Is hoarding a disease?

[poorgradstudent]

[quote=FlyerInHi][quote=poorgradstudent]
Neat freaks are nice to visit but extremely difficult to live with. I think for a marriage it’s good to have similar preferred degrees of messiness.

There’s a fairly wide range of what I’d call “normal”.[/quote]

Do you mean nice to visit because their houses are fresh and clean? Or that you only want to visit a short time?

I think I’m difficult to live with.[/quote]

Because their houses are fresh and clean! Although we’re the kind of people that run around hiding the mess we normally live in whenever we have people coming over. Sure, there’s two rooms that have closed doors and are off-limits, but at least the kitchen and living rooms look good!

[carlsbadworker]

We all hoard something if you compare the amount of usage that we had. For example, do you buy movie but how many times do you watch? Do you buy a car but how many hours a day does it sit idle? Human nature is greedy and competitive, and that’s why you see kids in kindergarten fighting for the toys all the time. It goes back to the fundamental economy theory which is based on scarce resource which will never be solved. (We don’t hoard resources that are not scarce, for example, no one is hoarding air at home).
The trick is to contain your greed to a degree that you don’t constantly piss off other people. Otherwise, they will treat you like you have a disease and force you to go through the useless therapy.

[FlyerInHi]

Interesting theory.

I have not bought at DVD since the early days of Netflix. They just accumulate dust. I once helped a friend move and I convinced him to give away his whole extensive DVD collection to the library. Formats change, so it’s useless to collect what you won’t watch again. He knew that, and it hurt to give up something.

It’s better to borrow books from the library. In fact, they be a national consortium of libraries to allow citizens to borrow books. They could close down some brick-and-mortar to pay for the cost of mail order, and still save money.

I used to accumulate things, but for the last 10 years, I’ve become very minimalistic. It’s like personal character training, I believe — therapy on your own, without the therapist.

[poorgradstudent]

[quote=carlsbadworker]We all hoard something if you compare the amount of usage that we had. For example, do you buy movie but how many times do you watch? Do you buy a car but how many hours a day does it sit idle? Human nature is greedy and competitive, and that’s why you see kids in kindergarten fighting for the toys all the time. It goes back to the fundamental economy theory which is based on scarce resource which will never be solved. (We don’t hoard resources that are not scarce, for example, no one is hoarding air at home).
The trick is to contain your greed to a degree that you don’t constantly piss off other people. Otherwise, they will treat you like you have a disease and force you to go through the useless therapy.[/quote]

Usually people draw a line between collecting and hoarding. We might thing the 30 year old man with a room entirely devoted to mint condition, perfectly displayed Star Wars figures is a little odd, but even obsessive collecting usually isn’t called hoarding, partially because what they collect usually does have value to outsiders.

[scaredyclassic]

Fear of hunger.

Maybe that’s what drives all our neuroses..

[Author]

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