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Hoarders
2009 · TV series · documentary · 43 min episodes · 16 seasons
Each episode of Hoarders is a fascinating look inside the lives of two different people whose inability to part with their belongings is so out of control that they are on the verge of a personal crisis.
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15 comments on Hacker News
Funny reaction videos to old episodes of To Catch A Predator and Hoarders.
Accumulating stuff that "might be useful" at some indefinite point in the future, without trying to curate the accumulation might not be hoarding, but, it's actually quite similar to the mindset of some of the actual hoarders on the TV show Hoarders. Those people obviously take it to pathological extremes, and I'm not suggesting having a bunch of empty, cleaned out yogurt containers stashed away somewhere is in any way equivalent to stuffing one's entire house from floor to ceiling with stuff. But, on the show, when the hoarders talk about why they do it, it's often a behavior that came about as a reaction to some kind of loss, or out of a fear of some kind of loss. I would suggest that what you've described ("I'll hold on to this 'just in case....") is a lot like the reasons they give for doing it, even if the real motivation is quite different.
There are differences as well. Magnitude is the obvious one, unless you actually filled your entire kitchen with yogurt containers or something lol. :) The other big one I can think of is that an actual hoarder will have genuine, severe anxiety at the mere thought of getting rid of anything from their hoard. This is another assumption, of course, but my guess is that if you had to get rid of some, or maybe even most of your accumulation of yogurt containers for some reason, you'd be able to do that, and the thought wouldn't fill you with dread or anything.
My two best friends are both sons of hoarders. One of the dads is a full "the city is gonna condemn your place for being uninhabitable" hoarder that could have easily qualified to be on the Hoarders TV show; the other is more like "has too much stuff and is too reluctant to get rid of it". Unfortunately, both of my friends have inherited their dads' traits.
I offer to help out and often remind them that "the stuff you own eventually owns you".
They aren't missing anything either. Subconciously I thought that I needed to stay on top of things like the news, how the stock market is doing, whatever the latest tech hardware releases are, etc. but now, most of the time I forget those are even things.
I watched a lot of the History Channel, TLC and Discovery Channel growing up. I've seen all manner of documentary about all manner of thing. I'd say plop your kids in front of that every now and then, but these days it's just Pawn Stars and Hoarders and Deadliest Catch.
Watch an episode or two of Hoarders and tell me it seems delightful to just let people live that way. If we're giving people housing because it's not okay for them to live that way, then I can't accept that also it's okay for people to live in such squalor simply because they have a roof over their head. That's just a personal opinion though.
eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WYO8fL_iMs
https://www.aetv.com/shows/hoarders
This sounds nice, but if the man filled 2500 sq feet with books and magazines and didn't read them, it sounds a bit more like an episode of Hoarders and it's certainly not healthy.
the good stuff stays the not so good get deleted, this isn't an episode of hoarders is it?
A comment on one episode of Hoarders stuck with me: "I'm saving all this for my grandkids."
It was a mangled way of protecting him from death and the indifference of future generations.
But all it takes is a visit to a local estate sale to realize no one wants 99.9% of this junk, even your descendants.
No idea if it's on the rise or not because it could just be reporting, but hoarding is a mental disorder no doubt. Watch an episode or two of Hoarders. People are literally breaking down for having to throw away a dirty piece of trash.
Personally, I've stopped bookmarking everything I find somewhat interesting. Now if I do find something and it will be used in the next week/month, it's often part of an existing project or idea, and so it gets thrown in a text file that's versioned.
I started doing this after accumulating a huge index of bookmarks spread across saved.io, Evernote, Google Bookmarks, iCloud, Firefox, Opera, txt files, Google Spaces and the other dozen or so bookmarking/collaborative knowledge sharing platforms showcased on Product Hunt.
I'm surprised there's no digital equivalent to the Hoarders TV show. I suppose thousands of bookmarks are less impressive than a garage full of old newspapers and rats.
> I'm sure one could just as easily say that getting the mail is like other addictions, because I chronically get excited at the thought of my latest online order arriving.
There actually are many people addicted to shopping. You can often see them on “Hoarders” or similar TV shows, their homes filled to the brim with products in boxes, unopened.
I'm fortunate enough to have escaped from any serious addictions (outside of maybe eating a little too much garbage when I'm feeling a little down), but my mother's side of my family is absolutely packed to the rim with people who have/had powerful drug and alcohol addictions. I also have a close personal friend who has a similar family history and a brother-in-law who comes from a deeply damaged family as a result of alcohol and drug addiction. So, while I can't offer any insight from a first person perspective, I can offer some from a close outside party.
You should be very thankful that you don't suffer from it, nor have had close enough contact to addiction so that a question like you're asking seems reasonable. I urge you to spend a couple hours reading up on it and how it works (at least the parts we know and understand), how it's defined, and how it's treated. If you can find some intervention videos on youtube, it might be worth sitting through.
For my relatives who suffer(ed) from this kind of addiction, it simply becomes all they think about all the time. If they're at work, they're trying to figure out how to get home earlier to start drinking, or they'll try to figure out how to hide the smell of the alcohol behind powerful aftershave. If they're not drinking they're trying to figure out how to drink, and if they are drinking, they're trying to figure out how to stay conscious long enough to get to the next bottle. In my family at least, the addictions are usually co-present with various psychological ailments. The literature on drug/alcohol addiction is jammed full of information on this co-presence.
To an addict, the thing they're addicted to become everything to them. They'll use everybody around them and manipulate them to feed the addiction. If you can't help that purpose, then they'll throw you away and move on to the next supportive person. It becomes more important to them than sex, food, shelter, etc. If you're down to your last $15 and need to decide between food and booze/drugs, to an addict the choice is obvious, you don't have to eat every day.
The best analogy I can give is that addiction of this nature feels a little like slow motion drowning. If you don't get to the surface to get another breath, it's over. A drowning person will climb on top of their own mother to get to that air, and thus it's the same with substance addiction. Everything else becomes secondary.
Bizarrely, it's not always the substances that are addictive by themselves (like morphine), but a powerful psychological predisposition drives many addictions. For an addict who's been able to go clean/sober, giving them a drink or their drug of choice is a little like putting them back in that drowning situation and asking them if they really need that breath or if they can just hold it a little longer. To them it feels like functionally the same situation.
I've watched several friends and relatives die either directly from their addiction, or from some secondary issue caused by their addiction. It's maddening watching it happen. You can even have full-rational conversations with an addict about why it's bad and terrible and they'll agree and provide thoughtful responses about it. But right after that conversation they'll go and pour a drink. The closest example I can think of right now is to watch a few episodes of "Hoarders", ignore the hoarding itself, and watch the conversations with the hoarders. They're completely lucid, but there's something broken in their psyche that causes them to do what they're doing. An uncontrollable compulsion. If you can get through a half dozen episodes of "Hoarders" without going a little crazy, congratulations. I can barely make it through an episode without wanting to reach into the television and grab the people and shake some sense into them so they can see what they're doing.
To your central question, there are programs that attempt to wean addicts off of their addiction. But usually the goal is to get them down to zero. In many cases it's simply because they are so addicted to their substance that going cold turkey would likely kill them. Getting clean, even off of a serious alcohol addiction, can be medically difficult. It can be unbelievably unpleasant, from seizures to hallucinations.
http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/alcohol-withdrawal-symptoms-treatments
Tolerances of people with very severe addictions can also be mind blowing. Blood alcohol levels that would kill most people might be the baseline an addict walks around with all day.
I know from some of my friends and relatives that AA has literally saved their lives. It's put them into a support structure full of people who also have gone through the same thing. It means they both have understanding, but also BS checkers...people who know when they're being manipulated because they were themselves manipulators. If you're struggling with a serious addiction, concern about deism is the absolute bottom of the list of things you have to worry about, but it is often used as an excuse not to join the program. I would also urge you to read up on the AA program, it's a powerful system full of some very deep wisdom. You can attend an "open" AA meeting if you're curious. It might be boring to a non-addict, but it can be the life-changing foundation for an addict. My relatives who are in AA never miss a meeting, and always find where the local AA meetings are whenever they travel. It's "religious" in the sense that following the program religiously has turned their entire lives around.
I also urge you to read up on the criticisms of AA and compare to other programs. Also, learning about AA and AA-like programs (like Narcotics Anonymous) as well as sound-alike but different programs (like Narcanon) can be useful as well. It's likely somebody you know does suffer from addiction, and understanding some of the things about it and how it works might enable you to save somebody's life.
Ever since watching a few episodes of Hoarders, I've become acutely aware of all the clutter and crap I own, and the line from Fight Club ("The stuff you own begins to own you") resonates with me quite well.
I'm also given a regular reminder by my parents who have a nice plot of land in the suburbs, a pool, hot tub, and whatnot, and all the time that's spent keeping up their impeccable lawn, keeping their pool and hot tub clean, frankly, I'd rather just pay my $14/mo for a gym membership to have that pool and hot tub when I want without having to dick around with maintenance.
That said, I still have a stack of old decommissioned servers that I just can't bring myself to throw away despite the fact that a cluster of a few Raspberry Pis will be just as powerful for significantly less power. I need to just bite the bullet and scrap them.
Self storage is the epitome of American excess. We bought so much crap at the big box retailers that we ran out of space in our McMansions to keep it all. So, we put some of it in storage. This excess stuff that we obviously don't need, since we haven't used it in years, will stay there in storage, being air conditioned in the summer, heated in the winter, and having rent paid for it, until we eventually run out of space and need a bigger storage unit.
There should be an episode of Hoarders where they find crazy people that have been storing junk in self-storage facilities for decades and look at what exactly they have that is so important that they need to lock it up for years and never see it or touch it.
It's rather interesting and jarring to me to see how many of the reply's in this thread are so aggressively defensive of the very idea that owning more stuff might not always be better than not owning more stuff.
I've been watching a marathon of back episodes of "Hoarders" (http://www.aetv.com/hoarders/index.jsp) on NetFlix streaming, and it's somewhat startling to me how much some of the replies here sound like the defensive responses of some of the hoarders in the show.