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Hoarding thoughts
Sep. 29th, 2010 05:19 pmSeveral of my friends have been talking/posting about Hoarding recently. I'm somewhat of a case myself, though I feel I'm improving.
I think it has its roots in my upbringing. My parents were pretty poor when I was born, and there was a definite philosophy of "Don't throw out anything you might conceivably need later." And just often enough we *did* need it later, that it got positively reinforced.
I used to justify having a vast book collection with the concept "What if I get up in the middle of the night and want to read *that* particular book?!?" Decades of experience have yielded lots of occasions of waking up in the middle of the night wanted to read something, but I don't recall any where I had a burning need to read something *specific*. I'm sure I will always have a large quantity and variety of books, but it doesn't need to be as large as it currently is.
Two big (if gradual) changes in my life over the last few years have greatly helped me be able to reduce Stuff:
* The existence of internet commerce has drastically reduced the effort required to find specific things, and also (on average) reduced their price. If there's a book or comic I want, I can probably get it easily. Significantly, if there's a book I want to *replace*, I can do that easily as well. It's much easier to get rid of Stuff when I believe I can easily replace any individual piece of it when needed. And I can afford to do that replacing, because...
* I've come to realize that I'm Not Poor. Sure, there's debt I'm trying to pay down, and I could always use more money -- but it's been years since I passed the point of being able to buy more media faster than I could consume it. The amount of this un-consumed media is frankly embarrassing. Now, when I think about buying new Stuff, I always run it by the mental filter "Will I consume this before anything else that is in the Unread Bookcase?" This kills vast numbers of would-be impulse purchases.
So I'm (slowly and intermittently) reviewing all my Stuff, and deciding what parts of it are not actually useful. I think the net flow has reached negative sign, though the magnitude is still small.
I think it has its roots in my upbringing. My parents were pretty poor when I was born, and there was a definite philosophy of "Don't throw out anything you might conceivably need later." And just often enough we *did* need it later, that it got positively reinforced.
I used to justify having a vast book collection with the concept "What if I get up in the middle of the night and want to read *that* particular book?!?" Decades of experience have yielded lots of occasions of waking up in the middle of the night wanted to read something, but I don't recall any where I had a burning need to read something *specific*. I'm sure I will always have a large quantity and variety of books, but it doesn't need to be as large as it currently is.
Two big (if gradual) changes in my life over the last few years have greatly helped me be able to reduce Stuff:
* The existence of internet commerce has drastically reduced the effort required to find specific things, and also (on average) reduced their price. If there's a book or comic I want, I can probably get it easily. Significantly, if there's a book I want to *replace*, I can do that easily as well. It's much easier to get rid of Stuff when I believe I can easily replace any individual piece of it when needed. And I can afford to do that replacing, because...
* I've come to realize that I'm Not Poor. Sure, there's debt I'm trying to pay down, and I could always use more money -- but it's been years since I passed the point of being able to buy more media faster than I could consume it. The amount of this un-consumed media is frankly embarrassing. Now, when I think about buying new Stuff, I always run it by the mental filter "Will I consume this before anything else that is in the Unread Bookcase?" This kills vast numbers of would-be impulse purchases.
So I'm (slowly and intermittently) reviewing all my Stuff, and deciding what parts of it are not actually useful. I think the net flow has reached negative sign, though the magnitude is still small.