What The Life Of A Hoarder Looks Like
Posted by: Nina Carbone
Filed in:
news
10:00AM, Wednesday July 8th 2009
We all sort of gape in horror at the people on those home organization shows like HGTV’s “Mission: Organization” and TLC’s “Clean Sweep” but sometimes, the overcollection of stuff is no laughing matter. For some, the collection of stuff gets so out of control it becomes a legit compulsion and disease called hoarding. People can hoard stuff, food and even (sadly) animals. The new installation on the main floor of the Museum of Modern Art takes a closer look at one woman’s life as a compulsive hoarder—it’s a public viewing of her life-long collection.
Chinese artist Song Dong organized and displayed every single item from his mother’s home, including numerous television sets, toothpaste tubes, plastic bottles, thousands of plastic bottle caps, legless dolls, cardboard boxes, and shoes in an exhibition called “Waste Not.” It’s truly staggering. [MoMA via Apartment Therapy]
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Adam(aka)AP
wrote on July 8 2009 @ 10:03 am: [report]
Someone needs a new hobby.
Humble Bee
wrote on July 8 2009 @ 10:10 am: [report]
Sounds like my friends mom, she’s a total pack rat, she saves absolutely everything. She has boxes and bags of junk that she refuses to throw away. They once got into a really big fight because my friend tossed out all her 15 year old empty lotion bottles, and useless crap from the bathroom. I think that they came from an unfortunate or really poor background so they save and cherish everything because it took them a lot of hard work to get the where they are at now. I can sort of see that my friends mom thinks she is ungrateful because she gets everything handed to her while she had to work her ass off to get to this country and actually own property in the late 70’s and 80’s as and immigrant. I would never save so much shi*t
joyy
wrote on July 8 2009 @ 10:17 am: [report]
My aunt is a hoarder ... sort of. She just buys tons of stuff at auctions very nice glass collection, actually), but her house is just filled with junk. Junk mail, garbage, piles of unworn clothes, it’s unreal. You can’t even open the front door of her house the whole way because there’s so much #&@$% on the floor.
I’m not much of a neat freak, but having her in my life totally prevents my own messiness from getting out of hand.
I Go To 11
wrote on July 8 2009 @ 10:39 am: [report]
My ex-MIL is one of the biggest packrats I know. It’s next to impossible to walk into her house and not feel smothered by the useless junk she has. The playroom she set up for her grandchildren is always a giant mess, and her frige always has stuff that expired months ago!
writergirl
wrote on July 8 2009 @ 02:24 pm: [report]
Useless junk, packrats are not what ‘hoarders’ are, really. I’ve delt with several once upon a time when I used to work and not only were whole HOUSES consumed with #&@$%, but yards, barns, storage sheds—any place something could be “stored” it was. There was one guy who lived on property that had a house and barn that was at least 180 years old. He had both the house and the barn filled to the gills—literally—with stacks of #&@$%. All organized. The yard was narrow trails in between more organized #&@$%.
The sad part? The township had made him clean it up TWO YEARS BEFORE. Everything was empty. IN TWO YEARS he filled a 2000SF house, a 3000 SF barn and half an acre of land.
That’s hoarding.