In defense of hoarding (ENG)

There’s a TV show - a few, in fact - where we’re invited to peer into the lives of hoarders. We pretend to do so sympathetically, of course, but in reality we’re there to gawp at the weirdos and feel superior. Look at them, with their stacks of pizza boxes and moldy newspapers and crates of rusty screws and mismatched socks. The sad (or, depending on the channel, pitiable) fools.

These TV shows share a common structure. Experts are brought in to analyse and opinionise. A cleaner might be engaged to excavate mounds of rubbish. We’ll listen to doctors and family members, witness hands thrown to faces, experience gasping and tears. There’ll be rubbish skips and rubber gloves aplenty. An emotional journey, or as emotional as will fit into forty minutes of content plus four ad breaks for things we ought to be buying.

There’s only one problem: the hoarders are right. They’re manifesting something as old as humanity, the idea that resources are rare and valuable. In the past, things were hard to come by, and when we got them, we held onto them. People didn’t “hoard”, or at least it wasn’t called that. Instead, they were thrifty. They were careful with their things. My father came from that generation and the sheds on his farm in Ireland were packed – packed – with any and every item he might someday find a use for. Nothing escaped his grasp. Often those objects got used, sometimes they didn’t, but it was all seen as normal.

At some point, however, it was decided that people who held onto things were bad for business. They have zero use in an economy based on turning nature into landfill as rapidly as possible. I suspect a workshop took place where slick marketing types presented their “deck” outlining the money lost due to thrift, then went on to explain how the situation could be remedied. “Maybe refusing to throw things away could be … a sickness!” Applause. Sliders were served, bottles were uncorked. Grins shone bright as bones in the sun.

And it worked. A hoarder is now seen as a problem. But that’s only because they’re in a place and a time where objects have no value, where the expected behaviour is to buy and break and dump and buy again. Anyone clinging to sad and outdated instincts to shepherd resources is a freak and must be called out on their deviant behaviour. Because it’s just normal to throw stuff out. Everyone does. Go on, you’re worth it. Do it. Now.

Nothing illustrates this civilization-wide delusion, this stampede towards the cliff-edge, like the garbage room of my Stockholm apartment building. Originally a place to put things empty or broken, it now mostly acts as an altar where ritual sacrifice is made to cardboard and plastic gods. The flood of objects into that small space is paralysing and endless. I know, because I save things from there, all the time. Week after week. Some are in need of light repair, but most are perfect, and it’s clear the person just got hold of a brand new X, thus finding the old X an embarrassment which had to be swiftly disposed of. 

The things I’ve saved from that room make a long list. At least fifteen pairs of trousers, in perfect condition. Dozens of pairs of shoes, some kept, others passed onto charity shops. Furniture: a 1950s sideboard, a vintage bedside table, an antique folding mirror selling online for over a hundred dollars, balcony furniture to cater to a whole building. Then the fans, the books, the headphones (most with only a basic fault, such as a missing earphone cushion, or no fault at all). Tools. Kitchen items. Lamps and lampshades. Curtains. Fabric. A functioning electric razor. Were I to list everything, this article would never end.

But it keeps coming, that never-ending flood. I used to wonder what was wrong with all the things being thrown out. Until I realised the question I should have been asking was, what was wrong with all the people? They’ve been duped, is the answer. They’ve bought into the marketing fantasy that new things are intrinsically better than old, and that damaged always means bad.

Hanging onto things, we’re told, is just not normal. What is normal is taking items that work perfectly well, or require only minor repair, and putting them in a box that leads to a furnace, or a crusher, or a sea-bed, or a field in some other country, and leaving them there, crumbling in the baking sun, forever.

And this is where we now stand, in the third decade of the final human century, knee-deep in our plastic sea. But as everything crumbles, which it clearly must, there’s a chance the lie might finally settle like smoke and ash, enabling us idiots to see what should have been obvious the entire bloody time.

It’s the hoarders who are healthy. And it’s the rest of us who are sick.

Photographer unknown. Please let us know if you know who it is!