I think hoarding might be more like over eating. Even Buddhist monks have robes and bowls.
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I think hoarding might be more like over eating. Even Buddhist monks have robes and bowls.
CL that is interesting you made a conmectin between the hoard and your free time.
Thats what horrifies me about hoards, the sheer amount of time it takes to deal with them. Moving them around, thinking abot them, sorting through them and agonizng over stuff in them. I Would never help someone clean out a hoard, I just do not have the patience for it.
I dont like clutter, its true, but mainly I dont like the investment of my time in messing with it. I think that activity is a waste of life energy, like Joe Dominquez urges us to assess.
The thing is - the hoard as it is now, takes up very little of my time. Shrinking it and keeping it from growing by throwing things out, recycling, donating, giving away, and putting things in their places, takes a lot of time. Cleaning around it is slower than cleaning without it, but the added cleaning time is less than the dehoarding time on a week by week basis. Perhaps there will be a tipping point for that (when the only dehoarding left is throwing away, recycling, and putting away of things used daily?).
it's like laundry - it is faster and less effort to simply wash all of your clothes in one load each week and then live out of the laundry basket than it is to sort them, launder them appropriately, and put them away neatly. But it isn't very civilized and you often look rumpled or stained. My son did this for 4 years - he had a laundry sorter with a "clean" bag and a "dirty" bag.
I just prefer to be realistic and not mislead people with false hope.
Think about this, people who lose weight -- I mean a lot, like 50 lbs. or more -- the vast majority of them gain it all back or more. Only about 3% of these folks keep the weight off for 5+ years.
So tell me that a 97% failure rate is a reason to be hopeful.
Right now, since hoarding is comparatively new, I think it is important to note that we don't have all the data about recovery rates.
But what we do know is that complete recovery for hoarders is very, very rare.
This may change as new treatments arise. But there are lots of treatments for weight loss, but still only about 3% of folks keep the weight off.
Again, I think we need to consider what "recovery" means.
We also need to think about partial recovery and harm reduction.
So I don't want to give someone false hope. It is not that I am being negative.
I wonder if this is a murkier assessment that one might think.
By this I mean, one has to work to earn money to buy the stuff that goes into a hoard. You don't work for money, but your husband does. So maybe you spend his life energy by hoarding.
Building an add-on to the house costs much time and money. But perhaps if you just had less stuff, you'd have more of that space to use and then not need the add-on.
Maybe you would not need to own so much land (that your husband had to work to pay for) if you had less animals and the same goes for that barn full of stuff.
I think acquiring, keeping, storing, cleaning, churning, organizing, ruminating over, etc. the hoard might be costing you more time, more brain power, and more life energy and resources than you'd assume.
It is a common "critique" of minimalists to say something like:
"All you do is think about your stuff all the time and how you can have the absolute minimal amount of it!"
Then this often smug type of person says:
"I have lots and lots of stuff, but I don't think about it. It doesn't take up much of my time at all. I don't focus on it."
But I think if you took a group of 100 minimalists and 100 hoarders and did a time usage audit on them you'd find that the minimalists spend very little time dealing with their stuff (which is why we become minimalists in the first place!) whereas stuff is what a hoarder's life is all about and they'd be spending massive amounts of time dealing with the hoard.
Oh, I'm spending massive amounts of time dealing with the hoard. Today the mail came, and I handed it out to the correct people. Then I opened my mail and saved 5 coupons for things we use (which took less than 5 minutes, so even when you add on the extra time to use each coupon, I'll be 'making' above minimum wage on the groceries, and the paint one is huge - this is one of the places where my time becomes "income" for us.)
then, and this is where the hoard part comes in, I spent two hours churning through all the papers finding every single coupon and putting the expired ones in the recycling and the good ones in a folder( and recycling some other stuff). So there - the dehoarding - is where it takes time. Otherwise it takes seconds to toss the unopened coupons into the hoard, seconds to grab the flier before I leave for the store, if I can still see it, and seconds to push the box back and forth with my foot when I sweep. Or I don't take the coupons - lost savings opportunity, no time investment.
And honestly, there would be the LEAST time investment if my kid just tossed the whole box of papers after I die. If I left behind 30 boxes of papers, it would still be Least time per paper, it's just that it would be all in a row and not my time.
(optimum time use - put recycling bin next yo mailbox and toss all mail in directly. Do not look at mail.)
if you vacuum every day, your house is cleaner than if you vacuum once a week - but the vacuuming isn't 7x faster if the carpet only has 1/7 of the dirt.
at one point, btw, I had more than 30 boxes of random paper. Now I have 1. In between getting "paid" for time spent handling paper and spending virtually no time handling paper, there is a lot of "wasted" time. But it is the same sort of wasted time as swimming laps is pool to lose weight. Yes, clearly it would be better to eat less. Assuming that works with the swimmer's metabolism. Which it may not.
also, most of the stuff in the hoard was "free" or super cheap. The feeling that I was not contributing financially and didn't WANT to be spending money unnecessarily was part of what contributed to me collecting giant piles of stuff the kids or I might need. I still have two shoeboxes of pencils that are slowly being used to refill the supply in my classroom as kids walk off with them. I have never bought a pencil. If you spend $7 on a big bag of clothes at a thrift sale (which is a fun activity, so no more life cost there than fishing) and your kid wears three things that would have cost $5 or more when they were needed, you have just cut clothing expenses in half!
btw, I do work for money now. Far fewer hours for the same poverty level total I made when I supported dh financially for the first 4.5 years we were married. - my investment in his degree seems to have paid off a lot better than your investment in yours.
and please read the original elephant thread and reach an understanding of the reasons for the addition before commenting on them. You don't have to agree with them, they just have nothing to do with the quantity of stuff in the house. If the house were literally empty, the rooms would still be too small and badly located.
i need the land to keep the people far away. The animals turn mowing (dh time) into barn chores (my time)
if if you did a time audit of hoarders and minimalists, you would see that we both spend way to much time on this website, but no one is under the impression that they are paying me to do something else.
Are you unhappy about spending massive amounts of time trying to dehoard and/or churning?
I'd just not use coupons and toss them all.
It seems like you feel as though your are dehoarding for everyone else, but not really for you. How true is this?
Not bad!
Not sure what you are getting at.
Confused here, but congrats on fewer boxes!
How often to you buy stuff?
Probably! My degrees are almost worthless! lol
I might...
I dunno about this...
Most of the time I am on here I am at work. I am not on here on the weekends!
UL: so in looking at studies on weight loss it states that the common folk lore since the 1950's is that only 5% of people keep the weight off for a year. Of course just like people that abuse alcohol people that overeat tend to lose weight themselves and don't use a formal program so stats are hard to get. Some studies have sent out surveys to people to ask about this and what they discovered is that many more people not in official studies have maintained weight loss, etc. Unfortunately you are a pessimistic doom and gloom person, people are their addictions, they never change, etc. Spending my life working with people professionally has taught me that this is absolutely not true for the majority. It is certainly true for some people. I have seen people overcome horrific things and not be bitter. You tell people that their is no hope-which is not true. My hope is that people in need of help seek out strong, positive people, professional help if they need it or use their inner motivation/strength to help themselves. Over and over again I have seen people be successful at beating all types of addictions and leading rewarding lives. Other people choose to be victims, hate their jobs, etc. that is their choice.