Similarly I believe information hoarding is a Gen X thing because we grew up in information shortage. Do Millennials download stuff? Maybe out of fun or for convenience but probably not because of the irrational Gen Xer fear that all the nice access to information we have could go away one day.

All of this is just my arm chair psychology of course.

I have 40 year old VHS tapes that are still good, vinyl records last a long time too.

Think of all these pictures we snap with our phones.

Most of them will probably be lost from disk drive failures, accidental erasure, hardware failures making them too expensive to recover, software obsolescence (pictures are on the device but they don't make the software to connect to the device any more)...

Meanwhile I have a box of family pictures, some of them from the 19th century (a few tin types), but most of them from the 20th century, that are still good most with negatives intact. I could print a brand new print of any of them anytime I want.

> Meanwhile I have a box of family pictures, some of them from the 19th century (a few tin types), but most of them from the 20th century, that are still good most with negatives intact. I could print a brand new print of any of them anytime I want.

This is really where cloud storage solves those problems. The photos I care about are shared with friends and family and are safe from hardware failure or house fire. The only scenario they aren't great at is the inter-generational one, but if dad gives kids access it's no worse than a shoebox under the bed. They'll just have to pull stuff down into their own digital lockers before MasterCard and Google realize I'm dead.

But seriously: Stuff disappears, not doubt, although if I remember something I can usually still find it online. I virtually never search something in the stuff I downloaded for years, because it is just easier to dig it up online - and that is not because my archive wouldn't be accessible. If it is important for me to remember it is probably important for others to keep it online.

With time I've learnt that not even archive.org is reliable for some things so I save whatever I can. Sometimes I even take screenshots of things that I may need someday.

I've never stopped to think of that as "hoarding", but probably it is. Thank God those files don't take physical space at home, though!

Do you mean you are happy that the files don't take up physical space at home like books do or do you mean they don't take up space because you store them in the cloud. The last thing would really make a difference because I think it's something old people like me don't typically do.

"at least 80 percent of people who engaged in extreme hoarding didn’t meet the criteria for OCD. They were more prone to depression than those with OCD. They had more difficulty making decisions. They were far less likely to be aware of their behavior as a problem. Genetic linkage studies showed a different pattern of heritability than OCD, and brain scans showed a different pattern of activation. Drugs that were successful in treating OCD were not effective for hoarding."

As for the on-the-rise component, there are multiple explanations offered, but this part struck me:

"In other words, something has changed—in history and culture—to cause hoarding to emerge as a prevalent psychiatric disorder. Objects have taken on, for those who hoard them, individual personalities with outsized emotional significance. They cannot be casually discarded; they are woven into the person’s very sense of self..."

The term hoarding is problematic because it is lacking a clear line even more than other potentially pathological behaviors, there is absolutely no consensus where having some stuff that you don't exactly use daily ends and pathological hoarding begins. Even alcohol consumption seems clear-cut by comparison. Combined with the smugness of how self-congratulatory "minimalists" will look down on everybody who has slightly different standards than them, and the unfortunate coincidence that disorder (as in chaotic) shares a linguistic token with disorder (as in mental health) it makes it incredibly hard to have a meaningful discussion about the topic.

(I write "minimalist" in quotes because far too many self-identifying minimalists are not minimal at all, they are just eagerly disposing to drive their consumerism to eleven, new and shiny every time)

Being significantly afraid of flying may be irrational and unpleasant, but the line is at the point where you’re incapable of dealing with that fear.

That said, I have no doubt it is a true mental disorder. Even if it gets reclassified yet again as a subset of another disorder, it is still a disorder. It was a disorder 10 years ago too. This is true even if a few people exploit the diagnosis. This last one is kinda like someone faking cancer: Just because a few fake cancer doesn't mean that cancer is imaginary.