I'm a typical IT pack-rat with cables, old PCs, laptops, many old parts. Hard drives are a risk since I don't want to toss due to not know what is on it (Bitcoin?) or have my personal data stolen, or just something I may miss copying from it.

My Dad died so much of his stuff is now essentially junk. But to me it's sentimental even things that I have no need for like his shoes, his clothes. My Mom tossed a lot of it out practically the day after his funeral. He has piles of tools, paint, gloves, coveralls.

Recycling rules. The local company makes it very hard for people to get rid of items. Much of it means you need a car to take it and drop it off. When there you enter a large building and some guy points to a pile and you have to drag it there. Anything big like wood has to be less than four feet in length and less than 40 pounds. Any elderly or those without a car or even a truck in cases like old mattresses are out of luck.

Just age and lack of stamina too or mentally not wanting to do the work of sorting through it. Mu Mom is nearly 80 and doing "The Big Cleanout" as older people do when they are nearing that time in life. But she tosses or gives away things at random without asking a family member if they want it.

There can be many layers to hoarding if it is that or just too much stuff or just being lazy I'm not sure where the line is.

Its all a burden, on your body but much more on your mind. I understand that it brings back memories, but you shouldn't remember given person by keeping their hoard. And that 1 in 100 items that is actually useful doesn't change any of it.

I've seen it done countless times, last time few months ago my parents were cleaning whole apartment after grandparents died. We each picked few small items to keep, and literally everything else went to dumpster. So liberating.

Good rule of thumb for anything, anywhere, anybody - if you can buy it with a reasonable sum, item is worthless long term and should be no burden to you. Cherish those things that are not replaceable - photos, gifts handcrafted for you. The rest, whether you have it or not doesn't change anything long term in life. Thus is largely meaningless for your happiness. Thus it can go anytime, no big deal.

-- You just need to get into a mood sometimes where you go to your attic, garage, or whatever and get rid of the old computers and stuff you're never going to do anything with. Yes, there's some nerdy kid who might want that old laptop but I don't know who they are and I'm not going to waste a lot of time finding out.

-- Try not to let things get to the point where even contemplating doing some sorting and winnowing is so painful that you just lie down until the feeling goes away.

-- Digitize as much as you can. OK, you're still something of a digital packrat, especially without good metadata, but at least it doesn't take up space.

-- I've found leaving some larger objects out by the road with a free sign can be pretty effective.

At least where I live, there are junk removal services but that presupposes being organized enough to have a big pile that can be taken away some day.

ADDED: It's almost certainly true that people in the US, especially outside of urban cores, do tend to live in larger homes so it can be very tempting to just hang onto stuff rather than going through the work of sorting and disposing.

It doesn't matter how convenient it is to rent a van, when neither you, nor the people inside your social circle, know how to actually drive a van. I've had a regular car driver's license for decades. An EV van is a whole different beast, as I found out the hard way while helping a friend move between apartments.

For example, they have big side mirrors, so you have an excellent view of where the back corners are.

Today you can buy a 20T drive for under $300. You can copy all your old drives to it, and then get rid of the old drives. As for stolen data, you can:

1. put it on a drill press and run a 3/8 drill through the platter

2. put your safety glasses on and give it a mighty blow from a sledgehammer

I suppose the NSA, at great expense and effort, might still be able to retrieve a few bytes from it, but even they aren't that desperate for your copy of Oregon Trail.

BTW, I'm a hoarder myself and understand the problem.

You could also literally wipe your data by using a little sandpaper on the platters if you really wanted to.

I'm a big fan of recycling old electronics wherever possible. Would the cost of compute to virtually destroy the data on the drive so it can be safely reused as storage exceed the cost of physically destroying the drive and then recycling the raw materials?

I know for some cases true destruction is the best way to mitigate data theft in this case but... That's a bit heavy handed for an 80% use case, innit?

Edit: personally I always check what's on my old drives before decomming them but I think I'm an outlier here

One of these days though I'll get around to zeroing out a drive and then running Autopsy on it for shiggles just to see what comes back up. Should be a fun experience!

I recommend overwriting with an endless loop of the freeway scene from "Solaris".

8 times rewrite.

I briefly worked IT for a federal police agency and that is what they did.

I don't think I'll do that though plus I don't have a metal bit sharp enough. I'd research how to sharpen a metal bit on a grinder. Get sidetracked and look up how to harden metal bits. Then metallurgy and different metal and what exactly is hardening how does it change the crystal structure. Is metal actually a crystal? and so on....

You don't need a special bit for this. Most of a hard drive is made of soft aluminum; a standard drill bit will go right through it.

You can get rid of all of that real quick by dragging it to the curb and leaving it near a fire hydrant (don't block it though). Call it in yourself and say that someone left an item that is blocking the fire hydrant.

Yes, it's illegal and dishonest, but not enough is done to help people actually get rid of this crap. There's no accountability in the other direction. You call Waste Management for a large item pickup and you're lucky if they ever show, or when they do they leave without picking it up because of more arbitrary rules (too heavy, too bulky, too many pee stains, whatever). Yet leaving it near a fire hydrant ensures someone shows up with whatever it takes to load the item and leave.

It is a paid service, hence my complaint-- they bill you after pickup. To get them to pick it up, you have to leave it on the curb, where you remain responsible for it. When they fail to pick it up as scheduled, you eventually get fined by the city or the HOA for dumping-- and you still have to deal with it somehow, like lugging it all back into your house.

This is the sort of situation you don't win (all risk, no reward), so there's no point in playing by the rules. The city makes it WM's problem. WM makes it your problem. So make it the city's problem again and stop them from passing the buck. I'm not saying it's right, only that it's a solution.

It was coupled, for my dad, with extreme frugality. He seemingly willfully deprived himself (and his family) of any fun or comfort by acquiring cheap versions of everything, or rigging up odd simulacrums of things, like the whole-house "air conditioner" he made from a cleaning bucket and some coffee cans. He bought a boat, then put such an underpowered motor on it that it was a joke. We had water skis, but they were rotted and just sat sadly against the wall, unusable.

Oh, my time's up? See you next week, doctor.

I know some quasi-hoarders who are similar, too: I know a person who has 30 guitars but they're so cheap and badly maintained that they're probably less worth than a high-end one. And the "next guitar" they buy is only good for a couple days.

My buddy's dad moved his boat from the water to his driveway to do a bit of work on it. Over the course of a decade, it went from "we can probably sell this for $15k" to "we can hopefully still get $5k for the engines" to "we gotta pay somebody to haul this away now".

So yeah, they got lots of old engines lying around on display now. And a box of compasses and other crap.

Where did his money come from?

That sounds kind of cool.

But yeah, I'd still be pissed if my dad left me a mess like this to clean up. The property is nice and all, but a lot of it may need to get torn down if hoarding caused any structural damage (it can, houses aren't built to be filled to the brim with stuff), and that's not cheap work to get done up front. Probably not that easy to sell if you decide not to clean up the messes either.

My own experience with several people has all involved older folks and this line from the article caught my attention:

> Childhood poverty, interestingly enough, does not seem to be connected with hoarding.

The folks I know who have been affected by this did not experience childhood poverty but rather their parents all survived the Great Depression. Generally they’ve been born in the late ‘30s, ‘40s and early ‘50s and from the stories they tell about growing up, a lot of their behaviours seem to be based on their parents’ behaviours that seem to have sprung out of young adult extreme poverty in the 1930s.

Although I don't think the depression era or poverty as the only answer.

I see the grandchild exhibit similar behaviors. There is an awareness of the problem but a disconnect in the brain to organise physical space. It is easier to cram objects (squirrel) than tidy up. And a resistance to tidy or organise physical space.

I'm fortunate that most of the people I know who have trouble with this are capable of somewhat keeping it in check, although there are certainly some garages/basements in my extended and in-law families that are going to be an absolute nightmare to deal with down the road. At least for the folks who live on farms, it has occasionally come in handy; while a ton of it is just straight up junk, they do seem to have a pretty good mental model of where things are even though it isn't really organized and can often dig up very old obscure parts for equipment (farming or electronics) relatively quickly.

Sounds about right. All my grandparents were young adults during that time frame, and my family keeps a lot of stuff around. Not clinical hoarding disorder level amounts of stuff, but quite a bit more than anyone else I know. I honestly think that it makes sense to keep a fair amount of “supplies” around so that you can do what you need to with what you have, rather than having to buy new stuff.

But I also struggle to adapt to (what I consider to be disgusting) present day consumerism, where most things are disposable in economic terms. I prefer to spend my money and time fixing nice things than replacing mediocre things.

I finally understood that hoarding is a breakdown in the error monitoring circuits of the brain. Error monitoring is the feeling that you would get if you almost throw your passport or wedding ring in the trash. Hoarders have been found to be more creative in being able to see alternate uses for everyday objects and also to see more emotional connection to objects than people without the illness.

For me it was important to realize that hoarders motivations aren’t different than mine, just stronger and in other scenarios the difference would likely have been helpful.

In an age of abundance the amount of packaging produced is enough to manifest clinically significant hoarding cases which wouldn’t have been recognized in the past. Think of people whose houses are piled up with old newspapers, magazines and empty cereal boxes. In most cases however clinically significant hoarding cases also require a concurrent issue with acquisition of material goods. Often this tends to fall more towards the traditional OCD behaviors where a premonition or feeling of dread can only be mitigated through a purchase.

Addressing hoarding in these cases requires both addressing the OCD behaviors and the problems with the error monitoring circuit. OCD is difficult to treat and there are no treatments that I’m aware of for misfires in the error monitoring circuits of the brain. That assumes there are no other concurrent issues such as financial pressures, physical disability or depression.

Society collectively displays some hoarding like behaviors with collective misfires in our error monitoring behaviors. We tend to attach more significance to objects we spend a lot of time with which creates an interesting scenario for companies like Apple. While companies like Kellogg’s can produce thousands of pounds of packaging which gets tossed without a thought we require (demand) to Apple that they carefully recycle our tiny but hopelessly outdated device lest they pile up in our houses due to our faulty error monitoring circuits.

This, and a lot of what you outline in your comment, reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_demand_avoidance

> The hoarders I've met tend to be very intelligent and manipulative (and verbally abusive) if they suspect someone is going to try impress change upon them. (A situation they perceive to not be in control).

I'm sorry, but this is just a horrible way to characterize a group of people with clear mental health issues. The reason extreme hoarders are extreme hoarders is probably because their drive to hoard stuff is stronger than literally every other emotion they have, including any empathy they have for those affected. Maybe the hoarder you know is manipulative and has low empathy, but the hoarder I knew was very empathetic and not a manipulative person. She had a ton of shame about it and refused to talk about it or address it.

It makes the most sense to me to look at this from a slightly different angle.

Most things have value. What hoarders can't seem to grasp is that each item they own also reduces the value of every item they own by a small amount. Every item that someone owns is an item that they have to store, organize, clean, etc.

So, those "junk" items aren't worthless per se. They're just not worth enough to balance out the cost of keeping them, at least for most people.

This right here is the crux of what defines hoarding, at least to me - when that work isn't being done.

I do many physical hobbies / DIY. So the characterization that keeping anything you don't have an immediate use for as hoarding doesn't ring true - some times you really will need that 1x2ft scrap of drywall in the future, or those bits of lumber or exact valued resistor/capacitor/etc. Or wanting to get all the materials for a project in order and ready to go even though you might not do it for a few months, which then turns into even longer.

But the stereotype of extreme hoarding with food wrappers and animals crapping in the piles doesn't ring true either. Because hoarding can exist long before that type of squalor, and long before the DSM would make a positive diagnosis.

So to me it's about whether one is doing the effort to organize/clean/use the stuff. It's ultimately about whether that complexity is being managed or being brushed aside. Like the part in the article about hoarders being more familiar with ad-hoc organization rather than categorization. That's a necessary skill, but it also creates a precarious situation that can fall apart when things change and that information gets flushed.

Getting rid of items is like throwing away something specials d apart of oneself.

The rise of this mental disorder tracks the rise of all mental disorders in the west (eg. >60% of our communities girls HS volleyball team last year were on antidepressants). There are known microcauses for this: isolation, not enough physical activity, little vitamin D/Sun exposure, family structure, etc.

As someone who struggles with mental health issues, and frequently not getting enough of many of those things mentioned, I've worked to try to do better about some of that; and it can sometimes help a bit. But the whole "get more exercise, touch grass, see a friend" isn't the magic cure-all that some people make it out to be; and worrying about doing enough of it can become a stressor all on its own. Additionally, seeing them as the solution can sometimes lead to harmful obsessive behaviors of trying too hard to seek them out, at the expense of other things like work or family time.

Anyhow, not saying that getting more of these things is bad, or that they have no effect. Just that a lot of times discussions of mental health online feel very reductive. More exercise, more outdoor time, more time with friends, more antidepressants; each of these could potentially have positive effects, but they can also have negative effects, or be unobtainable, or there could be one of myriad other issues that need to be addressed, or there could be situations, either mental, physical, or social that are so broken that they can never really be addressed, just lived with or in some cases not even that.

What about the type of hoarders who collect stuff for monetary reasons? I don't think there are memories involved, and I don't see a direct emotional connection. It's just people who believe that someday this stuff is valuable, or the other side, it's something they might need some day, for repairing or building, or something like that.

Lets not forget non-trivial part of population is on spectrum of one/multiple psychiatric disorders, but say 2 out of 10 doesn't get you to mental asylum, rather on lifelong medicines if you get diagnosed properly, but most people do not get that luxury. So they often end up a massive pain in the A for basically everybody around them.

This is not at all like the type of hoarding that's described here. You're referencing essentially greed, which we've been told is good at least since the early 80's

Yes, and the root cause for all of them is the increase in, and the inability to handle, oxidative stress:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3964745/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10051630/#:~:te....

There’s likely a U-shaped curve regarding the benefits of exercise and mental health.

If you had empathy, you would see that attacking their hoarding is both devaluing them and trying to remove what they perceive as safety so yeah, they are going to respond as such. If I pushed hard for you to give away your bank account and that you are crazy for having it you would probably push back in the same way. Maybe approach from empathy instead of judgement and you'd get a better response.

I can assure you, I am empathetic as are the rest of the family. The person in my life (my father) is not forced to do anything and they continue to do as they please. They don't want help, so we do not pressure them needlessly.

I believe people have their habits and we must accept them to an extent. Unfortunately sometimes ones way of living can negatively affect others close to them. My mother is the one who had to live with this. She is the one most deserving of sympathy.

I did write my original comment in a distant and judgmental tone. It was to write what I had observed through experience about the behaviors related to hoarding.

It may sound negative but, my father is my father. I don't dislike him.

I think some (much?) hoarding is driven by a basic emotional loop that seems adjacent to agorophobia. Acting on an impulse to gather things around and live in the resulting "warren" seems to give them comfort.

In hoarders in my family, I've also seen something like the "self delusion" you mentioned. They fail to acknowledge the time-varying value of most things, decay processes, negative externalities, or sometimes even opportunity costs. They almost seem to think they can avoid realizing a loss by never disposing of an item. Kind of a HODL (hold on for dear life) investment plan applied to material objects.

I've seen some genuinely nice people who only turn vicious when their hoard is threatened, but I ascribe that reaction to their illness.

My tendencies towards keeping things definitely revolve around 'I can't get this again if I need it'. Especially since if I need something and reach out for it, I am likely to be shamed by society for 'not planning ahead'/'not making better decisions'/etc. The margin of error is so small at the lowest ends of society that making any permanent decision is costly. It is rational to avoid doing so.

By the time this person was born, both parents had good income, but they continue to live as if in poverty (extreme frugality, never replace anything if they can spend 10x more time/money to repair, dumpster diving, etc).

The parents are low-level hoarders. The child is even more so.

It seems born of the trauma and uncertainty.

Hoarding seems to have a large overlap of traits with narcissists.

She always said that she can't throw anything away because there might be something important in there, now I'm thinking that she did it on purpose.

They don't seem to be completely aware to the problem of decay (water damage, perishable item mixed with valuable item etc).

Perhaps their brain remembers the 'original state' of the item and glosses over the decay happening in front of their eyes.