Hoarding
The FOX Reality Channel has a new A&E show called “Hoarders,” which is a lot like another A&E show, “Intervention,” but without sending anyone off to Camp Fix-Your-Head. I’m truly fascinated by this show. The only thing like it I ever saw before was a single episode of Crime Scene Cleanup where a crew had to straighten up the home of a compulsive hoarder who died alone and wasn’t found for a while. (That show was morbidly fascinating with a capital M.)
“Hoarders” has me thinking a lot about what causes this behavior. If I was a hoarder, I think I would be motivated by one, or a combination, of the following:
laziness — Most of the time, I would rather put things down anywhere than actually put them where they belong, or do with them what needs to be done. Occasionally, I get the motivation to do some cleanup, but it isn’t enough to keep up with the accumulation, so my place gets worse and worse over time.
unrealistic expectations of my future self — I imagine that my near-future self will diligently clean up the mess. I fail to realize that there is no such person. There’s just one me, and if I don’t want to clean it up, then nobody wants to.
failure to grasp mortality — Accepting that I am mortal doesn’t have to mean glumness or discouragement. It can be a source of motivation: I get off my butt and do things because I know my time in which to do those things is ticking away. And, fully grasping the approximate amount of time I have left to live means realizing just how much I don’t have time to do. As a hoarder, I imagine that I have unlimited amounts of time to do so many, many different things with all the stuff I’m accumulating, and I don’t realize that I might have to live for 500 years to do it all. (And even worse: If I continued to hoard for 500 years, I might just have that much more undone things sitting around — not fewer.)
low self-worth — I’m not rich, successful, and accomplished, and I really want to be (who doesn’t?). But look at these things I have! Look at all these things I’m doing (or think I’m doing). Throwing them away would be an ego-damaging admission that it was all a big, fat delusion.
fitness and perfectionism — I might fully realize that I’m not making use of all this hoarded stuff today. But I believe that soon, I’m going to reach a turning point in my life. I’ll get in shape, become active and productive, stop lazing around, etc. At which time I’ll start making use of all these things — and maybe even start throwing away the stuff I don’t need to use after all.
That last one seems particularly relevant to the premiere episode. The hoarder had a row of many-months-past-expiration yogurts right in the very front of the middle shelf of her fridge. This woman wasn’t in shape. She wasn’t even close. And she had lots of other hoarded food around the house, virtually all of it healthy food — meats, canned vegetables, etc. The show exposed her hoarding to the max, but made no mention whatever of what this woman was actually eating on a day-to-day basis. Something tells me it wasn’t yogurt. Why would she buy new yogurts from the store and eat them, while older yogurts sit in the front row of her fridge untouched for months? That wouldn’t be hoarding — that would be some other kind of bizarre behavior I’ve never even heard of. I have to suspect that she’s actually living on fast food, while stocking her place with health food in the belief that she’s going to switch to a healthy lifestyle any day now.
Most people have at least a little bit of a hoarding problem. If you could walk through their house, you’d probably find boxes in the basement full of stuff they never used, or didn’t use much. I have that problem, but I’m not a real hoarder, although I think I might have been one for some parts of my childhood. Just the other day I dumped a box of years-old, punch-flavored, creatine powder into the trash, that’d been sitting unnoticed in the back of the supplements cabinet in my kitchen. Maybe I have a touch of hoarder.
The only really bad, delusional, hoarding problem I have is my e-mail inbox. I seriously need to re-read Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero.
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