Ludington: Watching 'Hoarders' made me wonder, aren't we all with our over consumption?
What do you do in Santa Cruz when the grandkids are in school, the adults are working, it’s cloudy outside with a damp breeze and temps in the low 60s? You binge watch “Hoarders” in your hotel room.
Our fascination with other people’s misery is so great that there are a couple of multi-season reality shows on cable exposing people’s dirty linen and more.
Hoarding piqued my interest because I think there’s a fine line between virtuous thrift and buried alive. After all, we’re told be prepared, a penny saved is a penny earned and waste not, want not.
Humans have survived through preserving food, storing fuel and collecting all manner of items from the environment and turning them into useful items. Who doesn’t have a family story of reusing everything back in the day?
Hoarding shows explain that extreme collections result from anxiety and trauma. As I watched a huge dumpster fill with 10-years’ worth of plastic beverage bottles, takeout containers and more that one woman accumulated during multiple bouts with cancer, I asked myself, “How much of the same stuff did Jim and I send to the landfill over the past decade?” Would my trash have filled just as many 30-yard dumpsters if it had all gone at the same time?
I’m beginning to rethink what I learned was the Industrial Revolution as a revolution in consumption. Isn’t it possible that hoarding is the outer limit of over consumption that infects our society? Two-thirds of us are obese because we over consume food. Alcohol consumption has risen. Package trucks deliver stuff on my street morning, noon and night seven days a week.The number of thrift stores keeps growing along with the number of storage units to contain all our stuff.
I could pat myself on the back because most of my stuff fits into cupboards, closets and filing cabinets and there’s not junk cluttering up my yard. Our garbage goes to the landfill weekly. Why don’t I feel virtuous?
Take a drive out Highway 163 past the Metro Waste Authority landfill. That’s my hoard and your hoard, the accumulation of food we never consumed, the excess packaging from the stuff we did and a lot of stuff we bought that seemed like a good idea at the time. There is no market for most of what we do recycle or what we could.
We could all use an intervention.
Margaret Ludington has lived in Altoona since 1971. She is a retired staff writer and editorial writer for the Herald-Index. Margaret is a mother of two, grandmother of four. She and her husband travel frequently and have visited every state except Alaska and five Canadian provinces.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: 'Hoarders' made me think, aren't we all with our over consumption?
