America's Hoarding Psychosis

Zach Wendling has a fantastic post about Clean Sweep, a Learning Channel show where people with "pack rat-itis" clean out their junk. Toward the end, Wendling writes:

This is reminiscent of some sort of psychological trick, like over-eating. Conventional wisdom tells us our bodies are hardwired to store up calories for when times are lean. Are we also programmed to hoard? I doubt it, or else our cathartic purges wouldn't feel so good. Andrew Postman wrote in Real Simple Magazine two years ago about clearing out his Brooklyn brownstone's basement. He concludes, "When you're accumulating, you can't imagine throwing stuff out; when you're throwing stuff out, you can't imagine how you accumulated."

I admit, my family has this problem, but for different items for different people.

My daughters have a toy problem. Well actually, my wife and I have a toy problem in that we have too many in the house--way, way too many. We need to pare down the toys in the house, build some better storage (I like to build things--it is cheaper than buying, I can customize and carpentry keeps me off the streets). Now, of course, my wife and I have bought the bulk of the girls' toys, but Christmas at my house is an obscene orgy of toys and games for the girls, courtesy of my mother in law, for whom our girls are her only grandchildren. My parents (thankfully) are much more pragmatic--buying clothese for girls who are sprouting like weeds. That is not to say my parents don't buy toys, they do, just not as much.

My problem is two fold--books and music. I love to read and tend to buy books as well as check them out of the library. The problem is, of course, that once bought, my books rarely leave our house. Now, I have bought and built bookshelves, which now overflow with the many tomes I have purchased in some 25+ years of book buying (I bought books with my soccer refereeing money--I was a total geek!!). I have promised my wife that I will go through the roughtly 15 boxes of books we have in storage and donate them to the local library. But that is a promise I made some three years ago when we moved to our current home and well it hasn't happened.

When it comes to music, I am, I suppose, something of a 20th Century Luddite--I like CDs. I rarely download music and much prefer to buy an entire CD. I know that I could download an full CD for about the same price as a physical disk, but there is something about having a disk to touch that makes me happy. My disk collection is not nearly as large as my book collection and much smaller thanks to a theft of a house during college. During my Navy years, I would buy between two and four CD's every pay period. I had accumulated nearly 300 CDs during a four year enlistment and all of them were stolen when I was in college, a heart breaking loss not completely covered by a renter's insurance policy.

My wife's problem is clothes. Now I know that sounds sexist, but she will readily admit that she finds it difficult to part with clothing, even though I argue that our giving away of clothes is the most immediate charitable contribution we give. In the past three years, I have convince her to give away hundreds of articles of clothing and we still don't have room for her apparel. Our closet is stuffed, her dresser is exploding and she has now commandeered a drawer in my dresser. To be frank, this could very well be genetic since her mother at one point occupied ever closet in her not small house--this was after my father in law passed away. But one very large tax bill later, my mother in law discovered the benefit of charitable giving and gone was her oversized wardrobe.

My family is not atypical of our friends. We all have far too much "stuff" for our homes. My wife and I have a storage crises, but we are pretty much average among our friends. We have parted with clothing, I much more easily than my wife, and some household goods. But the above items continue to plague us.

The funny thing is that we know about our problem, even laugh at the victims on Clean Sweep, but tell ourselves we are not nearly as bad. But in reality, we are. It is just that we have deluded ourselves in to believing that because we are better with storage that we are not nearly as possession driven as we really are.

Are we the exception to the rule or the rule itself? Does America suffer this hoarding psychosis? I tend to think yes.