I choose to do a Spring cleaning of my apartment recently, which included pulling all of my art supplies out of the closets, and I realized, with a great deal of embarrassment, that I am a hoarder!
Now, I have always held myself above the friends and family that I considered hoarders, some of whom would describe themselves as “collectors.” Hoarding is, after all, a continuum with a range of states: the friend who never throws out a piece of paper in forty years, leaving barely a pathway to navigate her apartment; the neighbor who spends hundreds of dollars on two storage units to keep gifts, furniture from dead family members, and boxes of items that might come handy some day; and the fashionable young woman with fifty pairs of shoes, dozens of bras, and hundreds of panties. But cleaning my house has brought home to me that I, who have dozens of unused sketchbooks, boxes of colored pencils, uncounted frames, brushes large and small, etc., am also a hoarder!
Hoarding is considered a subset of OCD; it springs from the same basic desire to mitigate anxiety. Certainly in this time of heightened anxiety and runaway hyper-capitalism, it is the go-to neurosis!
It also, I think, feeds a need to participate in the abundance and wealth that is advertised constantly in the culture. Most people also do this by taking photos of everything: the food they eat, the places they visit, the friends with whom they socialize and even themselves. It allows them to present publicly as participating in the general affluence. This illusionary habit has little ramifications in their real world (though it may have psychological implications) unlike the very real compulsion to accumulate stuff, which does actually use up both energy and money in the physical world and is a more private vice.
So what are you hoarding? And how do you and I cure this neurosis? I think this problem has a three sided solution.
The first and most important strategy is to stop shopping except for necessities. Shopping is best described as the action of acquiring stuff, and that runs the gambit from high end full price status purchases through discount stores down to thrift shops ending in bartering and being the recipient of gifts and hand-me downs. For ordinary working folks, the trap is in discount stores where each purchase can be justified as a great bargain (shopping as a competitive game), or in thrift stores where originally expensive items can be found for pennies on the dollar. There is even trouble waiting for the devoted recycler if he or she rescues useable things from the trash, and then doesn’t find the time or energy to actually use them or to donate them or to somehow get them out of the house!
So the second vital action to take is to downsize. Now there are various ways to do this from purging (Marie Kondo is the most popular exponent of this method) to the gentler system that I have been using for the past couple of years: every time I buy or get a new (to my wardrobe) piece of clothing, two pieces must go out of my closet! This guarantees a much reduced set of outfits within a set time period. If you do decide to purge, I urge you not to simply haul everything to the curb to be picked up by the trashman. This not only makes garbage of many perfectly good items that other people in more straitened circumstances could use, but it also presents unbearable temptations to those of us of the dumpster diving persuasion!!
The final part of this three part program is the most difficult because it goes against a very deep-set social conditioning in this commodified culture. We are habituated to being dissatisfied, so that even long wished for objects lose their appeal in an amazingly short period of time as we go off on another quest to acquire another object that has been advertised as an absolute necessity. The best antidote to this is the daily practice of gratitude. This is part of Marie Kondo’s system: holding the item in one’s hand and thinking about how it has been instrumental in making one’s life better, and feeling gratitude for it, and then, if necessary, getting rid of it!
Better Choices 