Emotional/psychological attachment to objects/belongings

Both my parents were WW2 children so it was installed into me to never waste anything. If a kettle element broke my parents would buy a new element not a kettle. I do tend to collect things. My workshop looks a total mess but I know where ever item is and where it was purchased from. I do get emotionally attached to things but once they have been got rid of then I don’t think off them again, I’m he same with people, if I don’t see them, I rarely think of them or miss them. I do get angry when things are moved or taken without asking. I can be strange when abroad, if I’ve used 3/4 of say a bottle of bubble bath, my wife will want to bin it on the last day, I have to bring it home, it upsets me to leave it behind. It’s not the value, it’s just strange to explain. 

Snowman said:

They never see the software on the user side so no way of running it on yor own server etc. It's a weird, throw away time indeed

Then there is photography.

How many photos are never printed, never put into albums, never passed down in families ...never looked at again ...

valued and repairable. i was a child in the 80s and 90s but I can remember patches on clothes.

i was never into clothes as fashion, and we used to wear things until they were properly worn through.

A lot of the rubbish is packaging now too. We used to go to the local butchers and meat would be in paper or thin plastic wrap, green grocers used to sell fruit by weight again in brown paper bags but we used to have meals that were cooked from scratch. the idea of bunging something in a plastic tray in a microwave for 5 minutes was completely unheard of.

Even for things like televisions, radios etc there used to be a repair man who'd come round to the house and fix things or a shop in town you could take them to. We had a colour TV from the 1970s I was still using right into the late 2000s, the recycle centre (tip) is full of gadgets that don't "work" any more because they've been obsoleted or the internal battery has stopped holding charge etc.

What's happening to all these smartphones that were cutting edge back in 2015 and can't even run apps from the app store any more?

The modern computer consoles too, they're not even going to be of value for "retro" owners as so many of the games now rely on servers on the Internet to function. I still play the games I had in the 80s, no problems. My kids won't be able to play Fortnite in another 30 years, looking back on it like I might with games from my computer as they're downloads and most of the logic / matchmaking / maps etc live on cloud servers which will be switched off eventually. They never see the software on the user side so no way of running it on yor own server etc. It's a weird, throw away time indeed.

Agreed.  It can't go on this way?  I try not to "join in" with the "if-you-fancy-it-just-buy-it" attitude.  I think I do better than most!

Number said:

How the hell did we let it become like this Chuck-away-Charlie free-for-all.  

There is a massive change between how life was as we were growing up - me in the 1960s/70s, my husband in the 1950s/60s.

It is quite extraordinary this business with clothes.

My mum made ours as we were poor and we wouldn't dream of just getting rid of them because they weren't fashionable.

Actually, they never were fashionable.

Goods were expensive and valued and nowadays they are cheap and not valued.

Number said:

Thank you, Madame Cholet.

A cheesey 1970s song just came into my head ....

(I realise you won't take random links ..) ...so this is for others:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8XCHgqR7Kk

It includes original vinyl crackles!

Thank you, Madame Cholet.

I absolutely agree.  Growing up, our family kept the same stuff, only rarely buying "new" things.

When I remember the "bin collection" in the 1970's (quantity wise  = 1 bin bag per week) compared to now (I suppose x2 or x3 bags)....it is horrific!  How the hell did we let it become like this Chuck-away-Charlie free-for-all.  

yeah, sorry the eBay bit ties into the nostalgia and recovery of things I wished I'd actually kept hold of. they're generally things I've had at some point and let go of. it's very heavily tied into nostalgia.

Number said:

Womble

For the uninitiated

https://youtu.be/XWQMMPFtoG4

I'm buried in stuff.  I have weird old random stuff.  Know everything about all of it, or am keeping it TO find out about it.  Everything has multiple potential uses in my world.

I'm like a Womble - not eBay / Amazon type.  I assimilate stuff, rather than purposefully purchase it.

Sorry to hear this.

Autonomistic said:

Even worthless things like cardboard packaging I keep because I might need them if I move!

Yep, and I've got rid of things and needed them a year or so later, and wished I hadn't!

Yes, I can see that.

When I mention hoarding, I'm thinking of my mother, not myself.

I don't see collecting as hoarding.

I see picking up a magazine from a pile and it being dated 1973, finding a mouse nesting on the sofa next to her, opening a door and everything falling out etc etc being really hoarding.

Nothing whatsoever being thrown away, including the containers food come in, is hoarding to me but I know some people see just collecting/attachment to objects for a reason as hoarding.

what are people defining as hoarding?

according to the NHS site :

"A hoarding disorder is where someone acquires an excessive number of items and stores them in a chaotic manner, usually resulting in unmanageable amounts of clutter. The items can be of little or no monetary value."

Value isn't just monetary and how chaotic is chaotic? For example all my things are here for a reason. I don't just keep old bottle tops and weird items I have no use for, although to other people (my partner who refers to it all as "his cr*p") they might not understand the meaning of the objects, the value to me or why I'd want to have some archaic technology everyone else has moved on from.

I'm the same. I have spent several decades building up 'stuff' and now have far too much but can't seem to part with any of it. 

I too will remember exactly where each item was purchased and usually how much I paid for it. I hate wasting anything and if I part with it that is a waste of money. Of course leaving the items stashed away unused/unworn is still a waste.

It is a mindset I struggle with and do have a tendency towards hoarding. Even worthless things like cardboard packaging I keep because I might need them if I move!

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.

Snowman said:

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.

Interesting ... perhaps we can throw some light on it here ..

Thank you for these replies.

There's some fascinating stuff contained within them.

Iain said:

a compulsion towards hoarding and is one of the compulsions that can come with autism.

I didn't know that .

I hadn't realised that (I think you are saying) autistic people are more likely to be hoarders than others.

Any idea, anyone, why we may become more attached to objects than allistics do?

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.