Help - I'm a hoarder!
What I have realised over the last few years and had to admit to myself 鈥 as alcoholics do 鈥 is that I am a hoarder.
I thought I was unique until I saw people on T.V. with the same problem.
I have hoarded everything from screws, pieces of wood, strips of metal 鈥 all of which would come in handy one day.
The outhouse and attic are full of tools some still in their boxes and never seen the light of day.
Clothes. I have a jacket I bought when my daughter was eight, she is now 52, and I still have it. It fits me but I don鈥檛 wear it and won鈥檛 dump it. The same applies to suits, shirts and ties.
Paper cuttings, any scribbled messages my kids and grandkids wrote. Anything with sentimental value has gone into boxes.
I recycled Christmas and Birthday cards from friends, but hoarded those from family. However I cracked that problem by burning them in a big tin and scattering the ashes on family graves (Crazy or what?)
I have always been a sucker for gimmicks and gadgets. The house is full of them. I could open my own pound shop.
My late departed wife used to warn me, 鈥淚f anything happens to us two, the kids will have to clear all this rubbish.鈥 I now sadly have to heed this warning.
I have started packing bits and pieces into cardboard cartons to sort out later. It now looks like I鈥檓 hoarding cardboard boxes.
One of my daughters seems to have the answer. Hire a skip and dump the lot.
However this is where personality enters into it. I was in her house one day as she was ironing. The iron stopped working, she unplugged it and threw it in the bin. I retrieved it, took it home, but it was knackered. However had it been just a blown fuse she would still have binned it. I still have the iron.
I think there is a personality trait involved. The more sentimental the person, the more likely they are to be a hoarder.
I think I will take a weeks holiday and give my daughter 鈥榗arte blanche鈥 to clear the lot while I鈥檓 away. I will however just take a few boxes of my favourite bits and pieces and hide them away.
I wonder what hoarders of the future will be like? Will sentimentality still be around?
Photographs, records, books, letters, all written material can be copied and stored on discs, iPods and other means from the digital revolution. But will it be the same as actually holding, listening to, or seeing the original.
I think the digital era will relate mainly to storing (hoarding) the spoken word and moving images.
Most items made today will not retain the fascination of the previous millennium.
Well, anybody in the market for a home welder which I bought 15 years ago and never used because I can鈥檛 weld? Please get in touch鈥
Happy hoarding.
hello John,
I'm afraid I'm not in the market for the home welder (tempting offer though it is!) but am writing instead to say how thought provoking your posting is.
I wonder if you did go on holiday for a while what you'd miss whilst away (things? people?) and whether you'd notice what was gone when you came back. I suppose I'm really wondering how much your hoarding depends on the urge to collect and then put the item aside or whether you have your archive indexed in your mind and refer to it from time to time.
Not to make light of this tendency but if you were an artist this would be fairly normal behaviour - collecting objects, references and memories for future possible use, just in case...normal is after all a relative concept and you are extradordinary in all of the best possible ways.
On a more prosaic note, my practical but extreme solution to hoarding is move house several times - it's amazing what you miss/can live without and what you truly value once you've faced with carrying it up many flights of stairs!
Your point about the digital age is very interesting too - there's an increasing tendency to hoard data (as you observe) but not necessarily care for it, archive it or guard against technological obsolesence. I've read (if only I could remember where) that future generations will have more detailed archives from the Victorian era than ours, but that's also the issue of how history is shaped in the present, as well as individual memories.
keep bloging John & stay away from the pound shops!
M x
John
do you see a difference between hoarding and 'storing'?
The keeping of 'digital material' is storing for personal need/use - surely you are referring to 'hoarding' items that perhaps other people could in fact use??
'less is more' - thoreau
One of the tenents amongst the major religious orders and the devotees in particular in the form of nuns, monks etc is their training in non-hoarding.
It would seem to be a spiritual principle - isn't there a passage in the bible that talks about not hoarding things on earth but collecting heavenly goods?
Try moving to a one bedroom flat for a while, a friend of mine did it recently and found it invigorating - he called it the need to 'par' down.
Having all your varied collections of memorabilia etc around you is rather like the comfort a blanket can give you in the dark cold nights, but you can get too attached to the blanket and need it daily too!
Hello Marie-Anne
Thanks for the input. R.E. Holiday, I would miss people but not things and would not know what was gone. I often go rooting for an item and find another I never knew I had.
R.E. Artist, Maybe Tracey Emin could make something of it.
I could not keep moving house, that is not me I am a stickler and don't like change.
The digital hoarder will be a different animal. Technology will enable all the world's knowledge to be kept in a suitcase, which is a different kind of hoarding.
Alan, I think there is a difference in storing/hoarding. You store something for five years, after that it becomes hoarding. Personal data is not the same if not used after a certain time, you are hoarding.
Jason, 'Less is more'. Spot on.
Fitz, thanks. I see the point about the spiritual principle. If I knew somebody who would benefit by taking my hoarded items I would ship them to them immediately.
I have today received a package from Marie Curie Cancer Care and will be filling a few bags later on.
Disposal that way will give me a feeling of contentment.
Take care all
John
Artist Michael Landy destroyed all his possessions in the well-publicised art event in 2001.
This work questions our identity with personal possessions.
There's a fascinating discussion on about artists/researchers who capture their lives digitally and the thinking that has been done in this area.
Just one of several thoughts from that blog to pick up here: is one practical compromise for John's desire to hoard to capture a searchable description of all the artefacts of his life? With that John could reconstruct memories or even order music he once owned on vinyl.
A database of your life doesn't take up so much room in the attic.
From dontmindme
'A database of your life doesn't take up so much room in the attic.'
Ah...but does an object and related 'memory' have the same power if you can't hold it in your hands?
Or touch it in the knowledge that someone from your past once held it also?
I still have a wallet which belonged to my dad. It's an old scruffy thing, a bit smelly now, with age & time.
But if I hold it really close to my nose and sniff at the corners and underneath the cracked leather stitching, I can 'see' him open it and take out a two bob bit for me.
The subsequent grateful hug is conjured and a whole heap of smells, sounds & feelings come flooding back to me. Emotional memory.
Will technology be a threat to those abilities?
I never fail to be moved when I look at an ancient manuscript or drawing.
Even if it's in a language I can't understand.
I imagine the writer/artist bent over, in fading light, making a mark.
Do we have a 'need' to hoard beyond the actual inability to just chuck stuff out?
Esther Wilson wrote:
"but does an object and related 'memory' have the same power if you can't hold [the object] in your hands?"
Your written description of the effects on you of holding your father's old wallet is pretty evocative for me; when you read it back does it not invoke for you the identical experience that you describe?
Would that convince you that you have no emotional need to hold on to the wallet itself?
Suppose we were talking about an object that is equally personal but much bigger, and dilapidated so no longer of practical use. Let's say, a writing desk. Then presumably there is some motivation to be shot of it for convenience's sake. That would be easier to part with, wouldn't it?
What really is the value of objects to us compared to our feelings invoked by the memory of them?
Would life be just as good or even better if we could tap into our precious emotional memories in a clever and effective way by judicious use of technology instead of through inconvenient hoarding of clutter?
Aha! I see a new word rushing straight towards us. It looks like: technosentimentology.
'Aha! I see a new word rushing straight towards us. It looks like: technosentimentology.'
Fantastic! Can't wait for the derivatives....
anti-technosentimentism?
technosentimentalist?
pseudo-technosentimentology(isation)?
Joking aside-
'Would life be just as good or even better if we
could tap into our precious emotional memories
in a clever and effective way by judicious use of
technology instead of through inconvenient
hoarding of clutter?'
I'm reminded of Edward G. Robinson in the
film 'Soylent Green'
' In the year 2022, the starving masses depend
upon the government manufactured food item
Soylent Green to exist. But in the midst of a
murder investigation, a cop uncovers the chilling
source of the product...'
when a post-war/catastrophic existance gets too
much for him he goes to a government run
euthenasia clinic (the film was made in the
early/mid 70's) and dies while
watching videos of 'the way we used to live'.
No big dramas....just green grass, rolling tides &
cattle grazing. It was intended (in the film, like)
to show the utter ecstasy of a man's final
connection,in the year 2020, to something
earthly. Or 'tangible'.
The moment in that film really struck me (I was
too young for sentimentalism, then) as being
entirely sad. Ok. Edward G. Robinson did a very
passable 'I'm an old bloke, dying' type of a
turn. But there did seem to be something in it
for me....is it that the more sophisticated we
become in technically recreating the 'best'
reality....the
more we yearn for the flaws of our actuality?
Maybe a good way of parting with treasured items no matter how trivial would be to photograph them before disposal.
An attic full of sentiment could be stored on a few discs and kept for future generations to use.
You could then spend hours watching your old treasures and wallowing sentimentality, regretting that you ever parted with them, R.E. Esther.