppose that's possible but it looks really freaky and unhealthy

If there’s black mold and it’s an apartment building, my guess is that it’s not a case of hoarding, but a slumlord that won’t repair leaks!

My spouse isn't a full-blown hoarder, but it definitely dawned on me several years ago that they like to collect things and have a lot of trouble letting them go when space becomes an issue. We're literally in the process of having wall-to-wall shelving installed in one of our rooms because they can't bear to part with all the books, trip trinkets, etc. acquired over the years. We have a cottage that we used to rent out but have stopped so it can instead be a dumping ground for the furniture accumulated that cannot be donated. And just today I was told some people gave some lovely framed art to hang in the cottage - and my immediate response was "we have an entire attic collection full of your framed art already gathering dust!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antilibrary

I am actually rather proud of myself for building a large stack of books to sell— I am running out of space, and had to stay honest with myself about which books I needed and which I was never going to need or read. Being a reviewer and poet means that I get sent stuff that I don't want all the time— I have started putting this stuff in Little Free Libraries or giving away to friends.

Luckily my physical record collection hardly grows at all because I don't have the cash to be shelling out constantly for neat records, plus I no longer consider myself a DJ, so that's taken care of.

My parents' house is full of books, and always has been. They do a cull every few years.

i'm very much not a hoarder and love to get rid of stuff. sometimes to the point of regretting it.

my partner is a little further down the hoarder spectrum. one room in our trailer is his and it's stuffed to the gills. he keeps meaning to "go through it" but more stuff just accumulates. he also keeps all his receipts, which in the age of online banking, i just do not get.

Like my mom has a fear of being diagnosed as a hoarder, when she is actually pretty normal and healthy!

It certainly sounds like it, especially if you can actually find the things you need in her files. The two big things I took away from Marie Kondo (don't laugh) were 1) putting things in neatly labelled clear plastic boxes with proper lids can go a long way towards making chaos manageable and making you look like a person with their life together, and 2) never put anything you value or will need again into black plastic sacks, because the second it goes into a black plastic sack, you can't see it, and in your mind it is now garbage.

The leftist community center also had a book hoarder who would bring in boxes of books to the point that he was politely asked to stop doing so unless he removed some of his previous contributions and the books weren’t damp or moldy. … He ignored the request.

A Steketee mentioned!!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Steketee%27s_Building%2C_2005.jpg