[HN Gopher] Hoardiculture
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Hoardiculture
Author : Caiero
Score : 27 points
Date : 2022-09-17 00:33 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lrb.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lrb.co.uk)
| zafka wrote:
| Caiero, I love your about statment. I was disapointed that you
| have no listed comments yet. A quite interesting list of
| submissions though! As a side note, it would be nice if folks put
| contact info in their about section. I think it would allow for
| some fortuitous connections to be made.
| ggm wrote:
| True story. This tendency is strong in my family. I know it
| because I have a bus ticket I kept for nearly 60 years and a vast
| collection of possibly useful empty cardboard boxes, stored in
| other cardboard boxes.
|
| My sister was name called into a UK "your life on the lawn"
| hoarder reality show by friends. By coincidence she did some
| minor tidying and was that day called by the show producers and
| the dialogue went like this: Them: Surprise!
| You've been recommended to us to be on a hoarder TV show.
| Her: Oh great! I've just been dusting the video tape pile
|
| Then Them: Oh, sorry, if you can still clean, you
| aren't amusing for us. Bye.
|
| Obviously at the extreme end, It's life threatening and has major
| issues for everyone involved. More casual semi obsessive "I
| cannot easily throw things away" is rife.
| sshine wrote:
| > I have a bus ticket I kept for nearly 60 years
|
| I keep every drawing a kid ever made, and every single note
| someone ever wrote to me.
|
| Even ones where someone just wanted to tell me they were
| leaving while I was on a call.
| zafka wrote:
| I feel that with very little effort I could get on one of those
| shows. Recently I have been holding off the entropy a little-
| even throwing a few things away, but hey, someday I might be
| able to use those 1970 transistors from the old equipment in
| the back room.....
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have a _whole bunch_ of "just in case" cables. These are things
| like old S-video, and FireWire 400 cables.
|
| It actually causes me psychic pain, to consider throwing them
| away.
|
| I have compromised, by throwing away "all but one."
|
| At least, I was able to toss all my SCSI cables...
| Moru wrote:
| Last year I actually had use for that s-video cable I was
| saving just in case. That makes it soo much harder to throw
| anything away.
| WalterBright wrote:
| A storage unit costs around $300/month. Storage units are full of
| stuff that in aggregate is not worth $300.
| troyvit wrote:
| We treat thrift stores as our "off-site storage unit" and the
| amazing thing is it's a distributed storage site. When we don't
| use a thing we drop it off at the nearest thrift store. If we
| need it back we just hit the thrift stores around town until we
| find something close to what we were looking for and for a
| nominal fee we get it back.
| favourable wrote:
| I have cultivated a habit of throwing away at least one
| possession per day, and this doesn't include generic household
| trash. I mean something that I deemed: 'One day this will come in
| handy' but they rarely do come in handy later on. It's a form of
| 'essentialism' where I trim away the excess and keep a curated
| and perfect set of tools to get things done.
| thfuran wrote:
| Wouldn't it be better to stop acquiring possessions rather than
| generating an endless stream of garbage?
| culi wrote:
| I have a ton of these things, but the issue is most of them
| were rescued from the trash in the first place. I have 3
| monitors, about a dozen pairs of really expensive shoes, lots
| of workout equipment, kitchen appliances that I've never
| used, and way too much furniture
|
| Every time a friend moves somewhere and they go to IKEA I
| cringe a little. Go to any nearby university during move out
| season and they'll have giant trailers full of barely-used
| furniture and appliances. Unfortunately, manufacturing new
| things is just more profitable and the second-hand market
| goes against the core principles of our economic system of
| production
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Not really, no. The average thing you keep around because "it
| might be useful someday" usually once really was useful! As
| it passes out of usefulness, if you don't have something
| coming in to replace it, you're down one useful thing.
| Wistar wrote:
| Better yet to stop endless streams of garbage at the point of
| their generation, no?
| thfuran wrote:
| I'm not sure exactly what you're suggesting.
| sshine wrote:
| I don't understand why people have such a problem with hoarding.
|
| Clearly it is not a question of "too much stuff" but of "too
| little space".
|
| If you have enough space, and you have a good enough category
| system to find your things, who cares what the likeliness of
| needing something again is?
|
| I understand that the problem is that people live within limited
| space, such as apartments, and those apartments get stuffed very
| quickly. And life in such an apartment gets very crammed and
| dusty.
|
| And that isn't really a problem, even. The problem of hoarding
| too much stuff in a small living space is that you have to share
| that space with your family, and your family does not appreciate
| the things you hoard as much as you do. So their quality of life
| goes down at the cost of your quality of life going up.
|
| It seems to me that hoarding as a "disorder" is not sharing your
| limited space reasonably.
| schlowmo wrote:
| Maybe I'm just rationalising my own hoarding tendency but I think
| society needs some hoarders to enable others to live there Kondo
| lifestyle.
|
| Sometimes friends who know my habit try (often successfully) to
| offload their stuff to me. Just to ask me years later if I happen
| to own exactly the item they offloaded because they need it.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Does keeping friends' items around bring you joy?
| mod wrote:
| Oh my God, my uncle has been doing this to me and I only just
| realized it because of your comment!
|
| At least it's useful stuff, though.
| culi wrote:
| There's lots of Library of Things projects around the country,
| but they're usually informal mutual aid type events. I think
| something much better organized and funded (maybe even some
| nice software to go along with it) could make a huge difference
| in our waste crisis
|
| Also, we should be charging people for their trash. Both
| companies and consumers imo. It's kinda ridiculous to offload
| so much waste as an economic externality. I live near a
| university and every year I get to watch a new set of students
| move into the student housing. Towards the start of the school
| year the dumpsters are filled with Ikea and Amazon boxes form
| all the new furniture. At move out time they have to bring
| these absolutely massive metal containers (like 3x the size of
| a shipping container) for the students to through out all their
| furniture (most of which has been used for less than a year).
| It's particularly bad with this university since a fifth are
| international students.
|
| 80% of the furniture in my house was "rescued". We used to
| hoard it and sell it on Craiglist and the like. We once sold a
| $200 marble table we got for free. Also have two pairs of
| working air pods and a bunch of $100+ shoes (including some
| Jordans and a pair of Yeezys) that we just haven't gotten
| around to selling yet. We also have a bench press and weights,
| 2 working grills, and too many office chairs. All this and we
| still save every glass jar and use them as our cups.
|
| Unfortunately, my housemates are not big fans of the mismatched
| furniture look, but I find it quite charming :(
|
| It's wild how much waste could be averted if all that furniture
| was simply stored on a plot of land over the summer until the
| next wave of students came in and then we let them pick through
| it. We used to pick up everything we could sell, but it just
| became too much of an effort because of the sheer volume of
| furniture
| fortran77 wrote:
| We do pay for trash here, explictly. It's not "free", but I
| think every houshold is mandated to pay for some level of
| trash service as a form of a tax. You can pay more for larger
| bins, etc.
|
| If we charged too much, it would encourage hoarding, wouldn't
| it?
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| If trash was expensive and cover the true externalities, we
| might more long-lasting products that are easy to
| disassemble, repair and recycle.
|
| Maybe it's the general crappiness, the planned obsolescence
| in everything that makes us hold on to all sorts of "spare
| parts". Back in the day when producing items was hard, a
| wardrobe would be handed down through multiple generations.
| Hoarding wasn't feasible but also not necessary.
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