Hoarding - what I have observed and experienced.

This morning I stumbled across and article about hoarding, wrote up a long reply, then didn't feel like posting it there because it was a group I wasn't a part of and my response seemed out of place. I'm posting it here instead:

I grew up in a family that one side did quite a bit of hoarding, the other side was pretty much the opposite. I started out being a bit of a hoarder, but after losing everything I owned twice in a five year period due to different disasters I learned to let it go. I've still got a bit of an issue when it comes to electronics and maybe bicycle parts, but I've learned to get to the core of those as well.

What I've discovered - there's two types of hoarding (that I'm familiar with):

Hoarding - for many people, at least in my personal experience is financial. The less disposable income I have, the more likely I am to hoard something. "I can make use of that!" In my case I have multiple computers over a decade old, and I do still use them, regularly. I always have plans of what I want to do with electronics that may be lying dormant, and sometimes I actually get around to doing it. In every case there's a better way to do it than what I'm doing, but I can't afford to do it the way I want. In fact if I were able to afford to do things the way I wanted there would be less hardware involved overall (due to advances in technology) and I wouldn't have a problem getting rid of my old-stuff-stash. I work with electronics for a living BTW, so these electronics projects are both a hobby for in home use and career relevant development. Truthfully, if I had more money I would have less stuff as counter intuitive as that sounds. I wouldn't need extra stuff laying around and collecting dust because if something broke I could replace it with something newer and better. My bicycle stuff is similar to the electronic stuff for the same reasons, I keep good parts around in case I have replace something when I'm broke even if it's a part I don't think I'll actually need again. I've proven this before during periods when I had more disposable income, I started getting rid of stuff left and right.

Emotional. This one I'm pretty much immune to these days save for select few trinkets my kids have made me. I had a little of it when I was younger, but those disasters wiped out most of that stuff and I make a point of not getting attachments to much of anything else. I actually hate getting gifts overall because I don't want to have stuff that I feel that I have to keep. My family, both the hoarding part I told you about and my wife are emotional hoarders. My mother still guilt trips me about stuff I got rid of in high-school that made no sense for a teenager to keep around from early childhood. I'm 40 now. My wife grows emotional attachments to things. In the kitchen, she broke a pretty bowl and had to leave the pieces on the counter for several days to mourn it before I could throw it out.

I'm am very happy I was able to realize the causes of my hoarding, and was able to overcome them. Yes I still hoard some electronics and bicycle parts, but now I make absolutely certain it's something that can be used in the future, if it's actually useless it goes. This took a conscious effort to get there, and I fear most people are lacking in the rational means to achieve this.

Older generations:
I think the financial/availability issue is what affects older generations. Take my own family for instance - my mother’s side (the one that hoards) migrated to the U.S. between the world-wars. Financially they weren't too bad off, nothing rich, but they were middle class at minimum. During the war years there was a general lack of availability. There's stories in my family about some uncle or another who figured out he could put front tractor tires on his motorcycle because you could buy tractor tires, but not motorcycle tires during the rationing. There's stories grandpa would tell about how they reused all sorts of old junk or another to make something else out of it, a lot of it was genius level and kept them going, both professionally and at home. This kept them from throwing things out. That was Grandpa’s part, Grannies part were poor farmers, but they hoarded what they had for similar reasons. My great grandfather’s junk barn was a treasure trove of antique hardware for those who cared about those things.

The mindset never left. Grandpa had incredible amounts of junk in his older years. I'm grateful that my cousin cleaned it out when the time came. The mindset made sense at one time in history, but didn't as time went on. Couple that with the fact Grandpa had a very slow onset case of dementia, the minimal signs showed up two decades ahead of becoming a real issue, and he was still highly functional even when those signs first appeared, it made for a runaway case.

My dad's side was different. They were of mixed native descent during a time when that wasn't exactly a good thing to be. They were dirt poor during that same era on one side, and only slightly better off on his mom's side. The fact they didn't have a lot, coupled with the fact they didn't stay in one place for a couple of generations like mom's side did meant they were less likely to accumulate overall. Being able to move around more easily benefited his side, and to a point not having the resources to do so did too.

This is my personal experience, and I'm happy I've been able to transition from hoarder to not. Right now I'm focusing on going digital with things. I've gotten rid of most of my books and I'm encouraging my wife to follow suite, I've got a couple of e-book readers. Both of them together take up less room than many of the single books I had before. I've still got tons of digital media on disk, I've put it all on hard drives, but in my desire to stay legal I'm keeping the disks. I've at least broken all of that down into binders. A single binder takes up a very small percentage of the room of the movies/CDs did in their factory cases. I'm seriously thinking about getting rid of my older gaming consoles, but I like my games. I want to go full on emulator but legal reasons have me hesitating. Still, Steam is making a lot of my classics available "cloud wise" and my reasons for hanging onto the old stuff are diminishing with time. I've yet to decide if "digital hoarding" is a real issue or not. I've heard of people who collect digitally just to do so. I don't ever want to be one of those, but the Humble Bundle has made it easy to do.