I had a couple of thousand books in my flat in london, including about 500 technical computing ones (design, languages, other stuff). I got my nephew to fix up the flat, for sale. He asked me "Which of these books do you want to keep?", my response after a few seconds "None".
It's so easy to hang on to things you really don't need.
That's particularly true of tech books. I want to hang on to my copy of "Tinker Tailor" but "Adobe Air in Action" 2008?
That's a sad indictment of tech.
Most underlying technology is timeless (see TAOCP, SICP, CLRS, K&R, GoF, Dragon Book, Beej's Guide, Sipser,...); but we seem set on producing an endless, pointless, churn of frameworks and minor language differences in the name of progress.
Yeah, well, I do kind of miss "The Design & Evolution of C++", but I can't convince myself I actually need it.
You're not afraid you're going to need that UCSD Pascal book from 1986?
My physics textbooks look impressive sitting on a bookself even if I never open them again. I only need a few books like that to prove I'm smart though. "I swear someday I will open my calculus textbook again and do all the exercises..."
It's fun to find a colleague's collection of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming Books books and open them to hear the crack of a book that's never been opened before.
I've moved houses 3 times in the last 3 years. The pain of moving all my personal belongings made me realise how much unnecessary stuff I had accumulated. So I made it a point to throw or give away many things that was no longer really needed. It was a revelation and now I am more mindful to storing anything for long-term without thought. I still have more than 2+ decades of stuff in a storage - books, sentimental stuffs, things I thought may be useful or needed in the future etc. Still figuring out how to go through all that.
This applies to both physical and digital goods. I've tried to think hard about how to keep my digital life in order in a way that my kids will be understand to make some sense of. I'm not there yet but I am mindful of it.
Trying to explain the sentimental value of your belongings to others is like trying to explain a dream.
I'm not a hoarder, but my dad is.
I have a couple of items from my dead grandparents, and it's a connection.
It's a tangible connection that feels more real than something intangible like memories.
As for my dad though, I have no idea. He recognizes that it's a problem, but can't stop. It's stuff like plastic ship models, or stuff he wants to buy on eBay - postcards from defunct airlines that he used to fly on.
That makes sense, but don't you think hoarding muddies the signal? Do you know what of your father's you'd want to keep of his hoarded goods?
There is nothing that he has hoarded that I want to keep. I have told him that.
I have told him that he has so much stuff, that it would be impossible for me to recognize the $1,000 model boxes from the worthless model boxes, and that when he dies, I'm just going to have to wholesale the lot for probably a penny on the dollar.
I told him him that the people who will pay money for plastic model kits are the same age as him, and if they all die around the same time or before him, there will be no one to buy the model kits.
I've had the same discussion with my parents. They wanted me to go through their home and mark down everything I want. I don't want any of it and frankly dealing with a full house of stuff after they die is something I dread. I wouldn't even know where to start. Are there companies you can hire that will take care of everything?
> don't you think hoarding muddies the signal?
Yes, which I am thankful now that I only have a couple of items and haven't had to make the choice of what to keep or not.
Thank you for sharing.
Put it into a storage locker. Pre-pay 5 years of fees on the locker. Wait 5 years.
This is what we call a 'self-sovling-problem'
[delayed]
To be clear, it is in storage for the past 2+ decade. It was moving houses every year, the last few years, with only the essentials, that made me realise how much of a hoarder I was. Nevertheless, dumping it somewhere and "forgetting" about it is not much of a solution - as someone else said here, you are just passing on the problem to the next generation.
A few years back we "decluttered" our house in order to make it more appealing for sale and put all the stuff in storage. After the property eventually sold we went back and looked at the stuff we had stored and probably threw out 80% of it.
I’m in a similar situation, after dealing with the deaths of multiple parents I don’t want my descendants to have a huge burden of stuff and I’ve been on a mission to purge as much as possible. Facebook Marketplace has been great to get rid of a lot of the more bulky stuff. It’s great, you post a picture and someone comes to your house to pick it up cash in hand. Low value stuff gets donated to goodwill or my local Buy Nothing/Free Stuff group on Facebook. Also been doing a tidy amount of sales on eBay for smaller/more valuable items.
Still have a lot of progress to make. At least my game collection on Steam will be easy to clean up.
I have a wise, witty, charming and personable friend who is a complete hoarder. It was a big deal to be allowed into the house. But, after several years of attempting to help, I eventually had to realize that it wasn't the effort required to clean that was the issue. The issue is that she doesn't like the space that's left behind. If I could snap my fingers and make it all clean and tidy, it would not really help anything because it would be back to the old way in a month or so.
I once suggested bins and shelves to help keep it better organized and manageable, and her response (quite negative) was one of the clues that it wasn't the effort of cleaning up that was the issue, and therefore all the help in the world wouldn't make much of an impact. She doesn't like the space left behind after you clean, and feels the need to fill it up with whatever she can find.
Eventually, I had to just accept that this is how she was, and if I wanted to keep her as a friend I had to stop trying to change how she kept her house; if forced to choose between empty space in her house and keeping me as a friend, there was no way she was going to tolerate empty space in her house. Every bit must be filled. (sigh)
And yet, outside of her house, she's great. For example, she loves helping us clean our house.
> I wanted to keep her as a friend I had to stop trying to change how she kept her house
This is a hard lesson for those of us who like to fix things: you basically can't change the behavior of adults, without a huge amount of work and/or their active cooperation.
If folk would stop hoarding browser tabs too; the internet would be a tidier place.
If there’s one thing I learned watching those Hoarder reality tv shows it’s that you can clean up after them all you want but that’s just a bandaid.
I once had a patient in a nursing home who was a hoarder and she would hoard pinecones from outside the facility in her room. Garbage bags upon garbage bags of pinecones. When she would go to dialysis the staff would clean out her room and toss the pinecones. So she started begging the EMTs to bring the garbage bags of pinecones with her to dialysis so they wouldn't get thrown out.
The recovery rate for hoarding is under 5%, it's generally treated by SSRIs and CBT. Recently there is potential that GLP1s may have benefits for hoarding and other addictions.
For people like your patient, is it useful to try to give them any sort of physical agency, control, or tasks?
One of my most guilty indulgences is the various TV programs about hoarders and hoarding. They are of course sensationalized all to shit and they basically provoke mental breakdowns out of their subjects to make good TV. The guilt isn't just that it's bad like all reality TV- you can tell these people, a lot of them anyway, have serious mental difficulties that a TV show showing up with 4 1-800-GOT-JUNK trucks and parking them out front of their homes before pulling all their shit out for neighbors to see and then yelling at them for being distressed about it isn't addressing. They offer "therapy" as part of it, after they've traumatized the fuck out of someone already struggling. Woo.
But I watch. I have a mother who's started down the path. Maybe I'm like... training myself for what's probably due in about 15 years. Or maybe I'm just making excuses for indulging in trash TV.
The article is definitely correct: these people need help. They also usually need money. They usually need a lot of both. A lot of those shows take place in dilapidated parts of the world where you can tell, obviously, that the hoarding is certainly an issue but an even more pressing one is poverty. People keep everything when they're broke, far long past the point of reason, because they've found themselves needing... who knows, a tooth brush, a can of food, and had it kept from them by money so many times that they psychologically can't bear to throw one out, ever. Even if it's rotted away.
And what's worse: because throughout any attempt at helping them, anyone, is then a threat. They become animated, angry, and any action that can actually help them is like playing Russian roulette with 5 bullets in a 6-shooter. They'll tell you with a straight, red face that yes they fucking need the mayo that's been in the diner packets for 10 years because it's still fine and usable. It's hard to feel sympathy for people so insufferable, and it's not even just you, the helper. They're often estranged from family and have no friends because their behaviors strain every relationship beyond repair.
It's... tragic, in every sense of the word.
FWIW, I also watch a lot of YouTubers who do this in a way that isn't evil. But also the content is less engaging because, well, reality TV wouldn't poke people the way it does into acting the way they do if it didn't make fucking good content. But yeah, I feel notably less disgusting consuming that at least.
My mother went down this road (she, fortunately, had enough resources that it wasn't a catastrophe), but last year was forced to downsize due to a medical condition. I filled 2 20-yard dumpsters with the trash, donated another truckload, and put the rest (anything she might actually value) in storage. Since then, I've been going through that remainder with her and I think she's finally coming around to the absurdity of her situation. It turns out she isn't actually attached to her parents' monogrammed (but moth-eaten) linens, or the contents of her grandmother's sewing box.
It's not for everyone, but I found I was keeping a lot of things "for the memories". I started taking pictures of the thing then getting rid of it. Serves similar purpose and easier to let it go.
Also scrapbooking. I've really gotten into that lately as I struggle to get rid of like, strange things. Parking passes and tickets for concerts, receipts from dinners on trips, that sort of thing.
Scrap booking is wonderful for such things. And when I need a boost, I pop it open and get a rush of memories from all the lovely things I've gotten to do.
In my strictly non-professional opinion, as a watcher of this stuff: the hoarders stuff almost always replaces something. Maybe it's a person who is gone, or was driven away. Maybe it's a purpose they only had before they retired. Maybe it's an event that drove them to crazy places to get by, and even though it's past, it's scars remain. Maybe it's merely the abstract concept of control, and agency; this one crops up a lot with the older female subjects of the shows, who's abusive husbands controlled them their entire lives, almost with regularity exhibiting all the classic signs of Battered Woman Syndrome.
It's hard for me to disentangle this with the inhumane way modern life lets people live.
I’m on standby as my generation, the Millennial cohort, becomes the true “sandwich generation” in the US. Elder care is such a disaster and farce here. There’s a high profile senior citizen who has no business in leadership but apparently the system likes it this way. There’s going to be a mass passing of Boomers and how it looks - probably a lot like this but without public healthcare so even more traumatic - in the US does not seem manageable.
In the US we don’t even test drivers over age 70 for competence because taking away their licenses means we’d have to look out for them or provide alternatives and that’s not happening so here we are.
>In the US we don’t even test drivers over age 70 for competence
We don't test non-commercial drivers at any age after initial issuance of the license, which is apparent after a few minutes of observation while walking around.
That isn't true. If you move states they will test you again if you don't come from a state they like the testing for. This is just a written test though, there is nothing about do you apply the book knowledge to your real world driving.
Most people never make such a move, but it still happens. (this is an exception that proves the rule)