Published on 12, July, 2020
I was wondering today if this is an autistic thing.
I've spent several decades collecting objects and the last decade+ trying to rid myself of the majority.
However, I have given up on the idea of ever being minimalist.
I notice that I remember where everything came from, even, when purchased, which shop in which town.
I try not to be sentimental about things, but sometimes I can't help it.
My mother, who I believe was autistic, was a hoarder in quite an extreme sense.
My autistic friend finds it very hard to part with belongings.
Everything has an association.
Are others like this and are there contributors here who are genuinely minimalistic and don't have an attachment to things?
I got into the whole minimalism as a concept in about 2010. I say got into it. That means consuming information about it but not actually doing very much of it :) I love the idea of it. I love clear uncluttered spaces to work / live in, however, I collect things to do with radio / audio electronics and computers and find it hard to get rid of things and find when I do get rid of them I have immediate or some kind of delayed regret and want to get them back. When I was a child my room would get to total chaos stage then I'd spend a day sorting and everything out into order again for it to slowly decay again over the following months. I am interested in things. I've always been interested in things to the point where I used to get told off as a child for taking things apart to see how they work. Now I'm old and with family literally everything I have is crammed into a room where I also try to work from. It's horrible as I don't have the space needed for both storing and getting things out. Looks like a bad case of hoarding to the untrained eye but everything is here for a reason.
The other weird thing is, when I was a child, I'd get confused about objects. For example, if I went clothes shopping (something that didn't happen often as I used to wear things until they were worn out) with my parents, they'd ask me what I thought of this or that but I'd always say it was nice to avoid hurting the feelings of the object!
I have attachment to everything. I hate getting rid of anything because if it's here there's a reason for it, be it sentimental (was something of my dads) or it being of practical application I simply don't have time to use any more.
A lot of this is also driven by nostalgia. I have old tape machines, short-wave radios, CB radios, bits of 8-bit computers, an old 16 bit computer, old Mac which I use now and again to relive the past. I'm often completely consumed by nostalgia to the point where it makes me quite sad I don't have a time machine to go back. I'm one of those "everything was better" people (which is what got me onto this site originally, my first post was a reply to a really old thread about just this very thing, I found from googling autism and nostalgia). I find myself thinking back to how it all used to be all the time. Maybe this is an age thing a lot of people do but this does consume a lot of my brain space.
Ebay is a nightmare, I've got things watched that I really want to get hold of and it takes some effort to stop thinking about them. I want to get my old 12" black and white TV back, I recently bought an old VHS recorder and have plans to get hold of a HDMI to composite video converter so I can start archiving old documentaries people through the Internet have made available again, back to VHS tapes. If I had the time I'd have already done this. I have boxes of audio cassettes. As a child I used to record conversations of people in the house and listen to them again and again. I used to record loads of stuff from the radio and even have tapes full of conversations from the CB radio back in the 90s many of which I've since digitised, I don't know why. I'd like to get hold of one of the old dumb terminals I used to use at work too. Text only "green screens".
Saying all the above, at the height of my "I can get rid of stuff in the name of minimalism and letting go of it all / living in the moment" I did get rid of all my Vinyl records (ok, almost all of them) and the players and a mixer. It didn't bring me happiness of relief though. I think if I'd have realised I was autistic at the time and what these things meant (most of them were from my childhood through to mid twenties) I'd have maybe tried to hang on to these things.
I have the same thing now with digital stuff too. Since people have been archiving things to the Internet I've managed to replace a lot of things that got lost with digital versions including right back to those "Storyteller" tapes that came out, weekly in the 1980s. Someone has converted them and dumped them online so naturally I've had to get hold of them for digital storage here :)
I don't know what the fix is other to now just accept that this is the way it is and perhaps the whole minimalism thing is someone else's solution for their own specific problems. There's certainly (from all the books, blogs, podcasts etc I'd taken in) never been a discussion about clutter / minimalism from an autistic point of view and a deep analysis of why things might be how they are for some people. I mean at the end of the day if it's not causing you problems, what's really wrong with being thing focussed anyway?
Sorry for the lengthy reply.
Snowman said:I'd always say it was nice to avoid hurting the feelings of the object!
I relate to this! Even though I know intellectually that objects don't have feelings, I still can't quite shake it and I am 50 now!
I don't even aspire to minimalism. I don't like the emptiness. Even when I used to go in a hotel I would take stuff out of my suitcase and spread it around to feel more homey.
Snowman said:at the height of my "I can get rid of stuff in the name of minimalism and letting go of it all / living in the moment" I did get rid of all my Vinyl records (ok, almost all of them) and the players and a mixer. It didn't bring me happiness of relief though. I think if I'd have realised I was autistic at the time and what these things meant (most of them were from my childhood through to mid twenties) I'd have maybe tried to hang on to these things.
I did that, and so did my autistic friend, and we had similar responses to yours.