I was thinking about The A&E TV show Hoarders. Wikipedia tells us, “At the time of its premiere, Hoarders was the most-watched series premiere in A&E network history among adults aged 18–49 and tied for the most ever in the adults aged 25–54 demographic.” A TV producer friend also told me another fact about Hoarders: people only watch it by themselves. It’s a very guilty and conflicting pleasure. In it, we meet hoarders, most of whom seem to live in decaying single-home bungalows on the outskirts of medium-sized US cities. These are people with seven-room houses filled with newspapers, dead cats, margarine tubs, weapons, mummified half-eaten dinners from 1975 . . . crazy amounts of stuff that they refuse to part with. This is the conceit of the programme: a trained professional comes in and tries to make that week’s hoarder shed their stuff. Even in the first minute of the show, you can see the panic on the hoarder’s face when asked, “OK, let’s start with this mayonnaise squeeze bottle from 1982. Do you really need it?” Of course I do. But why? Because I might need it later. And thus begins a winnowing process that more often than not implodes within the first hour. A good part of the show’s allure is that these people use the exact same reasons that most of us do when deciding if they want to sell that Lichtenstein print that’s been leaning against the dining-room wall for a decade beneath two other unhung, framed pictures: I might need it later.
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From @vanessavi