Have you ever stumbled on that A&E television show Hoarders? The documentary series focuses on people who suffer from compulsive hoarding and how it has affected their relationships with the people that care about them. The homes of these hoarders are usually so filthy that you feel dirty just from watching the show. Even though the people on hoarders are usually not Asian, I can safely vouch for my people when I say that Asian people love to hoard. My Chinese parents might not be classified as compulsive hoarders but they are still the closest thing to the people I see on television shows like Hoarders that I know of. My parents see things differently than most people do. Where most people see garbage, my parents see potential. For example, most people would recycle those old plastic individual yogurt cups but my parents would keep stacks of them and use them as bathroom cups. When I was growing up, if something could have a future use then it must be kept. Of course being resourceful is not necessarily a bad thing but it does mean that there is a good chance a lot of junk will collect in a short amount of time (for example, we have a half dozen old dog treat containers in our basement because my parents say they can be used again.)
My parents are not extreme enough to be labeled as compulsive hoarders but their example makes it really easy for me to see how somebody could become so attached to their things that they end up collecting them and become the people we see on television. I honestly wonder how many people actually need storage units and how many of those units are being used just to store what most people would consider to be junk. Apparently hoarding is genetic as I have just started to notice how much crap I have kept over the years. In one year my wife and I will move out of our apartment and into our new house and last month I decided that it was finally time for me to clear out my old bedroom at my parents' place. Even though I have moved out of my parents' house years ago, my childhood room is still there just as I had left it... full of junk.
As a kid, I used to collect stamps, coins, comics and cards. I also collected less desirable things like school notes and clothes. Just like my parents with the yogurt cups, I also kept junk because I thought that I might need it in the future. For example, in my mind it was a very reasonable to keep grade 11 English notes on Hamlet even though I was in university taking biology and philosophy courses because who knows when those Hamlet notes might be useful again. In terms of clothes, my old t-shirts with the armpit holes were kept for working out and pajamas which resulted in dozens of options when it came to picking out what to wear before going to bed. Last month I started cleaning out my childhood room and in the span of two hours I had thrown out garbage bags that were full of clothes, three recycling bins full of school notes and countless shoe boxes. (side note: I threw out all of my high school and university school notes but still haven't tossed my career related course notes yet. In terms of clothes, some of the gems that I found in my room include my old hockey jerseys as well as my high school blazer.) I know that I am not alone as one of my friends used to collect those McFarlane sports figurines (among other things like Anime DVDs that we thought were cool when we were 18-years-old) and he has absolutely no idea what to do with them now that he is ten years older and hopefully wiser.
I can totally understand how sentimentality can win over reason and just like many other people including my parents, I too have fallen victim to this. We all have things that remind us of people we care about; the problem with hoarding is that the attachment to objects becomes stronger than the attachment to the actual people. However, there are other objects like yogurt cups and school notes that probably have nothing to do with any person except ourselves and our compulsion to hoard. My parents are right as yogurt cups and dog treat containers can be reused again but I am starting to realize that they actually have to reuse those dozens of yogurt cups in order to make it worth their while. Similarly, those grade 11 Hamlet notes might be handy sometime down the line but does using those notes 20 years from now justify keeping it all of that time? There has to be a point where reasonableness outweighs usefulness or else you will keep collecting and be unable to throw things in the garbage.
