Hoarders

Hoarders

I’ve been making “house calls” for 34 years and I’m sure I’ve walked through, shown or sold ten thousand homes by now.  One thing those experiences have taught me is: Everyone struggles with “stuff”.  No one is immune and to a greater or lesser degree we all reside somewhere along the hoarder spectrum. 

Somewhere in the space between the person who can’t pull their second car into the garage anymore and the one who stopped being able to open their garage door decades ago. Between the person who can’t find their old high school yearbooks in the closet and the one who is down to one navigable room in their house. 

Between the person who can’t seem to get rid of a lifetime’s worth of Christmas stuff and the one who has become a neighborhood pariah because their yard is a junkyard full of discarded parts, broken appliances and rotting boxes. 

Somewhere in those spaces is where most of us make our homes. And I do mean “us” because even though I’ve witnessed more than my share of people wrestling with the dilemmas of downsizing, I’m not immune to the curse of “consumer culture” or to the irony of my own first world problems.  

Meanwhile we just blew through Season 13 of Hoarders, the show about people with obsessive compulsive disorders who buy, collect, accumulate and surround themselves with way too much stuff for reasons that are difficult to explain but that we all can all relate to simply by echoing the existential hoarder question: “What if I need it someday?”

Hoarders (145 episodes) is the show that  launched a thousand spin-offs to satisfy our insatiable appetites for more shows about stuff.  Think Hoarders Buried Alive, Hoarder SOS, The Hoarder Next Door, Extreme Worst Hoarding and everyone’s favorite:  Hoarder House Flippers.  There’s also an Elvis impersonator who tackles hoarding projects (probably looking for aliens and two-headed love children under mountains of garbage!)

The whole “stuff” genre includes shows like: Strange inheritance, My Strange Addiction, Extreme Makeover, Pawn Stars, Auction Hunters and Storage Wars.  And a slew of others that try to clean up after the horde: Clean House, Clean Sweep, Extreme cleaners, Dirty Rotten Cleaners, Hot Mess House, Conquer the Clutter.  Oprah, Dr. Phil and Dr. Drew have all dipped their toes in the clutter pile.

So here’s the question: How many tragic stories about “stuff” can we possibly consume?  And what does it say about us, that we can’t seem to stop staring at slow motion train wrecks that track peoples’ descent into the hells of hoarding? Why do we keep watching?  And what’s reflected back at us from this particular abyss of reality programming?