The Secret Lives of Hoarders_ True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter - Matt Paxton [11]
▶ The Information Junkie
Rick, the college professor we met earlier, had twenty-five years’ worth of mail, magazines, and financial documents. A two-foot-thick layer of compressed paper carpeted the whole house.
Every surface in Rick’s house was covered in mail. The living room was so cluttered with huge piles of paper and other items that we didn’t realize there was furniture in there until we cleaned it up. Rick had spent his whole career gathering, sorting, and sharing information, so for him to throw away that paperwork was almost sacrilegious.
It is difficult for most “information hoarders” to let go of newspapers, books, or mail. Matt has learned that many hoarders know where a specific issue of a magazine or paper can be found.
This is a form of information hoarding. Rick couldn’t bear to let information slip through his fingers, out of his control. Books, newspapers, CDs, magazines, photographs—basically any printed or recorded material was important to him. Information hoarders are usually people who have dedicated their careers, and lives, to education in one form or another. Many of them are highly educated themselves and work at top-level jobs in government, law, corporate America, or at universities.
The average person will read the morning paper and then toss it into the recycling bin. Rick read it and then decided that the article on investing would be really helpful one day. Or he’d save a magazine with a gardening article for a friend. (Of course, the friend inevitably did not get the magazine.) Then there were the crossword puzzles—so good to take to a doctor’s appointment and work on in the waiting room. So each newspaper or magazine went into a pile. But the next day another newspaper went on top of the growing stack, and pretty soon he had years-old piles of paper that he saw as full of potentially useful information and entertainment.
The logic that so much information can be stored online nowadays has little effect on information hoarders. Some hoarders do, in fact, use their computers to back up the physical items they are holding. But for many hoarders, “online” can seem nebulous. If it’s not in the house, hoarders worry that they can’t locate what they need instantly. Surprisingly, information hoarders can usually find what they’re looking for—or at least know where it is in the piles, though it may be buried three feet deep.
▶ The Shopaholic
Marcie’s house was packed floor to ceiling with unopened plastic bags of items from discount and big-box stores. This stout, gray-haired grandmother who dressed in flowery polyester pantsuits loved to shop. Her hoarding had progressed to the point where she’d go shopping to replace things she couldn’t find in her mess, but then she would also buy extra stuff while she was at it. For years, Marcie would come home from her latest spree, put her shopping bags down on the nearest pile, and then never look at them again. Soon she forgot what she had just bought and often ended up buying replacements for something she didn’t know she already had—something still pristine in its original packaging.
Marcie just couldn’t pass up a good bargain. She got a real “high” from the hunt-and-purchase process and couldn’t stand the thought of a good sale item going to waste. She appreciated the value of that sale item and felt smart for grabbing it.
There’s a reason why shopping has become what’s called “retail therapy.” When Marcie bought yet another dress for her three-year-old granddaughter, who already had way too many dresses, Marcie wasn’t thinking about the dress. She was thinking about the granddaughter: how cute she was, how she would love the dress and smile