HOARDING

Nostalgia, Hoarding, and the Ever-Expanding World of Things

Sentimentality in a consumerist world

Photo by Onur Bahçıvancılar on Unsplash

With the plate-sized CD player of my childhood in my hands, its cheap plastic buttons clack inward stiffly as I slide my fingers across its shoddily-made surface. I know that it will never play another CD again in its life here on this dusty shelf; I’m not even sure that it still works. But in this clunky old heirloom from a not-so-distant past, I can feel a world unfurl.

It might seem like a piece of junk to some, but to me, it’s one of the most enduring bridges between who I was and who I am now. In its dusty blue and its grayed white, I can almost see an old CD spinning and I remember the melodies that it used to play.

When most people envision hoarding, it’s the walls piled high with junk and the electrical hazards and the feces-ridden floors. It’s true that the advent of shows like “Hoarders,” “Hoarding: Buried Alive,” and “Britain’s Biggest Hoarders” have done the malady little justice.

But the truth is that the hoarding disorder is actually fairly common. The American Psychiatric Association found that between 2–6% of people struggle with hoarding.

You don’t need to be a packrat with a house piled high with newspaper clippings dating…