your life is such a cluttered snowglobe of disaster that you forgot your stars. don't worry, i got your back.

A certain amount of clutter is fine (and often has an underlying order, there are plenty of creative, sometimes highly successful people who are cluttered way beyond anything I could stand), but there's a line.

I also don't buy the "possessions hold you down" line as some kind of universal truth, but they definitely can in some cases.


tl;dr this guy cray cray

My most valuable possession is a 70s Gibson Hummingbird knock-off (looks like a Gibson, plays like a Gibson) that I got from a pawn shop for . Yay for ignorant salespeople.

If it's an Ibanez then it's better than a Gibson from that period. I'm not sure what my most valuable possession is, but there's a high likelihood that I paid under 0 for it and a not insignificant likelihood that I paid under .The thing about a controlled, deliberate, managable amount of hoarding is you reach a sweet spot where you aren't living like a hoarder but you can support your hobbies almost entirely through barter (or even end up making it a profession if you're so inclined and have the luck, temperament and skill to pull it off).

The people I've known who were really into living a minimal, ascetic life have almost invariably been the most self-loathing, angry, and likely to strike out at others. Self denial is just another kind of self indulgence.

(that wasn't meant to imply anything about anyone in here)

It's the dreadnought style body, black, mother of pearl inlays, epoxy pickguard with an image something /similar to a Hummingbird or Dove. No name on the head stock, no adhesive stains on the inside from a sticker or anything. There's a serial number hidden up near the neck on the inside I haven't been able to track down at all. Clearly old, though; the white trim on the edge of the fret-board has developed some cracks down the length of it and the saddle is of older style.

I think I strike a balance between self-indulgence and minimalism. A fancy-ass laptop would be nice, and maybe some more audio 'ware and a good mountain bike. Other than that, meh.

I do have self-loathing in spades, though. So maybe you're not far off.

That brings up a question, what is the line between collecting and crazy. I'd say its fine to collect rare games and consoles, but all those broken bits, parts, old computers, and TVs really need to go.

I think it really depends on organization. I think it's fine to have shelves of records, tapes, or whatnot if they are on display, accessible, and orderly. But, if you get to the point where you just have box after box of random shit in storage units or all over your floor and garage, you are probably entering an unhealthy place. Things are only as good as their use, and if it takes you more than maybe a minute or two to find the thing, it probably isn't that useful to you.

Agreed, with the caveat that organization is subjective and excessive organization is just as psychologically unhealthy as this is, despite being more socially acceptable.

I also think organization is a problematic metric for this because it has at least as much to do with social class as it does with mental health.

Like, Neil Young owns around 600 identical Fender amps and claims he's only found one that sounds the way he likes. Is he not hoarding just because he's respected and has the money and space to keep them organized and maintained well? If someone nobody had heard of had the same amps packed into a small apartment would they be hoarding while Neil isn't?

Am I a hoarder because I have to make my workshop and office/studio fit into an apartment that's a bit too small for them right now, because of the price of rent? If I could afford to rent two studio spaces for them (or even an apartment with two more rooms) would that make a difference?

It's complicated, escept in the clear-cut cases like this guy.

"Collection" usually indicates that you care about quality and have specific criteria. Filling your closet with random garbage that, at one point, USED to be many different vintage game consoles is not a collection so much as it is a mental illness.

True, but a lot of the people I've know who were full on hoarders (I worked at a record store for 6 years, I met quite a few) DID have criteria for what they hoarded, it just wasn't necessarily rational. Actually the only person I can think of in my own life who was a serious hoarder and really did just collect random garbage (including a lot of literal garbage) without any apparent rhyme or reason was also schizophrenic.

LJ Time: I had a room-mate who was a garbage hoarder with OCD. She would spray 70% isopropyl alcohol onto anything she brought into the house...she would also spray anything she threw out BEFORE it left the house. She constantly sprayed her room, her boyfriends' clothes, the hallway leading down to their bedrooms, etc.

It got to the point where she wouldn't come through the front door, or allow her boyfriend to come through the front door because she decided she didn't like one of the other room-mates. We lived in a bad part of town, so of course junkies caught on that you could jump in and out of the window easily enough. The alcohol smell made it very unpleasant for anybody who came over or had to live there; it was the middle of winter and I had a room in the freezing-ass basement, but it was almost impossible to breathe or think upstairs.

So things eventually went all to pot, she and her boyfriend (used to be a good buddy of mine) move out in the middle of the night, and the land-lord offers to pay me to clean out her room. So okay, why not?

Turns out the smell of the isopropyl was covering up the smell of rotted food and mold from the multiple garbage bags full of rotting food, some of it still in the reusable grocery bags which she'd brought it home in. There also happened to be money in almost every bag because I guess she told the cashier to just chuck it in the bag. There were also coins from 25c to all over the place; on top of bags, inside of bags, GLUED to the floor with filth. All told I made about on top of what the landlord paid me.

It was one of the most disgusting, degrading and profitable hours I've ever spent in my life.

Ugh, got caught up in my disgust, there. Some of the food had made it's way into garbage bags, some of it had never made it's way out of the grocery bags.