Unsoft's List

c r a z i e r t h a n y o u t h i n k

I am constantly being teased by Mandy and my family about being a hoarder, and to some degree I'll admit it.  When I was a little kid, I wanted to be an "inventor".  I kept everything I ever broke with the thought that I would transform it into something else, maybe even better than before. 

I could go into a good bit of analysis and discussion about what social problems and which specifics of the human condition interact to make a person a hoarder and also why the rest of us need to separate them and classify them as such.  Just like every American generation I've ever been exposed to directly, I believe I am a product of the Golden Age of Everything.  Manufacturing and entertainment are the big ones for me, but I'm getting older so I'm beginning to slipslide into that perspective that everything from "my days" is better than today.  Although that's just tangential and subjective, I have some completely objective points to make also.

I am PROFOUNDLY saddened by waste.  I am PROFOUNDLY saddened by things MADE to be WASTED.  The entropy cost of manufacturing plastic nothings with materials sourced from literally everywhere, shipped back to literally everywhere from China arranged into some icicle lights or Mighty Beanz which are entirely intended to be lost, broken, and sooner rather than later, landfilled, is astounding to me.  The only lasting thing being made through this process is the arithmetic cost of entropy (chaos:  S = k ln(w) ).

I once wrote an old blog about the Mr. Turtle swimming pool I had when I was very young and didn't throw away for years.  The thing made me so very sad and it was always so hard to explain.  The face on the turtle was so friendly and attractive it even had some affect on me as a college student, much less as a little kid.  It made me want to be friends with the turtle.  Of course, the turtle could not be my friend, and to make matters worse, the pool was not even well made enough to swim in once - it leaked right out of the box.  The best way I have to explain it is this:  The reality gap between the promise of turtle friendship and the real, cheap plastic thing in the box IS the giant hole we try to fill with our garages, basements, closets, corners, nooks and crannies full of junk.

When I watch the television show Hoarders, I feel so much for the poor people involved and I identify with the worst of them.  I can easily stretch my mind to understand why the moldy, ratty cardboard boxes with undetermined content could mean so much to them.  It's not that much more of a stretch for me to understand why they'd want to keep an old empty cardboard tube that once held a favorite Christmas wrap or the instructions to an appliance they no longer have.  In many ways its representative to the hoarder, but we as a society, with our incessant advertising, marketing and drive to force more and more, of the less and less valuable or sustainable junk into people's closets and more importantly into our minds, must have some liability there.

The basic needs of human existence naturally formed the first economies. As economies themselves became one of the "new basics" of human existence, we began to blur the lines between need and want and the state of that dynamic centuries later in the Western world is what I would call profoundly PERVERTED.  Perverted in the sense of taking something natural and over focusing or overdeveloping aspects of it to the point it's unrecognizable and deleterious to society (much like other kinds of perversion).

The people on Hoarders are essentially just normal people who for whatever reason are better tuned to be drawn in by the perversion that we've been whipping into a frenzy for centuries.  They aren't given the respect they deserve, ever. Typical of our society, we love to gawk at the perverts and make fun of them.  Might as well be the sex offender show or the mug shot parade on TMZ. 

I have lots of junk.  Some of it would be considered valuable by a large segment of the population because it has market value (old musical instruments and things like that) but you could sort it into piles of things with significance to fewer and fewer people 'till you got to the huge pile of things essentially valuable only to me.  In my mind, all of it is still waiting (with the moldy basement full of broken toys of my childhood memories) to be magically transformed into "inventions" mother necessity hasn't inspired as of yet.

I have my own personal reality gap, also.(ya think?)  To make myself feel better in the face of all this disdain, I can call myself a "project guy" a "Maker" or a "DIY type".  The hard part is in getting others to call me those things.  To legitimately earn any of those titles, I would honestly have to "D" a lot more of "I".

Here's my yardstick for the whole game.  The so called experts always use the same line on the hoarders.  "But are you using this RIGHT NOW?"

It is a loaded question and it's not fair debate.  There's an obvious implication there that nobody should have anything they aren't using "right now", so with recent studies indicating that there really is no such thing as multitasking, just shorter intervals to rotate between linear tasks, nobody should have more than one thing to their names?

My question back would be "No, not right this second.  How 'bout your savings account?  You using that RIGHT NOW?  Your retirement plan?  Just askin'."
As a matter of fact, I think fear of the future (the same mental engine that drives things like retirement savings) is a contributor for me also.  I have never had all that much faith that the stores, banks and factories will be here as long as I might.  Given some form of that as a potential eventuality, where might a guy get something like a 1950's analog technology K&E transit, a slide rule, or even a good selection of silicon diodes or enough consistently manufactured copper wire to customize an electric transformer or motor, wind custom inductor coils or make simple resistors?  Correct.  Right out of my dusty, moldy savings account.