Coda Possessions: Is Hoarding Objects a Fear of Death

Our mortality means recycling of our thoughts and ideas.

Most of cerebrum will go back to raw material. Perspectives lost, discarded, unmined.

Other ideas leave a coda or viral influence. But future changes, pride and persona are brittle, and it's best we are forced let go.

There are many reasons offered why people hoard, preserve, conserve, or fail to discard. My childhood was drenched in "Ozark Depression Education", tales of the dust bowl, grandparents history of literal hunger. A bent clothes hanger should be kept in the shed, as it might bind something when you cannot afford wire. Cut it into small pieces, it might be converted to light nails. If you have grandkids (me) with nothing to do, tell them to see if they cannot straighten out clotheshangers and bent nails... it will teach them to preserve and conserve. "Value kept is value added".

But the actual reason to conserve is love of those grandchildren, and their children, whom we never meet. The Earth's resources are finite; even if the rareness of materials is frequently exaggerated, the environmental cost of digging ever deeper, smelting ever rarer percentages of ore from mountains, trekking ever deeper into oceans and rain forests to find raw material to make our stuff, is the biggest tab left for our descendants to pay.

We make our children feel proud of their grandparents, in part to instill in them the importance of someone in their future one day being proud of them. If they care whether their great-great-grandchildren would approve of their lives work, they may tread more lightly. So it goes.

In every religion or philosophy known to humankind, there is a (hypothetical) greater intelligence. Whether or not that hyper intelligence exists terra firma, or in heaven, or in an abstract sense, the religion demands we imagine our lives and thoughts as if a greater being (or greater Self) could see our lives in total, from 50,000 feet in the air.

A God's intelligence can see a book on a shelf all at once, the way we read a whole word when a bird could only peck at individual letters. The last page and the first page exist at once. Time, therefore, is cutting our history a bite at a time, because that's the only way our existence can "fit" through our minds. Whatever the religious or philosophical "greater intelligence", existing or hypothetical, it can see our past and future at once.

How does this fit into Discard Policy Studies? Has the Good Point Ideas Blog gone off into a swamp?

No. Our greatest possession is likely an idea, passed down to future generations, whether or not they are related to us genetically. Conservation was an idea passed on to me, and caring about what my society leaves for unborn children is something tied viscerally to my nurturing.