How (not) to become a hoarder
The minimalist who had ten thousand browser bookmarks
November’s instalment is all about digital hoarding, procrastination, and consumerism.
Lately I’ve done nothing but delete old bookmarks.
You see, I have a unique problem: I’ve been collecting bookmarks for as long as I’ve been online and I have thousands of links gathering proverbial dust in my browser, many of them dating back to the late 2000s and, of course, long since defunct.
I also collect articles and e-books and academic papers, movies and photos and e-mails, but it’s mostly bookmarks, and the process of culling the hoard looks like a small-scale archaeological dig.
Last week I unearthed this wonderful page with a food history timeline -- did you know that people have been making beer and wine since 7000 BC? I didn’t! And there’s this amazing collection of ancient language learning resources that I’ve kept for some reason, even though I hated learning ancient Greek and Latin and I’m in no rush to repeat the experience. Then I got really into mythology for a while, and I found dozens of history and folklore-related articles on Celtic, Finnish, and other pre-Christian traditions -- because even though I’ve never had an affinity for history as a subject, I’ve always felt like I should.
Why? When was I going to read about the Mayan afterlife or the Welsh Atlantis? What did I care about neutrinos and M-theory? What was I trying to prove to myself?
I’ve been reading a lot of Anne Rice recently and I keep wondering whether immortality would help or hurt my situation; whether I’d be the same person either way, flittering between interests and gaining not much from them at all; whether I’d be even more anxious that my memory would fail me, that I’d fall behind, lose track of things. Case in point: I have only vague memories of the topics I listed, a testament to the absurdity and pointlessness of this compulsion.
I had no reason to label this compulsion. There is no word for hoarding in my native language, in my defense, and I’m a minimalist in every other way that matters.
Researchers think digital hoarding is an emerging type of hoarding disorder, though whether it’s a disorder or not is up for debate. It’s relatively unobtrusive and easy to hide. It doesn’t look like hoarding. It certainly feels normal -- there’s an endless supply of online content and I’m a magpie that’s weak for the siren call of listicles like “top 10 neuroscience studies of 2018.”
“It might be useful one day” -- the hoarder’s favourite excuse. The hoarder is in love with a fantastic future where their hoard will become useful, work to transform their lives in some way -- objects exist as possibility, as potential.
There is no useful distinction to me between physical and digital hoarding. They are both manifestations of the same insecurities, the compulsion taking different forms as what we consider important changes.
Some time ago that I came across a short documentary on Homer and Langley Collyer. Known as recluses, eccentrics and hoarders, the brothers lived in seclusion for over a decade. Fearful of the aftereffects of the Great Depression and the resulting influx of black families in Harlem, the brothers completely withdrew from society.
The Collyers held onto anything and everything that ever passed through their hands. Yards of unused fabric, rusted bicycles, pianos, guns, baby carriages, paintings, sculptures and chandeliers were just some of the items the police unearthed from the four-story brownstone, along with a library of over twenty-five thousand books. Many of them were law books, though Homer was blind and paralysed and unlikely to ever practice law again, and stacks of old newspapers filled the brownstone from floor to ceiling. Langley thought that, once his brother regained his eyesight, he would like to catch up.
Of course, the brothers never made it out of that brownstone. The building was so stuffed to the brim with refuse that all the entrances and windows were blocked, while Langley had constructed mazes and tunnels that allowed him to move around. The brothers had lived in a bubble, detached from reality and consequence, unable to clearly look at their past and future, incapable of coping with change.
I see hoarding as a manifestation of the usual suspects: apathy, fear, avoidance. Depression is often a factor -- if nothing feels significant then everything has the potential to be. There is no room left for other people in the hoarder’s menagerie of trinkets and trash, so the self-imposed isolation becomes both cause and consequence.
Pathological hoarding is notoriously hard to treat and yet, for some reason, seems to be treated as a joke and a spectacle. We like to gawk. I like to gawk. It’s that morbid curiousity that led hundreds of New Yorkers to gather around the Collyer brownstone for a chance to look inside; it’s the perverse satisfaction of watching an episode of Hoarders and seeing the trash and filth cleared away; catharsis in the most literal sense.
Marie Kondo’s 2019 Netflix show feels to me like part of the tradition of reality shows like Hoarders and How Clean Is Your House? but it isn’t, not really. It’s not exploitative; it’s not voyeuristic. It’s not even about hoarders. These are ordinary people that simply own too much stuff, and Marie Kondo offers no-nonsense advice that amounts to “if you're not using it, and keeping it doesn't make you happy, then why keep it?”
The show and book launched a thousand Kondo-critical thinkpieces, the result of a potent combination of xenophobia and cynicism. The cynicism is understandable -- the bare-bones, all-white aesthetic of minimalism had been gaining popularity for years and had already by that point established itself as a new type of conspicuous consumption. In order to be assimilated into the culture, non-consumption had to become a type of consumption itself.
The other reason was that people saw themselves reflected in it. It was a little too earnest. It didn’t let you gawk and distance yourself but rather invited you to examine your behaviour and asked you to do better.
It all came to a head when Kondo talked about decluttering books. The “I base my personality on how many books I have on display” crowd was incensed, affronted by the idea that owning things is not a substitute for doing things.
Hoarding and consumerism aren’t so different. Objects become imbued with meaning, turn into totems of possibility, promises of security, comfort, and control.
I think of everything I’ve ever bought that I’ve regretted, for one reason or another -- the jeans that were one size too small, the bright lipstick, the perfume I bought thinking of the person I’d like to be, the books I bought in an attempt to become more cultured.
I like Kondo’s suggestion that we should thank an object before letting go, a ritual to provide closure and a powerful antidote to the sunk cost fallacy. Yes, orange looks terrible on me. Thank you for teaching me something.
But we feel compelled to hold onto our ill-advised purchases, unwilling to face them yet unwilling to part with them. We want to keep the possibility alive, like holding onto someone's phone number even through the relationship has been ruined, irreversibly so.
I’ve been trying to stay on top of my hoarding problem for years and although I’ve made progress, I’ve never felt in control of it. I decluttered and deleted begrudgingly, knowing that it was in my best interests to do so.
Lately I’ve found myself deleting bookmarks en masse as if startled awake by some grand revelation. The more I wrote the more I realised I had no use for any of it, actually, and found myself giddy at the prospect of making room for something new and more worthwhile.
It reminds me of the freedom and clarity that new minimalists often talk about. I think the feeling is mostly a matter of novelty, but ideally it should be an opportunity to pivot away from our obsession with things, whether that is owning as much as possible or as little as possible. Like everything else, what matters about minimalism is chiefly how we engage with it.
Here’s how to avoid becoming a hoarder: do something.
Use the old china, light the candles, donate the clothes, read the books. Doing things leaves no room for clutter. And if it’s too late for you, you can always try writing about it.
You can support my work by buying me a coffee ☕
Do you have any hoarding tendencies of your own? Too many bookmarks? Twenty tabs open at all times? Do you keep adding videos to your YouTube watchlist?
Comment below and let me know what you think!