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Comment by nowicleanpoop | Hacker News Reader

The only people I know who have profoundly cluttered homes filled with much more stuff than average had war or famine/poverty as a part of their personal history.

I'm sure this doesn't account for all cases and my sample isn't representative.

When I notice the extra items in the homes of hoarders I know, they're nothing that I haven't or wouldn't have acquired in one way or another -- they're things I would've thrown away.

I see no evidence in the article that a possible increase in (more likely recognition of) hoarding is a result of increased consumption and yet that connection is implied in the article again and again.

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I seem to recognise this behaviour in my girlfriend (Thai nationality). She was from a very poor family, they didn't even have shoes to wear some of the time. Food was also very limited, sometimes she'd share a single egg with her brothers and sisters and her mother wouldn't eat. Or her father wood kill a raccoon and they'd eat a raccoon for dinner.

Now our 1.5 year old daughter probably has 20-30 pairs of shoes and every other week my girlfriend buys a new pair. Same is true for toys. Our daughter definitely gets a few new toys every month and most of it is sadly of crappy quality.

For clothes it's the same. My girlfriend has many old clothes in the drawer and buys new clothes for our daughter every month - she doesn't buy too much new clothes for herself though.

I do try to make her change this behaviour, but it's not easy and I don't want to fight over it. I am a bit worried our house will be cluttered with crap in the coming years.

Having lived in poverty, particularly as a child, was certainly a trigger for many hoarders, but it isn't the only one. We just don't understand how mental disorders are triggered.

I know that I have trouble throwing stuff away if I think I might need it, be able to use it, or be able to repair it. Part of this is probably inherited from my mother, who I think might have ended up with a house like some of those you see on TV if it weren't for my father helping to set boundaries.

While I don't think hoarding itself is genetic, it is clear that there has to be a genetic predisposition that make it easier for this type of behavior to be triggered. My mother also ended up being diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, and I think it's a reasonable hypothesis that there's a connection, although obviously I don't have the data to prove it.

> it is clear that there has to be a genetic predisposition that make it easier for this type of behavior to be triggered.

You just described one of the major theories about the onset and progression of mental illness: the diathesis/stress theory of mental illness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diathesis%E2%80%93stress_model

Around here we have a term for that which directly translates to "warchild" (or "child of war"). Mainly used for people who grew up in scarcity around WWII.

My girlfriends grandmother is often referred to as such. She has a high perceived value of things because the scarcity is ingrained in her.

Yep, my parents who grew up in communist Poland used to collect so much stuff it's unbelivable. And then I can't really blame them - during the communist times if you wanted a new washing machine or a radio you had to wait for a special coupon to buy one, or maybe you had to figure out how to get some foreign currency to buy one in special shops that sold foreign goods(the irony being that these shops sold goods for US dollars, but you couldn't legally obtain US dollars anywhere, you could only get them if someone sent them to you for instance or if you had legitimate business with the West - for which of course you had to get a special permit that was difficult to get).

So yeah, of course we always had several of everything, because "what if it breaks and you can't buy another".

> you couldn't legally obtain US dollars anywhere, you could only get them if someone sent them to you for instance or if you had legitimate business with the West

This reminds me of a funny story.

A friend of mine lived in north America while his parents in lived in Yugoslavia. This was during the war.

He would spend hours on the phone with them. He would often call them, and hang up right away, and they would call him back and talk for hours.

I finally asked him if it wasn't crazy expensive for his parents back home?

It turns out his father had a job that paid him in Deutch Marks. When the phone bill would come it would be a ridiculous sum: millions of dinars!

They would just wait for the second notice for the local currency to devalue even more (war was causing hyperinflation) so now those millions of dinars would cost pennies in DM.

They would pay it and repeat the process next month.

So I was actually reading Stanislaw Lem's biography(famous Polish Sci-Fi Author) and it's full of gems about this.

A lot of his correspondence with other authors in years 1955-1965 is about the fact that even being a recognized and "well paid" author means nothing under the communist system. What use is having hundreds of thousands of Polish zlotys, if you can't actually buy anything with them? Obviously you could use them to buy food and pay rent, but you couldn't just go and buy a new TV or a car, even though you had enough money for either - but without getting the right permissions and coupons you simply couldn't buy it.

A really interesting bit was about him having to go to Prague to collect the money for his books sold in Czechoslovakia, but he was paid in koronas - which were useless back in Poland, you couldn't even exchange them for zlotys at the time, much less for any currency that would be useful. So him and his wife basically spent 2 weeks in Prague living as lavishly as possible in that system spending pretty much everything he earned in one go - because that money was worthless otherwise. I think he said he lived for 2 weeks on a diet of caviar because that was the most expensive thing on the menu of the hotel restaurant, and he had to burn through this pile of money.

Getting Eastern Deutsche Marks for his books was slightly more attractive, because it allowed him to purchase a car that was above any ZSRR produced vehicle - a real East Germany Wartburg! Of course it turned out to be absolute crap as well, but that was the best he could hope for without finding a source of real Western money - with Dollars he could have bought a proper western car, but it was impossible to do otherwise no matter how "rich" he was.

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