Inertia is a hell of a thing. Selling, donating, recycling, or disposing of items is an active decision.
I would say it's an inability to execute the 'correct' decision society has imposed on them. Hoarders can make decisions just as well as anyone. Their unique 'problem' occurs when it's apparent to everyone but the hoarder that it's time to discard an item. It's always something that has almost zero vale, but never none. The hoarder distorts reality, and imagines a world where the item retains some low value in the remote future. My feeling is that it's somewhat linked to gambling addiction. It's as if they were a poker player, constantly buying into games for hundredths of a cent. It doesn't really matter what cards they're dealt. They never need to fold, so they never need to discard a truly terrible hand. In fact, they retain a very slight chance of winning a penny by sticking with it every time.
Nicely put. It is fascinating how often the brain can create a reality of its own, and how its perceptual and predictive machinery can be prone to "bugs".
Some close friends of mine are hoarders and I can't help but feel that hoarders have a hard time valuing themselves or their time as more important as the objects they hold onto and the time/living space it takes to keep them. The ones that I know definitly have a hard time genuinly loving themselves and a lot of what they do (including the hoarding) seems to deal with that in some sense.
Curiously hoarders sometimes have pockets of pristine order, be it some sort of hobby or their linux home folder, while other spaces are in a complete state of disarray.
I think your polyurethane example mirrors what I see with my mom, and to some degree in myself, and it's something different. It's a fear that you're throwing away something useful. It's not that me or my mom is unable to decide, it's just that we don't want to throw it away because perhaps one day it might be useful (to us or someone else), so we decide to keep it.
I'm trying to improve. I go through my stuff routinely with my SO and I force myself to get rid of things, either give them away or recycle. Do I really need this?
I talked to my mom, she wanted help but she's always talking about "sorting through" stuff. I said I'd only be willing to help if we actually threw away some stuff each time. There's just too much stuff for me to go through again and again. Suddenly it turned into a hard no. She refused my help if we had to throw away something each time. I said fair enough, perhaps not always but most of the times. Still hard no.
Admittedly she has some historically interesting things, and some useful stuff. But also a lot of junk that nobody wants anymore, like that can of polyurethane. And she just can't let go in case it might be useful...
This to a T.
My hoarding, which fortunately is mostly digital, is grounded in the fact I came across far too many fucking instances of "Why the hell didn't I keep that?!" such that the prospective cost of throwing something away (deleting it) far outweighs the cost of just keeping it.
Hence I've kept even files that I know for an absolute certainty I would never need again but still hoard because what if I need it?!
As an example: I have a PDF scanned copy of my passport renewal application from over 10 years ago. I will never need it again, the form itself is no longer valid, literally nobody would want it. But I keep it. Why? Because "Why the hell didn't I keep that?!".
I fear what would happen if I learn the same lesson in the physical world.
With physical things it really depends on what you save. I personally tend to keep a bunch of hardware around many people would not. Some of those things will most definitely go out of usefulness date before I get to them, but are hard to get anyway so weird to get rid of. These are liable to become useless. Others are older spare parts that would not, but I cannot be bothered to sell them just yet... They might go out of style and become useless, but are likely to keep their value.
Yet more are some pieces for plans the didn't pan out yet, but they might. These won't break or might get used for something else. And a few fixable broken things that are not quite junk. These might get fixed depending on requirements.
That is different from my mom's minor hoarding in that she keeps things that will not get used for anything ever, look cute but are horrible to keep, and additionally I do regularly clean out total junk...
The new meta is to give stuff to people who will make use of it.
Another strategy I'm trying to adopt is one my brother-in-law lives by, which is to focus on one "thing" at a time. Like he recently wanted to get an RC race car. So he sold his previous "thing" and bought an RC car setup. He'll keep it for a year or two until he finds something else he wants to try and he'll sell the RC car stuff and buy something else.
Yup, that's a key right there.
I do have a more inherited items from my family's past than I can use and have a hard time getting rid of these items.
I find that it is definitely easier when I can give it to someone who will care for it, or even a charity thrift store (e.g., some animal shelters run them for funding). Just tossing it in the dumpster or leaving it in the rain is almost painful, but if it seems that it'll be taken care of (especially better than I would), it's all right.
Similarly, I work with some very expensive materials at my composites business, and offcuts can be valuable. I cringe to put those offcuts in the dumpster, but when they accumulate too much, just giving them away on Craigslist to someone who will use them feels fine.
So, both the inability to make decisions, and also the ability to let someone else make the decision that you'd make (i.e., figure out how to put the stuff to use), are both helpful angles.
I think this is spot on. I definitely have hoarder tendencies. A look at my office would easily confirm this. I also tend to hoard code - I'll often comment out old code that no longer applies just in case it might be needed later, or in case I'll need to remember how I did something before. This gets pointed out in code reviews.
It probably does stem from some sort of loss aversion. We have all wished for longer undo history, things like git take that to the extreme. Now that we can't lose things, we're free to work without that fear.
It may be related to too good of a memory, or autism, or whatever, but there are parts of my life where I have way too good a memory for everything I have and had, and other parts where I'm like "yeah I got a lot of something like that, but who cares".
CONSOLATION GROOK
Losing one glove is certainly painful, but nothing compared to the pain, of losing one, throwing away the other, and finding the first one again.
--Piet Hein https://www.phys.ufl.edu/~thorn/grooks.html
I grew up in a family of collectors. By the age of 10 I'd spent countless hours scouring antique shops and shows and flea markets for my items of hyper-focus: metal litho advertising, mostly particularly tobacco cans, because I was working with an allowance and the age of tobacco tins was not long in our past then. I was really introverted, but learned to haggle, to "dicker," before I learned to swim. I spent even more hours in my public library, looking up whatever information I could find about my collection and similar pieces and why some were valuable and others not.
Yes, I kept everything up well. But . . . I only kept collecting. It was almost some kind of mania. Even when I branched into antique yo-yo collecting, it wasn't doing anything for my ability to socialize as a teenager. Collect, collect, collect!
Until my parents got divorced and sold their collections. My brother and I opted to also sell our collections. No coercion - it was a choice: I was an adult by then and my brother was 18 but still finishing high school.
And soon after that, I wasn't looking at everything as a collector anymore, I wasn't trying to put a value on things. I also didn't have a lot of stuff that just took up space. Eureka! I'd discovered some new state of being: collection-free.
I think collecting can be a problem. I think the author misses that in the analysis, too.
Then there’s the part of convenience. The likelihood of hoarding something is directly proportional to how hard is to to get rid of.
Edited: for clarity
The times and circumstances meant a lot of fixing, and creating. You didn't throw stuff away, it could be useful, and usually was.
He was successful, had a good career, lived in a big house, but never lost the urge to build, recycle, fix and so on. When the oven door broke after 30 years he replaced it with a spare one he had in the garage. [1].
From him I learned to despise waste. I don't like throwing stuff away. But I'll happily give stuff away. And we live far enough up the food chain that there's always someone happy to take my broken junk and turn it into money.
I've come to learn that I don't have my father's desire, or time, to actually fix things, but I have his sense of not-waste. Sometimes it takes effort, but I try to make an effort to discard things that are truly past it, or at least pass them on to someone else.
Yes, I've inherited his sensibilities through genes and upbringing, but I've also become self-aware of it and so j recognise when it's happening.
[1] because his mothers stove broke years earlier, same model, and he kept the broken one for spare parts ;)
To be clear my grandfather was basically a farmhand from Bavaria with an 8th grade education who found himself in NYC in 1936 to marry his sweetheart and get the heck out of Germany.
This makes me wonder whether there is some other psychological process which makes those particular decisions hard.
That’s a very helpful insight; and to take it further I would just note that pathologic doubt, or intolerance of uncertainty is a cardinal feature of obsessive-compulsive disorder. No idea whether it relates to the family members in your story or even to most hoarders, but in some OCD patients, like me, it takes the form of an extreme inability to decide because of a need to completely dispel doubt by seeking more information. But of course there’s no amount of information that will ultimately triumph over doubt for those so afflicted. I wonder why all OCD/uncertainty-intolerant people don’t become hoarders. Maybe there’s a countervailing aesthetic, ordering drive.
So even if you have a hard time to decide, that cost will push you to a decision at some point, because it starts to affect you as a person physically and emotionally (e.g. being annoyed by that box of empty bottles).
Hoarders tend to priorize those objects above themselves and phantasize some time where those objects might become crucial to have. We all to that to some degree, who doesn't have weird chargers for long lost devices in their drawer somewhere? But what differenciates hoarders from people like you and me is that they won't stop keeping things when that drawer is full, when their living room is full, when every last nook and cranny of their flat is used.
I have been to sizeable flats that looked like narrow caves, with the walls obscured by piles of things and stacks of old yellowed newspapers splitting rooms in small paths. Of course keeping such a place clean is more or less impossible, especially if it is being lived in and the safety hazards (fire, collapse of floor, ...) are real.
Obviously I'm paying for these through council tax rates so I make a point of using them up.
These give me a chance to, and crucially, force me to make decisions about junk to get rid of.
Another part of the hoarder condition is that often stuff you board does actually become useful again, I'm regularly coming across things in the house that need fixing or batteries replaced and a quick look around the workshop or in the dedicated junk draws and I can usually find the thing I need. This reinforces the habit.
But back to my point, can I suggest you supply your mom with a rubbish pick up a few times a year, rent a trailer or skip and drop it off to be filled for taking to the dump.
The time based urgency should help make some decisions.
I also wouldn't have let her wait to look that up, I would have looked it up on the spot. Putting things off is a good way to lose the war.
First of all the thing about hoarding being triggered by loss: I think this has more to do with psychoanalysts looking for an explanatory reason of that sort. (I.e. Freudian bullshit.) From my observation it is more of a genetic personality trait that the person has already had the inclination to hoarding independent of any life events. Certainly life events or the loss of a loved one could make a barely-in-control hoarding situation spiral out of control, but it didn't start the hoarding any more than gunshot sounds cause avalanches unless avalanche conditions were already present.
Second to the points about inability to describe the objects in detail, to handle the objects for more than a short time, or not being able to reliably tell the animals apart in an animal hoarding situation. We had 19 cats (in a 2 bedroom), and it was bad for us and the animals, but we definitely could tell them apart! Photographic memory runs in my family; most of us could in fact describe most of the objects. That's part of the problem! A tendency to see every object as unique contributes to inability to not keep them all.
I feel like TFA was written from the perspective of someone who has no personal experience or understanding. A recent experience at my mother's house provides a much better illustration of why hoarding happens. Her doorstep had rotted out and I had to rebuild it. My mother suggested I use some polyurethane coating to finish the wood, but the bottle she'd been saving had been open an unknown number of years and turned into a disgusting milkshake. I said we better not use that and would just buy a new bottle. I asked if I could take the spoiled bottle to the trash for her and she almost agreed, but at the last moment stopped me. She wanted to look up on the internet whether there was a way to turn the spoiled polyurethane back into usable, and asked me to put it in the separate RV (itself falling to pieces) until she has time to do that.
Here's the key: it's an inability to make decisions. That's it. The emotional distress component follows from the stress of being unable to make a decision, not the other way around. (The reason a decision cannot be made is because the future cannot be completely known, thus it is impossible to say a discarded item will definitely not turn out to have been needed.) The build-up of things comes from putting off the decisions to keep or get rid of things indefinitely.