I'm not a hoarder like most people imagine, but I have hoarder tendencies as my two storage units can attest. My main challenge has always been that when I have invested the (significant) effort in organizing things in a reasonable way, some life event soon comes along that causes everything to go back into disarray. My "stuff" is almost entirely various types of tools for doing various types of things that I have gained skills in over the years as personal education or hobbies.
My dream, which I'm hoping to soon realize, is to build myself an expansive workshop that has defined spaces for everything so that I can actually do things and make things when I want to, with all the necessary tools present, and without requiring external storage or cluttering my home. Right now most everything I don't use daily is stored neatly in labeled totes which are tracked in a spreadsheet and on shelving units in a storage unit off-site. Certainly not the cluttered mess that most people think of, but at the same time I have many things which are not used every single day that took years to acquire along with the companion skills and I have no intention of getting rid of.
In times gone past, I wouldn't appear as a hoarder because land, housing, workshop space was all massively more affordable and so I would have achieved my dream many many years ago. It's pretty incredible in how disappointing our current timeline is that someone who earns a massively outsized income compared to the average cannot afford to have a designated place to exercise their hobbies, because property pricing is so out of whack with what is reasonable that you need to be a multi-millionaire/billionaire to afford the space to do and have things without it appearing as a mess.
This is a preface to the fact I see these same problems with my older relatives, many of whom are now incapable of ever again participating in some of those hobbies due to physical infirmity. They spent a lifetime learning and collecting the tools to go along with that learning, and in many ways those tools now represent physically the manifestation of their entire life's work, and they cannot give them up, even as they can neither afford the space to keep them organized nor have the physical capability to continue working those skills even as a hobby, so it all just lingers around them as so much clutter and unopened boxes in the attic. This isn't quite the trash bags of magazines level of hoarding that most people think of, but I already know I will be responsible with the mental and physical effort to deal with this situation after my relatives pass, and yet I already find myself in the same situation. Wouldn't it have been so much nicer if they would have been able to pass along the property, the tools, and the skills to the next generation instead of being priced out and it all ending up in a dump eventually?
My dream, which I'm hoping to soon realize, is to build myself an expansive workshop that has defined spaces for everything so that I can actually do things and make things when I want to, with all the necessary tools present, and without requiring external storage or cluttering my home. Right now most everything I don't use daily is stored neatly in labeled totes which are tracked in a spreadsheet and on shelving units in a storage unit off-site. Certainly not the cluttered mess that most people think of, but at the same time I have many things which are not used every single day that took years to acquire along with the companion skills and I have no intention of getting rid of.
In times gone past, I wouldn't appear as a hoarder because land, housing, workshop space was all massively more affordable and so I would have achieved my dream many many years ago. It's pretty incredible in how disappointing our current timeline is that someone who earns a massively outsized income compared to the average cannot afford to have a designated place to exercise their hobbies, because property pricing is so out of whack with what is reasonable that you need to be a multi-millionaire/billionaire to afford the space to do and have things without it appearing as a mess.
This is a preface to the fact I see these same problems with my older relatives, many of whom are now incapable of ever again participating in some of those hobbies due to physical infirmity. They spent a lifetime learning and collecting the tools to go along with that learning, and in many ways those tools now represent physically the manifestation of their entire life's work, and they cannot give them up, even as they can neither afford the space to keep them organized nor have the physical capability to continue working those skills even as a hobby, so it all just lingers around them as so much clutter and unopened boxes in the attic. This isn't quite the trash bags of magazines level of hoarding that most people think of, but I already know I will be responsible with the mental and physical effort to deal with this situation after my relatives pass, and yet I already find myself in the same situation. Wouldn't it have been so much nicer if they would have been able to pass along the property, the tools, and the skills to the next generation instead of being priced out and it all ending up in a dump eventually?