I grew up relatively poor as well, but I think the difference for me was my parents. I seen how they both would hoard items, and after dealing with the mess that was my Mom’s storage a couple of years, it put a bad taste in my mouth for collecting stuff.
Thanks for the link.
I’ve never discarded other people’s possessions, but there have been another, minor, problem at times: I’ve rid myself of gifts given to me by others, especially my parents, and then have them ask me where those things went.
With my mother, especially, this has been a problem, as she is the exact opposite of me: She has very definite hoarding tendencies. When I was a kid, there was a room in our house that was filled with junk. Just garbage. I don’t even know how she managed to accumulate it all. She just would not throw things out. Our kitchen drawers were filled to overflowing with old pens, rubber bands, screws, various crap, receipts from two decades ago, and so on. Uneaten leftovers from a meal would stay in the back of the fridge until way, way beyond the point where they were inedible and threatened to walk out by themselves. This, of course, in addition to the mountains of what you would call normal possessions, things that you might classify as functional, but that were mostly just sitting there, useful to no one, for year after year. Bicycles no one was riding. Clothes that hadn’t been worn for ages and ages. Toys from when my brother and I were younger, that no one was playing with anymore. Fishing rods, although no one in the house ever went fishing. All that stuff. As well as decorative items, by the bucketload, in every nook and cranny of the house. Figurines on every surface and pictures on every wall.
I do wonder if my own opposite behavior is a reaction to this. It certainly drove me nuts even as a kid.
The problem more or less came to an end when my parents moved house about a decade ago, when she threw out most of it in one big purge. She had to - you can’t readily explain to anyone, or at least not to my dad, why you want to bring along a metric ton of junk in the moving van, to a smaller house, that you’ve even bought a new set of furniture for anyway. While she still has more stuff than, to me at least, seems humanly possible, the problem never got as bad again as it was. At least now most of it is nice or has some practical function, and she doesn’t keep useless garbage anymore. Well, at least not as much.
Even so, the idea that someone else might not want things has never really penetrated her mind. She always wants to buy me stuff, like I’ll somehow die if I don’t have a new pair of shoes or a cheese grater.
For the longest time, she would give me things for Christmas and birthdays. Then I would give them away or throw them out, or “lose” them in some unexplainable way. And it would hurt her feelings, like rejecting objects was the same as rejecting love. And then I would feel guilty about it. Rinse, repeat.
Now, I’ve finally managed to train her, and the rest of my family, to understand that when I say that no, I really don’t want anything for Christmas, I’m not being modest. I really mean it. But it took years and years to get there. The first part was realizing that I can say that, instead of just saying thank you, and then getting rid of the stuff later behind everyone’s back.
Although, the thing is, I’m just as bad, but in the opposite direction. I’m not good at giving gifts to others. I just don’t intuitively grok what things they might want, or that being given things they never wanted in the first place could possibly make them happy. I just don’t have a feeling for it, and I usually can’t bring myself to give people physical objects.
I’m not saying that I’m not generous (at least I try not to be less generous than your average person), just that I’d much rather buy someone dinner, or a holiday, or take them out to a play, or buy a round of drinks, or help them with something, or do some favor for them. (For instance, how about I help you clear out your house of all those useless things you have sitting around one these days? Wouldn’t that be nice?)
I had that problems as well, but I never got the heavy guilt trip like you did. After some years, my Mom finally got it, and the only thing I usually get for my birthday is a phone call, and for Xmas, leftovers, and really, that’s all I honestly want. Anything else I want, at this point, I can buy for myself because I am a adult.
Otherwise, if you ask me, gifts should be for children. They tend to appreciate it more, because they do not have the means like adults do to buy things.
Yeah, I agree completely.
Finally trained my parents not to send gifts for Christmas that only needed to be stored some where and later thrown out or donated by sending them fruit baskets. The fruit doesn’t have to be stored somewhere in the house. By mid January its all gone; nothing material is left that they need to find a spot for in the house. Dates from AZ, Pineapples from HI and Cherimoyas from California all make great gifts that “disappear” in a few weeks. And both my parents and I feel great about that fact that we exchanged gifts. Its much better than saying to them that you want them to stop sending a gift.
I had a coworker once who had almost nothing in her office that belonged to her personally. No coffee cup, no photo of her family, no stress ball. She had worked there something like 8 years. I asked her about it once and she told me if she was ever cut in a layoff she wanted to be able to walk out with her stuff alone and in one trip.
I am a neat-freak. I also grew up “working class poor”. However, everyone else in my family is trailor-trash hoarders, I escaped. I love a clean house and everything orderly. My basement is empty. I do have nice furniture (if I do say so myself) and no clothes I don’t wear (aside from the eight tuxedos I had tailored over the years).
Thank God! Because when I started to have to use wheelchair I only needed to move a piece or two of furniture to have a clear space all over the house.
Precisely. To some degree, all “mental illnesses” are normal functional behaviors which are taken to such an extreme that they cause distress, but the person can’t stop doing them, even when they recognize their actions are causing distress in their lives and they really really want to stop.
It’s perfectly normal, as we age, to become less attached to Stuff and to start paring down. Does everyone do this? No. But it’s common enough and doesn’t cause distress, so we call it “normal”. Purging or not acquiring Stuff as you age, particularly if you’re doing it so as not to burden your kids with dealing with your Stuff (and especially if you offer them said Stuff while you’re still alive, to avoid causing interpersonal conflict) is not dysfunctional or diagnosable.
A good way to tell if you might have a problem is to try not doing it, and see what happens. Does NOT throwing away (or giving away) the camera cause you anxiety, insomnia, repetitive thoughts which bother you, or stress in your interpersonal relationships or ability to hold down a job? If so, you may have a problem which may be alleviated with proper treatment (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a good one). If not, if you can live with the camera in your position without distress, then you’re a person who *prefers *to live simply, and your actions are in your control and you probably don’t have a “disorder”.
Obsessive compulsive spartanism is not a DSM diagnosis, but it’s as good a label as any for the behavior - except that it limits things to OCD in the mind of the layperson. In reality, just like with hoarding behavior, many disorders can cause it or have it as a symptom. Could be Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or Anxiety or Depression, or the manic aspects of Bipolar I or II Disorders or Schizoaffective Disorder…or even Hyperthyroidism, depending on what your other symptoms are and exactly why you’re getting rid of things more than you’d like to, to the degree that it’s causing distress.
The guy in the OP doesn’t sound like he’s got any of those, from the description given.
Now that’s more likely to be the symptom of some disorder or another…but it may also be a mismatch in lifestyle choices. There again, we’ve got to make a judgement about whether this woman’s behavior is maladaptive and overcontrolling, or whether she married a hoarder and her attempts to declutter were seen by her family as maladaptive. And a big part of determining that is a family counseling session, and finding out whether she thinks her behavior is distressing to her, if she’s minimalizing to reduce excessive anxiety or stress, and if she’d prefer to stop it if the anxiety could be managed some other way.
You have my sympathy 
I agree, being generous is something that should go to kids, who have very little control about what they have or receive.
I never thought of my parents as hoarders. They had the usual stacks of boxes of old stuff in the basement, but not the mounds of stuff. I kind of wonder if my attitude is guilt - I know what it used to cost to buy things. Today between my wife and I, we’re flush with cash. The same goes for her parents, who also scrimped and saved. But today - if someone needs a new coat, or wants to read that book, they simply buy - and within reason, and it’s not hurting anyone. Nobody racks up credit card bills we can’t pay off that month. We went to the middle east, a $20,000 trip was paid off well before the year was out. We’ve stopped giving gifts a while ago, because there’s nothing any of us “need”, so unless we find something that we think is really special - we don’t buy random junk for the sake of producing a gift.
However, when it’s time to part with something physical, I feel guilty throwing away money. I hate selling stuff; I would rather give it away if I knew it found a “good home”. However, the cameras for example go into a box downstairs when the new one is bought. They weren’t obsolete then, but a 4Mp camera surely is now. Similarly, if “the diet starts tomorrow”, should I throw out perfectly good clothes that are simply a size too small?
That’s why I think, the people who purge are the ones who don’t care about the cost of re-acquiring things they need that they recently threw out. If someone went straight from being supported through college by the parents, to a well-paying career, they probably never had to realize the real value of working for what they had. It always seems like things just came to them, and then once they were working, the cost of "things’ was quite low. It seems to me that unless you are very determined to spend extravagantly, there are very few things needed for an average urban lifestyle that cannot be bought by one month a professional’s salary, excluding house and car. You got rid of the Panini press or Keurig coffee machine or your iPod and decide a few months later you want one again? A day or two’s salary. Nice bicycle or set of skis? Less that a week’s salary, unless you want the carbon-fibre frames 28-gear Olympic sports bike or the absolute top of the line skis. Ditto for home appliances, entertainment systems, etc. And so on… We live in a crazy rich world if you have a good income.
The only difference is that there are so many of these items to choose from, you can become a hoarder by necessity unless you limit yourself. There are dozens of entertainment options where our grandparents maybe had a radio, record player, and (if you are young) a TV. No computer and internet, no Xbox, no DVD/BR player, no Netflix, no cable or satellite TV connection, no DVR, no CD or MP3 players. The car came with a radio. Plus, the “guilt cost” - when I was a kid, minimum wage was $1/hr and a colour TV (when they came out) was over $500 - 3 months’ wages. Today a colour TV twice the size still costs $500 but minimum wage is $10 or so, a big TV costs just over a week’s minimum wage.
I definitely see some of this spartan tendency in myself. I was in a long-term relationship with a woman with severe hoarding tendencies, to the point that I recognize many of the behaviors seen on the hoarding-themed TV shows, and it’s left me with a strong compulsion to throw things away at the least provocation. People debate what kind of disorder hoarding actually is, but strictly from my secondhand experience of it, hoarding is a strategy for coping with anxiety, and assuaging one’s fears about loss of control. The argument against waste — “This is a perfectly good VHS tape rewinder/fax machine/canned ham/pair of Mork suspenders” — while sincere for some hoarders, is (IMO) mostly just a rationalization for the fear of being caught unprepared — and thus out of control — in an unanticipated situation. Consequently, for me, discarding things (mostly through Goodwill, lest you think me profligate) is a way of asserting my independence, of refusing to knuckle under to anxiety. This has resulted in my having to occasionally re-buy things I once gave away, and feeling a bit silly in the process. But I’d rather waste a little money that way than waste energy worrying about every possible thing that may befall me.
I’ve been thinking a bit more about this whole thing. It’s funny that you talk about it as a way of refusing to knuckle under to anxiety. In my case, I wouldn’t describe it like that at all. I definitely think my own purging behavior is a way of dealing with anxiety in the same way that hoarding is for the hoarders. It really might be just two sides of the same coin. It’s a way to regain and maintain control of life.
Whenever a problem gets to big, my natural reaction is to try and make it smaller. If a situation gets out of hand, and I feel like I’m losing control of it, I tend to focus on isolating the essential parts, or reducing the noise, if you will. I try to get the situation down to a size and a level of complexity that I feel I can control and understand. Throwing stuff out, ridding myself of anything I don’t need, is kind of a part of the same strategy. The world, on a fundamental level, feels too big and too chaotic to me. So I need to make it smaller, and simpler. More basic.
Again, I’m probably not the worst purger out there. But I think it’s pretty clear that it’s a kind of neurotic response to anxiety in my case.
Oh, good point! I’ve lived in the Bay Area all my life, but that never occurred to me. Right you are.
The minimalist probably won’t be having much of a successful estate sale.