In the living room there isn’t any place to sit that doesn’t have something on it. He points to an older piece of furniture. It is an old fashioned desk that used to be his mother’s. The drawers are full of family photos and tchotchkes. “Different things that have meant things to me. A lot of it is worthless, meaningless.” He pulls out a plastic robin’s egg blue toothbrush holder. “My mom wrote my name on it.” He shrugs his shoulders and put his hands palms up by his shoulder, making the universal gesture for “WTF?”
Adam refers to himself as a hoarder and calls his apartment “terrible” and a “swamp.” “I have one friend who won’t stay here or come over. She always stays in a hotel.” He actually tries not to spend time in his apartment. He loves to go out, see friends, tag along on family trips. His dance card is rarely empty. That said, he knows there’s a moment every day when he realizes he has to figure out what to do after work, where he spends a considerable amount of time. “I am not a planner and not a decision maker. . . . Am I going to go home to this horrible apartment? I will find something to do. And something I want to do that might motivate me to clean up the desk. Maybe try to write something.” He sighs as he points at the computer. It is on a desk that you can’t really see under all the paper. “The computer is an amazing thing for a hoarder. I have folders and folders of articles that I’ve saved. I don’t know that it is any better. They are somewhat organized. There are folders by topic . . . even to the point of a hierarchy of folders of structure and incredibly organized by topic. Writing research project. Actual projects. Subject topics. Then I have one hundred places that are marked, ‘Go through this folder!’”
During the course of our conversation, without any prompting, Adam ticked off one chronic disorganization threshold after the other: perfectionism, traumatic events, attempts to remedy the situation, difficulty in decision making, negative impact on social life, shame. He also knows it is getting worse. He recognizes the domino effect. For example, in the middle of the night a few months back he noticed a leak in his kitchen ceiling from some pipe. It was 3:00 AM and he knew the super wouldn’t come, so he just closed the door. Now that the pipe has been fixed the ceiling needs painting, but he knows he can’t get someone in there to do it until he cleans the kitchen.
There’s also the issue that he thinks this just may be who he is, and that if he cleaned up he would no longer be Adam, That Guy with the Apartment, as people know him and introduce him. That’s how I met him, through a friend who said, “You have to see my friend Adam’s apartment!”
“I have to say, I dine out on it a bit,” he admits puckishly. He does perk up at the idea of working with a professional organizer, but wonders if this behavior is in his DNA. “I can remember unwrapping gifts . . . and my mom saying, ‘Don’t rip the paper . . . we can use it again.’ My parents’ garage down in Florida, there are jam jars filled with nails. . . . What I’ve learned is, I believe, my parents are hoarders, or what I believe are hoarders, whether they are technically or not.”
His suggestion that his elderly parents have a problem is in line with the research around aging and holding on to items. Of the 13 percent of people over sixty-five who develop dementia, one in five exhibits some sort of hoarding.9 The physical limitations and cognitive impairments that occur as we age can contribute to the accumulation of things and the inability to get rid of them.
There are also distinct attitudes about objects based on generational cohorts. Valentina Sgro has written and lectured on the subject extensively. She describes the current elderly generation born between 1922 and 1946 as the Veteran Generation. They grew up in the decades after World War I, during the Great Depression, and during/after World War II. At some point during their lives was a period of great rationing. Holding on to things, saving things, was what they were taught to do, and it was considered a virtue. Throwing out a perfectly good item was and still is blasphemy to anyone who grew up experiencing drastic measures like the Emergency Price Control Act of 1942, which set rations for food during the war so that Americans were unable to buy sugar, coffee, or meat without government coupons. The New York Times ran a fantastic series on Depression era survivors in their own words. Gladys from Florida wrote this:
My mother never threw anything away. If a sheet got worn, she would cut it up and put it together with another sheet. She mended towels, and when they frayed around the edges, she cut them up to make washcloths. The sheet got old and were worn out in the middle, they cut strips from the sides, narrow strips, and tied the ends together and put it on the loom and wove blankets. If they wanted color, they added narrow strips of fabric from old dresses.10
It is a common refrain that organizers hear. Lynn from Florida told me clients say to her, Someone will use it someday or It belonged to my mom, my grandmother, my grandpa. It is easy to understand the mentality. That is why there are garages with jam jars full of nails, like Adam’s parents, or fill in the blank for the member of the Veteran Generation in your life. What was a behavior for survival during lean times can translate to troublesome habits given the available abundance of the last half of the twentieth century. Imagine what a Costco looks like to someone who had to stand in line for food?
Sgro’s other presentation point about generational collecting habits is that the Veteran Generation takes its role as historians very seriously. “They view themselves as repositories of lore and wisdom.” She found these folks are often obsessed with the past, and some of them see it as their duty to save everything for future generations. Another issue for members of this greatest generation is that they were very accustomed to order and rules. When those rules disappear after retirement, it can be unsettling. She said one way to help an elder with junk issues is to remember that they respond to structure, systems, and authoritative sources of information.
Parts of the population are cognitively vulnerable when it comes to the accumulation of stuff. The love of junk is the perfect mash-up of the neurological and the behavioral. According to Dan Ariely, who is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, humans aren’t wired to assess value. “We don’t have an internal value meter that tells us how much things are worth. Rather, we focus on the relative advantage of one thing over another and estimate value accordingly.”11 Humans take from external clues (a Kelly Blue Book assessment of your old car), but sometimes internal processing (I love that car!) layered over reality leads to an off-base valuation.
Through his research, economist Richard Thaler introduced the endowment effect. His work revealed that people will consistently value or overvalue an item just because they own it. The aversion to losing the item pumps up the items perceived worth for the owner. I’d like to suggest this could also be called the garage sale effect. How many times have you seen a used item with a sky-high price tag and thought, Really? You believe your old beach towels from Epcot Center are worth five dollars apiece? The answer is yes, because the idea of losing the object gives it more worth in the eyes of the owner.
A recent neuroscience study backs up the idea of aversion to loss, even if the items are useless. Yale University researchers discovered that two areas of the brain that register anxiety and even pain were stimulated in certain people, mostly hoarders, when they were asked to discard a personal item. The areas of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula, registered activity when “actual real time and binding decisions had to be made about whether to keep or discard possessions.”12 The possessions in this experiment were not family mementos or photos. The possessions were junk mail and newspapers.
It would be hard to discard something if you believe on some level it has feelings and emotions. It is what scientists describe as the human ability to decide that a thing is “worthy of moral care and consideration.”13 This anthropomorphizing of possessions led researchers at the University of Miami to find that “anthropomorphic tendencies were significantly associated with greater saving behaviors and the acquisition of free things.”14 It could b
e hard to give away that poor chair because it will be lonely without you.
Then there are people who retain things out of a sense of honor. Researchers at Texas A&M who studied what’s known as product retention tendency describe a behavior which is “more closely associated with the waste avoidance tendencies of frugality, creative reuse, and environmental concern, whereas compulsive hoarding is more closely associated with the emotionally-charged product attachment tendencies of possession attachment and materialism.”15
There’s one contributor to junk-a-holism that is prevalent and hard to avoid: touch leading to ownership. The science supports what retailers have known for years. We’ve all had a sales person encourage us to feel a soft, fuzzy sweater or run our hands across the grain of a leather couch that’s on sale. A purchase is more likely to be made if one holds the item, because certain brains are wired to take ownership upon touch and to feel connected to a thing just because of the contact with it. The writers of a piece titled “Please Touch the Merchandise” in the Harvard Business Review advised firms to read up on the latest science around touch and to consider how “physical warmth, weight, and hardness can influence consumer decisions. Arming managers with knowledge regarding the precise effect of specific touch sensations can further improve retail strategy.”16 Two researchers, one a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Business and the other at UCLA Anderson School of Management, noticed that the attorney general of Illinois warned shoppers about haptic manipulation and being pressured to handle merchandise during the holiday season. They sought to investigate the premise. Subjects, 231 in all, were presented with a Slinky and a mug on a table about two feet away. Some were asked to touch the items, play with them, and handle them. The other group was told hands off. At the end of the session when asked if they felt any ownership of this mug or could own this mug, those who touched the items had indeed grown attached to them. The non-touchers were indifferent or not committed at all.
The length of time you hold something can also affect how you feel about it. A project called “The Power of Touch” revealed that participants who held mugs longer were willing to pay over 60 percent more for the mugs than participants who held the mugs for shorter periods.17
The ICD has its own name for this behavior and Samuels has seen it in her work with clients. “There is something called kinesthetic sympathy. I notice that when someone who does tend to get emotionally attached to their things, if they touch it, they become even more attached.” She has developed a workaround. “So if I am working with someone new and we are deciding what’s going to stay [and] what might be a candidate for going, I’ll ask permission to touch something. If everything they are touching stays then I say, ‘Is it OK if I hold it while you decide? Let’s see what happens.’ And very often that makes the difference.”
One astute organizer from Calgary boiled it down to one sentence about why her clients keep unnecessary items close by. Deidre said, “To them, it’s not a thing. It’s a memory.”
“I am careful about the words I choose,” Linda Samuels says slowly. And she is being careful in sharing this with me because she knows the name of this book. She does not use the word junk about her clients’ things. “I don’t even say ‘throw out’ or ‘trash.’ I will tend to say things [like] ‘edit your possessions’ or ‘let go’ or ‘release.’ I’m trying to honor even the things they decide [to throw out]. I don’t make those judgments. Let’s just say we are talking about clutter; what is clutter to one person is an end goal to another.” She feels it is important to be clear about this particular issue. “For me as an organizer, I have to be really careful with my words because junk, when you are working with CD clients, it is an insult.”
Pack Rats
You really shouldn’t be too insulted if someone calls you a pack rat. It’s not just an inventive name for a person who likes to store randomly acquired items. Common white-throated wood rats, scientific name Neotoma albigula, are 1) incredibly cute, and 2) serve a bigger purpose. In leaving behind their jam-packed homes, pack rats have helped archaeologists look back thousands of years via the fossilized matter those rodents tucked away. So you can drop that information next time someone looks around your garage and tries to use pack rat as a pejorative.
Pack rats are small, furry, and cartoonishly adorable creatures. They look like the successful result of a scientific experiment to genetically engineer a rodent to resemble a kid’s stuffy toy. Weighing in at just under a pound, they have round, chubby little bodies, brownish fur, black button eyes, and circular ears that stand out like hand fans. Pack rats have fuzzy tails, unlike their much less appealing city cousins, Norway rats, whose hairless, whip-like rudders are creepy. Pack rats are passive loners. They just want and need to collect things to bring back to their nests.
Tom Van Devender was the senior research scientist at the Arizona–Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, Arizona, for twenty-six years and he knows pack rats. “I think they’re very opportunistic. Most of them are real generalists. They’ll go out and they’ll try something. They’ll try anything that’s there. So, they may decide, ‘Well, I don’t like this’ and drop it.” The southwest is the home turf for Neotoma albigula and Van Devender has conducted numerous field studies of their habitat. Even though he is a scientist he doesn’t use the Latin name for the species or call them wood rats, as other scientists do. He prefers to call the animals pack rats, a nickname they have been called for a century, although one scientific journal wouldn’t publish his work if he did.
What does he make of their collecting tendencies? “I think it’s innate.” Van Devender recalled an experiment with a baby pack rat who was separated from its parents. The rat, raised without the nurturing of mom and dad rat, was put in an aquarium alone. It immediately went to work building a house with what was made available to it. Van Devender calls them natural snoops. “They’ll see shiny things and bring them back. One time I was doing a little studying about strips of shiny things. I realized that if they got really interested they’d just keep going further and further. I think that’s curiosity.”
Although the pack rat is the most well known of the collectors in the animal kingdom, other species do it as well. Legend has it that intelligent crows called magpies also like shiny things, though recent science has questioned that claim.18 The reputation is so enduring that an opera by Gioachino Rossini called La Gazza Ladra, which translates as The Thieving Magpie, uses the bird’s kleptomania as a plot point to create drama. There is one real-life documented case of a magpie making off with the goods. Imagine how devastated Julia Boaler of Sheffield, England, was when she realized she couldn’t locate her large pear-shaped diamond engagement ring. She and her fiancé looked in sink drains, pulled up the carpets, and turned their car inside and out. Years later during a spring clean up of their yard, they found the sparkler in an old magpie nest.19
There’s no debate that some animals collect things to propagate their species. The male satin bowerbird builds a tunnellike nest out of plain old sticks but then decorates his bachelor pad with found items that are mostly blue because female bowerbirds really have a thing for blue. The males will bring back blue pens, bottle caps, and key rings to tuck into their nests, setting the stage for what they hope comes next. The goal is to attract a ladybird to make baby birds. For protection, the decorator crab, a variety of spider crab, will grab pieces of shell, sponge, and seaweed and fasten the items to their backs for camouflage. Survival drives these creatures.
“Wiffle balls. They really like wiffle balls,” says Kris Brown, who is also known around Tucson as Mr. Pack Rat. A forty-year veteran of the pest control business, his job is to get rid of pack rats who have decided to make their homes in and around human houses in the southwest.
As someone who is called in to dismantle pack rat dens, Kris has pulled all kinds of things out of the nests.20 He keeps the winners in a display box at his home office. “The best nest as far as interesting stuff is always where th
ere’s little kids [in the homes] because [the rats] take the kids’ toys.” His treasure box is full of, among other things, a rubber duck, a Barbie with the hair chewed off, a phone handset, a political rally button for Fife Symington (the former governor of Arizona who was indicted for fraud), car keys, half a Ken doll, a Double Bubble wrapper, the motor from a Swedish erotica vibrator, lots of balls of all sizes, a piece of a beer can, a baby shoe, and a mousetrap, suggesting that at least one pack rat understands irony.
Pack rats originally lived in the arid desert mountains in the south and mountain west. They created dens in rock crevices and boulder piles as protection from their natural predators. As humans moved into the desert, pack rats saw even more opportunity for protection and hydration in the lovely gardens planted by landscapers. Pack rats really don’t want to set up shop in a human home like other rodents. Kris says if a pack rat gets stuck in a house it will destroy the home trying to claw its way out. They care more about their own dens than yours. They prefer your lawn. Humans have made it so darn inviting with all that cacti and those sprinkler systems making water so easily available. Kris explains, “Pack rats are limited by their habitat. There’s only so much habitat. When you build a house and put in roads and streets, you suddenly create a lot more habitat. The runoff from the streets, the irrigation, you get a lot better environment.”
“The spawn of Satan” is how one homeowner described them. Another found it amusing when he stumbled on a pack rat and tried to shoo it away with a shiny wrench, only to have the little critter play tug-of-war and try to take it.
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