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A society of hoarders

February 05

A fascinating show on television is called Hoarders. It details the lives of people who go beyond just a messy house, and where stuff takes over peoples’ lives. At first, I thought, maybe this was just an exception to how people live, but a recent trip to an antique store made me think it may run deeper than that.

In just about any antique store (I admit it, I really like going to antique stores) and you will see the following:

Safety Razor blades, in their original containers.

Boxes for food,  not made for decades.

Sealed containers for pop, decades past it’s prime, unopened.

Boxed toys, never played with.

Medicine, still in containers, that would probably kill you if you tried them,

Tins, boxes, and used containers of all sorts.

Huge assortments of clothes from the last 80 years.

Why were these items not thrown out? They served no more useful purpose. Why keep an empty box of Ritz Crackers from 1964? I think the answer is, as a society, we have a really hard time throwing things away. I totally understand why furniture is in antique stores, it was designed to last for decades or even centuries, but razor blades? They were meant to used and thrown away. Why buy a toy, and never play with it? I can understand keeping the box if you want to keep it safe when you are not using it, but never opening it? I guess there are some really young collectors out there. I hope this is the case.

As Americans, we treasure our stuff. We hate getting rid of it because we paid money for it, and it sometimes has an emotional attachment. I find myself guilty of this as well. A personal story: For years I had 2 or 3 LARGE boxes full of cables and random electronics. I could not get rid of all those cables, dongles, and boxes of unknown usefulness. With cleaning up the basement, I finally got the nerve to start tossing cables. It took 3 rounds, but I am finally down to one, fairly small box of cables. In that box, everything in there is useful. All that outdated technology is gone. I was never going to need 20 RCA cables or an amplifier for a phonograph. It was really hard to admit that and just toss the crap out. This was just a few boxes in my basement. Try this times 120,000,000 households and you can see how antique stores and eBay are so well stocked.

Why do we treasure our stuff so much? I really don’t want to point the finger at our consumer society, but I don’t what else to blame. It has afflicted us with a need to accumulate stuff and make it nearly impossible to get rid of it, unless you are dead. I have a hunch about 95% of the stock of antique stores is estate objects. I still want to know how many broaches were made between 1910 and 1960. I am guessing about 2 billion. Buy, why did the dead keep these things? This can’t be a recent thing, since so many of the objects out there are decades old. Is it a post WWII thing? Post Depression? I am guessing the Great Depression really made people hold onto their things beyond their useful life and they passed those habits to their children. My Mother in Law was definitely affected in this way as well. Though, one has to wonder, how much of it is what your parents taught you and how much of it is what commercial messages are? I am not an anthropologist or psychologist, but if there are any readers out there who are, why do we keep these things?

 

Posted by on February 5, 2010 in General Comments

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