New Year’s Day: I resolve
In this, the dawn of the new year of 2008, I do hereby solemnly resolve…to make no New Year’s resolutions. You heard it here first.
Ah, where are the resolutions of yesteryear? The ones to diet, or to exercise, or to do (or refrain from doing) any number of things that were supposed to begin on that January 1st date and continue on forevermore?
Well, as it turns out, some of them actually have been incorporated into my life, especially the regular exercise one. But not because of a New Year’s resolution, and not beginning on some arbitrary January 1st. In this I don’t think I’m alone; I’ve devoted quite a bit of time and thought to the subject of personal change, and I doubt that resolutions are a common mechanism of implementation for most people.
Unless, of course, they’re already ready for whatever the change might be, and just need a little jumpstart to get them over the hump of actually making it a part of their lives.
Some folks have a larger hump to traverse than others, as I was reminded by this NY Times article about hoarders. Even though I am not now and have never been a hoarder, I (like most people) have too much stuff, a fact of which I was made even more aware recently when I moved. In the process, I’d gotten rid of a great many of the extraneous objects—especially paper—in my life. Or so I thought. But when I unpacked I was astonished to discover some of it had somehow slipped into those boxes and moved with me.
I’ve thrown out more of it since. But not enough, never enough. But still, I’m nowhere near to being in the league of the hoarder,
I’ve had some personal experience with hoarders, and I would imagine many of you have, too. Some of you, perhaps, have even
been bitten by the hoarding bug yourselves. It’s not uncommon, as it turns out; as the Times article states, it affects perhaps 1.5 million Americans. You know who you are.
Here’s a description:
[S]ome people look at a shelf stacked with coffee mugs and see only mugs. But people with serious disorganization problems might see each one as a unique item ”” a souvenir from Yellowstone or a treasured gift from Grandma.
To a hoarder, every item—not just those gifts from Grandma—has emotional valence. A hoarder’s relation to objects is somewhat like that of Borges’ fictional character “Funes, the Memorious” (about whom I’ve written before, here) to his recollections. Funes was a man who could forget nothing, and to whom memory was so specific and all-encompassing that he could remember each leaf on every tree he ever saw. This paralyzed him from action; he spent all of his time contemplating his memories.
To a hoarder, every item is a memory, or stands for one. Thus, throwing things out becomes an almost unbearably excruciating act of discarding the past. Why this should be so for some people and not others is a mystery, but it can become nearly incapacitating. As Lynne Johnson, a professional organizer from Quincy, MA and president of a group known as the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization says:
Many clients have already accumulated numerous storage bins and other such items in a futile attempt to get organized. Usually the home space is adequate, [Ms Johnson] says, but the challenge is in teaching them how to group, sort, set priorities and discard.
“Challenge” is certainly the operative word. For all of you facing this particular one, best of luck.
And a very Happy New Year to all!
Hmm, lets see – I can currently see in my closet. I have a box for Borland Quattro Pro, Microsoft Encarta (it says in large letters “CD EDITION”), A game called Star Controll II, and a NEX 2x cd-rom. Oh yea, there are about 40 VCR tapes too, haven’t had a working VCR for about 10 years.
My father gave his brother a box of promotion golf balls he found in the basement for Christmas, they were stamped “Union Carbide”. Union Carbide left this area in the early 70’s (my uncle worked for them). To note, my parents have moved twice since then so they got packed, moved, and unpacked at least twice.
Nope, no packrats in my family. However, I don’t see them as individuals and would throw them away if I ever actually had the gumption to move them. Though I do still install and play start control II from time to time.
Mostly it just piles up until I need the room for something new and I move it. I don’t keep clothes in my closet (I have a wire rack I use for that) it is mostly full of junk.
I usually don’t make resolutions but last year I was going to lose weight.
This year I make no resolutions, although I have determined to a daily word-count minimum with my fiction writing, though that wasn’t a New Years thing. And by chance I happened on a livejournal community doing the same thing so I’m sort of like, “cool beans!”
I think that resolutions worked pretty well for me when I was a teenager. Maybe it was because, even though I had less control over my environment, I had fewer impositions by others on my own self. Less control in one sphere and more control in the other.
(Although, as anyone with kids and commitments knows, the greater control adults have is mostly a myth.)
Am I a hoarder, I wonder?
But on the subject of excercise, recently we signed up for a new cable TV provider that carries Fit.TV and they have http://fittv.discovery.com/convergence/shimmy/shimmy.html Shimmy, so now I’ve been attempting to shimmy, and I think you would love it!
I need to throw out a whole lot of stuff but I’m not sure how much of the problem is seeing each thing as a memory and how much is a feeling that throwing stuff away is waste and how much is simply laziness.
Yes, we have coffee mugs from different places but they really don’t take up much room. But why didn’t I throw out the two plates that broke from my last move? It’s because I had in my mind the idea that although I couldn’t use them to eat off of, I could glue them and use them to serve biscuits or something, so it would be wasteful to throw them out. They’re the closest thing I have to “fancy” plates and I could not possibly replace the broken ones.
Did I glue them in five years? No. (I might have finally thrown them away, though… I’d have to check my cupboard to be sure.)
A very Happy New Year to you neo!
I tend to be the one who wants to throw all things out. My husband wants to hang onto everything – just in case. Somehow we manage and keep things in check. Amazing how much stuff builds up without us realizing it. It’s especially evident when moving to smaller places. But it’s also an excellent way to get rid of things because they don’t fit. 🙂
I throw out, my husband hoards. A neverending battle.
Happy New Year. I am really enjoying your blog.
more “valence”! I totally know that word!
From reading your post, I guess I’m a borderline hoarder.
The thing is, the junk from 50-100 years ago are valuable collectibles today. And you never know what common items today will be prized in a generation or two.
I think a rule of thumb is that the things you think may be valuable someday probably won’t be. It’s the stuff you’d never expect.
So save everything, just in case. 🙂
For immemorial millennia our species had been hunter-gatherer, so instinct of collecting items of any probable value must be hard-wired into our brains. It has lost its adaptive value relatively recently, but instincts never die completely, they simply find another forms of expression. And such things as food shortages or extreme poverty invigorates these instincts tremendously. Generation of my parents, for example, with experience of war and after-war hardships, never was able to throw away anything at all. ExÑeptions are rare.
My experiences are the same as Sergey’s.
My resolution this year is to look a bit more tidy at work, sounds easy? It’s not my instinct. Speaking of instincts, as Sergey mentioned, and other forms of expression, I wonder if using the computer, posting, replying, staring at the screen is akin to watching caribou migrations.
Happy New Year, Neo!
Hoarding Instinct? Or Myers-Briggs Personality trait … P, which I call the “open-ended” type, rather than the J “closure oriented”. (I’m surprised you don’t mention Personality Types more, I’d love to hear your take on the MB 4 vs. the Big 5 — which I haven’t studied much but seems less useful for healthy folk.)
I’m an E/I NTP, very aware of the NF empathy folk, but with a few J (clean desk) friends. I don’t throw stuff out because … I’m not quite done with it! (But I’m almost never done with most stuff).
I’d have more time to do stuff if I had less stuff to do, but it’s a bit of giving up a “dream” to do something, when I toss a barely started or almost completed project.
However, with Google, storing internet available resources in hardcopy seems increasingly easy to forego, as it seems to be easier to find stuff again on the internet than in my almost unorganized set of boxes of stuff.
This year, for sure, more hardcopy stuff goes! (Also to get a bigger and better hard disk for storing more digital stuff!).
How many boxes for just memories? Only a couple.
I resolve to start reading this and other blogs again
The wife is definitely a packrat. She gets it from her father. He came from a poor Pennsylvania coal-mining family and grew up during the Depression. To him, anything you actually owned free and clear was precious, and you never threw something away if there was a chance it might come in handy some day.
I, on the other hand, grew up peregrinating around with the military. We tended to travel light, so a lot of my stuff got tossed every two or three years as excess baggage. A lot of what didn’t get tossed before a move was mangled by the packers and ended up getting tossed anyway. So I tend to think of just about everything I own as ultimately disposable. I am not used to living in a junk pile.
My house is full of junk that I am more than willing to donate to charity or set out for the trash men. Unfortunately, the wife gives me such a hard time about chucking anything that I find it easier just to let it pile up. She maintains that reducing clutter by tossing disused stuff is a waste of money. Evidently, once you spend money for for an item you are obliged to keep it forever. Also, she is convinced that the moment I throw something away I’ll need it again almost immediately and end up spending money on a new one. If I get past those two obstacles, it usually turns out that the thing I want to get rid of suddenly has great sentimental value. That’s about the point at which I give up and try to make some room under the bed – where the offending item will at least be out of sight.
I figure my best chance is to wait until the wife goes on a trip somewhere. While she’s away, I can haul all my excess crap out from its various stashing places and take it to the Goodwill store. This will only postpone the terror, however. She has a mental inventory of everything I own. I’m not sure what will happen if she notices something is missing.
Hmm.
It seems that anything that someone finds objectionable (clutter, weight, disorganization, etc) becomes a disorder, with people suffering from other extreme disorders being used as examples of that “disorder” (I collect memorabilia in boxes that aren’t indexed and cross referenced – am I disorganized, a hoarder or perhaps not anal-retentive?)
I find clutter to be a refreshing bulimic moment in housecare. You let the crap accumulate in a particular room or set of rooms (or the entire house) and then when you need that refreshing purging of tension and the eventual satisfaction of a room cleaned, you clean, pitch out and organize.
If you do it right, you have a continual series of managable campaigns to keep you busy when you need the excuse to purge and destroy! Aaaahhh!
On a side note, they say (now) that putterers lose more weigh than none putterers. I like that, as I have the attention span of a gnat and puttering suits me to a tee.
Wha…? Shiny thing! Shiny thing!
I resolve to keep on reading. I hope that you keep on writing
Best wishes