Why We're All Chipmunks Who Can't Stop Hoarding

Last night I went hunting for a new pair of pants, so I’d stop looking like a hobo around the supremely fashionable office. As usual, I came across some site with a ridiculous combo-builder deal where if you buy more stuff you get an inordinately larger discount. I ended up walking away with ten times more stuff than I planned on, and it’s not like I really need it when I already have mountains of shirts piling up. The whole experience left me cowed and shamed, and now I feel like a hoarder.

My reproachful shopping habits aside, the compulsive collection of stuff, and the inability to process and dispose of it, can be a life-destroying problem. It’s an issue that has spawned a reality show empire, which makes it, according to the skewed universe of television, an even larger concern than heart disease or diabetes.

We’re all susceptible to hoarding to some degree. It’s what led Philip K. Dick to coin the term ’kipple,’ referring to all that crap lying around that just seems to multiply. There are a number of deep psychological factors at the root of compulsive hoarding, but considering the majority of us hoard to some degree, have we evolved an innate predisposition to stockpile stuff everywhere?

The root of hoarding is the actual accumulation of whatever it is you’ll someday be surrounded by, before the TV crews show up and make you cry and make everything right. The desire to buy all kinds of junk goes back to our biological need to collect resources. Remember, your ancestry couldn’t have survived the first 99 percent of human history if it weren’t good at collecting berries and antelope steaks. Also remember that if you’re better at collecting those things, you’re more likely to attract a high-quality mate and have healthy kids. And at that time, getting stuff was hard. You risked your life to spear a moose, but the payoff was huge.

Fast forward to the modern world and we don’t necessarily need to be gathering all the stuff we need all the time. Stores are always open and well-stocked, so finding stuff isn’t exactly difficult or life-threatening. Rather than a matter of effort like in the prehistoric days, it’s a matter of cost.

When you find a good deal, the perceived value of that item goes through the roof. I could find a shirt at any time, but if one is 70 percent off, all of a sudden I need that shirt right now. In prehistoric times, picking any old fruit off of trees probably wouldn’t have caused a ruckus. You could find that anywhere. But if all of a sudden a cheeseburger tree appeared, you can bet those dudes would have been grabbing more than they could carry. Nowadays it’s Black Friday shoppers that are getting whipped into a frenzy.

We see this phenomenon – of people acquiring items with extremely high perceived value at a pace that exceeds their actual need for them – on those other hoarder shows, the ones with "extreme couponers." It’s horrific to watch someone have a nervous breakdown over messing up $5 worth of coupons after buying $1,500 worth of family-poisoning packaged food that he or she didn’t even buy. Still, sad as it is to see basements filled with centuries’ worth of cheap deodorant and Chef Boyardee, it is one hell of a display of resource gathering.

Let’s agree that the reason why we collect stuff in the first place is fairly reasonable. We can’t pass up a good deal because, deep down, we compare the relative thrift of a sweet find to the difficulty of procuring something at full price. In prehistoric terms, it’s the difference of killing and eating a regular buffalo and one you just happened upon with a broken leg. You’re not going to say no.

But the problem with hoarding isn’t necessarily the compulsive gathering. It’s more the inability to get rid of things. In the animal world, two of the most famous hoarders are chipmunks and acorn woodpeckers. Chipmunks, and rodents in general, spend all of their time stuffing their cheeks with tasty nuts and stashing them in safe spots. Acorn woodpeckers’ entire physiology has evolved around drilling holes in tree trunks, which they fill with nuts every autumn to store for the winter.

In both cases, the animals are hoarding for a specific purpose: If they don’t secure a stockpile of food before the nutrient-scarce winter hits, they might not survive. It’s likely that early humans did similar things, figuring that you might as well fill up a basket of berries because you don’t know when the next bush might come.

That habit is fine when one is dealing with perishables, because you’re either going to eat them all or they’ll simply rot away. But when you get into decades-of-newspapers territory, our predilection fo securing resources comes back to bite us in the ass. We want the entire McDonald’s collection of Beanie Babies because they’ll surely be worth a ton one day, and plus the kids will probably like to play with them. That is, until we wake up and realize our house was so full of crap we’d convinced ourselves was incredibly important that we’d never had time or space to have kids anyway.

Really, that’s the crux of the small-time hoarding problem. We do have a predisposition to aggregate all kinds of important, valuable stuff, just as many other animals do. Plus, there’s that little issue of sentimentality. We often identify ourselves with our stuff, and there are a lot of memories wrapped up in even an old hat. That’s hard to let go. The animals have an easier go of it because the stuff we’re accumulating isn’t necessarily edible, and doesn’t come with a set shelf life that, by virtue of its own rotten stink, tells us when to throw something out. So we hold on to old sentimental t-shirts and Blackstreet CDs because we can’t let go something that’s valuable to us.

Yet, as evidenced by those few neat folk out there with clean closets, we aren’t totally beholden to our biology. Perhaps, as evidenced by the overwhelming mountain of organization tools, services, and apps, we’re all evolving to get a better grasp on our cluttered lives. Plus, as we continue to cast off everything analog, we one day won’t have to worry about ever accumulating books, movies, receipts, and documents. Fully digital living does offer the promise of less stuff. Of course, that does introduce a new problem that’s the same as the old, in the form of digital hoarding. But hey, we’ll still have the chipmunks beat: They can’t store their nuts in the cloud.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter. Have a question? Write Derek at derek(at)motherboard.tv.