Do you pass by a yard sale and feel compelled to buy something even though you don’t really need it? Do you shield your eyes when you venture into the basement or attic, reproached by stacks of stuff that should have been tossed long ago? Do you feel you have a special personal bond with, say, those 1974 Advent speakers that you can’t bear to discard?
Please accept our sympathies.
You are suffering from the national disease: hoarding.
Just as this nation has mounted a war against cancer and other dread diseases, it must now confront the painful condition of packratitis.
Closets are full. Attics are stacked to the rafters. Garages lined with boxes and boxes of … stuff. So what happens when the house can’t hold another gewgaw? Do Americans quit acquiring things? Never! Some buy a bigger home. Those who can’t afford it–having disposed of their disposable income by accumulating ever more stuff–rent storage space. It’s a booming business.
“The dirty little secret in this business is if Americans ever stop keeping their junk, we’re in big trouble,” Cris Burnam, president of a Columbia, Mo.-based operator of storage facilities told Tribune correspondent Tim Jones. “We have folks who pay thousands of dollars in storage fees for stuff that you literally wouldn’t get a hundred dollars for in a garage sale, but it’s their stuff and it has special meaning to them.”
The disease to acquire starts young. Wander into the average teenager’s room these days, if you dare. (If he’ll let you.) The massive accumulation of stuff that leers from every available space triggers a sudden flash of vertigo. The floor sinks. Dizziness. Most parents and other interlopers quickly retreat, aghast, muttering in amazement. Where did the kid get all that stuff?
Where indeed? Well, look around. You’re doing a pretty good job of packratting everything from your first-grade artwork to a decade’s worth of department store shopping bags that you can’t bear to toss out.
This page supports small business, but it seems to us that these folks are enablers. They’re enabling hoardaholics to continue their habit. We’ve all heard that whisper, when we’re about to toss out something. I might be able to use it. It’s still good.
Those are the siren songs of the hoarder.
Of such dementia is the basement filled. It is stuffed with household goods, stained rugs, frumpy lamps, dog-eared books, old clothing, outdated appliances and the like. Much of it goes unseen for years, if not decades. Which raises the important question: If you haven’t used it for years, if you don’t even remember you have it, then why keep it?
But this is heresy to the hoarder. More is more. There is no less.
However, there is another way.
Once a year, in many places, there’s a spring cleanup day, in which the trash collectors expand their purview, collecting all manner of junk that they would refuse otherwise. This encourages people to toss out old furniture, power tools, electronics and other items of questionable utility.
This is the best day of the year for the purger. Beats Christmas and Halloween rolled together. You prepare for this day weeks in advance. You make your list and consult with your spouse or significant other. Can that grimy sofa finally be tossed? What about the broken mirror, the teetering bookshelf, the ill-considered George Foreman grill, offered as a Mother’s Day gift?
When this moment arrives, our advice: Be ruthless. Get rid of it all. Glory in the empty spaces, the clean surfaces. There is serenity in the clutter-free life.
Just leave that stuff on the curb. Someone else will surely take it.
