Hoarders

It doesn't matter what that thing is...

The TV show Hoarders was exploitative. If you’ve ever seen it, you know. But I watched it and you probably did too if only to gross yourself out. Maybe feel better about the dirty dishes you left in the sink or the pile of laundry on your bedroom floor that’s been there for a week.

Hoarders was one of those shows that got popular because, in some ways, it made you feel better about yourself.

“Well, my house is messy, but at least I don’t have seventy-five cats.”

But, again, the show was exploitative and edited for maximum drama. And we love drama.

But, in its defense, it often really did delve into the mental health issues of people who suffer from hoarding disorder. And there was always a mental health issue at the bottom of it all. No one just starts hoarding dolls and clothes and food and animals all on their own. There was always trauma at the bottom of it. But, in the end, we all just watched it because it was gross and because how “crazy” the subjects were. We loved growing frustrated with them. We asked ourselves why they just didn’t stop hoarding because they were hurting the people around them.

But it’s different when someone is hoarding money. All of a sudden, the disgust turns to admiration. We don’t call them “crazy”, do we? We call them smart, savvy, industrious. We don’t ask ourselves why they just don’t stop because they’re hurting the people around them. Because there’s only one thing that we love more than money and that’s the people who have a lot of it.

The concept of a trillionaire is so abstract there’s no point in even pondering it. It’s like trying to guess the number of grains of sand on a beach. The mind boggles.

But there’s only so many things you can buy. And it’s only so long before, if you can buy anything in the world, you get bored with “things”.

Then you want to buy people, elections, loyalties, societies, immortality, and humanity itself. A strange kind of sociopathic God complex lives within these people. It’s not about big houses and yachts anymore. It’s about how these ridiculously abstract amounts of money make them feel.

When I watched she show Hoarders and I saw that person sitting in the middle of all their gross stuff, it was apparent to me that that gross stuff was a nest. They liked the way their gross stuff made them feel safe and they couldn’t, for the life of them, see their way out of it . Their gross stuff is protection against the injury they’d sustained along the way.

No one cheers for them or calls them “smart” or “savvy” or “industrious”. We call them hoarders. We see clearly that they’re broken people. But we don’t see it the same way when it involves money. When it’s money, we applaud their pathology.

But my perspective as a recovering addict helps me to see it all clearly. And billionaires and trillionaires are the same to me as that woman with seventy-five cats.

Any time you’re trying to fill a bottomless hole in yourself with something external, you have a problem. Any time you try to numb the pain with something external, you have a problem. It doesn’t matter what that something is.

It’s what my religious friends call a “God shaped hole.”

And there is no other reason in heaven and earth that anyone would want to be a trillionaire.