Hoarding

The differences and similarities between minimalism and hoarding.

Transcript

Hoarding

Given how little has been written about personal minimalism, one of the best ways of understanding it is in comparison with its better-known opposite, hoarding. The manifestations in the physical world could not be more extremely different, but at least in some ways both tendencies proceed from the same desire: control. The minimalist has concluded that the only way he can maintain even a semblance of control over his environment is by trying to simplify it, diminish it, get rid of all that stuff that might somehow assert its own will and so impede the minimalist’s need to assert his. There’s a tinge of sad desperation about it, as if the minimalist already knows that he’s defeated or that it’s a hopeless cause, and the best he can do is strip things away.

The hoarder is similar in that he has admitted that the world out there is totally beyond his control, and the best and only strategy is to have control over at least his own territory. The interesting question is why the hoarder turns to amassing things rather than getting rid of them. What is it about having lots and lots of things around you that contributes to a feeling of control? Perhaps there’s no denying that the hoarder does create a real, distinctive, separate physical world for himself, and so that very fact confers a feeling of control: it is an odd and messy little world, but it is undeniably a world. However, the hoarder’s pile always threatens to topple if you build it up too much or too high (literally and figuratively).

Documentary filmmaker Kelly Anderson, the director of Never Enough, about three hoarders, has this to say about what the minimalist and the hoarder have in common:

I think in some cases the impulse is the same because I noticed among hoarders some of the issue is not wanting to waste, so there’s a kind of almost ecological impulse, which is that, “No, I can’t throw out this toaster even though it’s broken because some day I might be able to fix it and it still has use value.” And so they’re also trying to resist the sort of throwaway society, but their way of resisting it is to hang onto everything because some day they think they can figure out a way to fix it. So that’s kind of an interesting similarity between the groups you’re writing about [minimalists] and these people.

The other thing that the hoarder and the minimalist have in common, of course, is that in their own ways, their life projects are doomed, or at least exceedingly unlikely to make them truly happy. The hardcore minimalist ends up in a pristine apartment, yes, but at the extreme he may also avoid friends, commitments, even some of life’s pleasures, all of which end up being sacrificed to the minimalism god at some point. The hardcore hoarder can’t stop his addiction to acquiring things which take over almost all the available space in his home as well as crowding out most of his family and friends. Some can’t come to visit because they’re angry that he apparently values things over relationships. Some just can’t stand the mess or the stench. Some are heartbroken over what has become of their formerly relatively sane loved one.

Both the minimalist and the hoarder are hiding. The metaphor is obvious for the hoarder, who is literally barricading himself against possible intrusion. And perhaps it’s just as obvious for the minimalist, too: he is trying his best to clear absolutely everything out of his life, mowing down everything around him in a wide radius. If you imagine that they are both fighting a war, which in a way they both are, then the hoarder is in a bunker to protect himself from the enemy. He doesn’t mind being there, and in fact he kind of enjoys the messy, cluttered privacy of his own world. He doesn’t imagine that anyone is going to get through. The minimalist has a much bigger weapon: it can clear out a whole terrain, reduce everything to nothing, and then he doesn’t have to worry about the enemy any more. That enemy has either been destroyed in the process, or will assume that there is nothing left now and won’t even recognize or see that cowering, frightened minimalist lying there amid nothing.

The hoarders get all the attention, perhaps because they are just an extreme version of most people’s natural tendency to accumulate stuff. People tend to save things, even things without sentimental value, and the things they save include items they have not touched for years and which they are pretty sure they will never touch again. There are no moral judgments made against the hoarder: he is doing what we all do, though  going a little too far. Annabelle Charbit writes:

Hoarders have a name for their suffering, clutter phobes do not. If there are enough out there, then we need to get together and raise serious aware-ness about this type of torment. Perhaps it is far less interesting or scandalous than hoarding, but it is tor-ture, as only an OCD patient can know.

In their book Life at Home in the Twenty-first Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors, authors Jeanne E. Arnold, Anthony P. Graesch, Enzo Ragazzini, and Elinor Ochs describe some typical American homes, where

U.S. families have trouble getting rid of their possessions, even those they box up and move to liminal spaces such as garages and basements. Whether they cannot break sentimental attachments to certain objects, do not have the time to sort through and make decisions, or believe objects have value and could be sold on eBay, most families struggle to cope with stored clutter. (44)

There is sympathy for the hoarder, but the minimalist is regarded as a kind of outlier, quite unlike most people. There’s a certain elite quality about minimalists that is distasteful or embarrassing to a lot of people. It’s also true that most people probably wish that they had more minimalist tendencies (so that they could clean up their house, throw stuff out, finally unpack those boxes from the last move two years ago), so minimalists are a reminder of their own failure. Psychotherapist F. Diane Barth says that minimalism is “even admired by those of us who are mild ‘collectors’ and have troubles getting rid of things.”