I spent the day watching Hoarders with my mom while playing Pokémon Unbound on my GameBoy Advance SP. Normally, I just download games onto my laptop and play with a GameCube-style controller, but I got these cartridges so I could trade and battle with my friend as seamlessly as possible. It's a neat little nostalgia trip, and I've refrained from looking up any guides and just discovering everything manually like the good ol' days. Websites like Pokémon Showdown spoil people by giving them level 100 Pokémon with perfect stats and letting them customize the movepools without any hassles. It's like the Pokémon equivalent of pornography; it creates unrealistic expectations, and it loses sight of what makes Pokémon so fun: the exploration. Every Pokémon, item, and moveset in a legitimate playthrough has a story. Can't spam Leftovers and Heavy-Duty Boots on all your monsters? Well, you haven't earned it! Plus, playing on actual hardware means no speed-ups, which automatically equals more immersion. I am still afraid that we may not be able to actually battle though; on the Radical Red cartridges I know that it works, but we recently got Emerald Imperium cartridges and those were trade-only.
Anyways, Hoarders isn't what I would call a "fun" show, but it's good motivation for sprucing up the apartment. I used to watch this show when I was a kid because it made me feel better with the way my own home was, and I guess in a way it made me feel like a "better person" than these people whether that was a conscious thought or not. These days, I just find it sad. Some of the stories on there are devastating; for instance, there was a lady whose three-month old died about twelve years before the episode aired, and she never got past the first stage of grieving. She could not bring herself until then to throw away her child's belongings, and had wound up in a co-dependent relationship with a heroin addict.
I relate to this show because I've been close to many hoarders in my life. Hell, my last house was pretty close to being a hoarder home. The house had a lot less functional space than the home before it (no garage, smaller kitchen, 1.5 bathrooms instead of 2,...), and we sort of just shoved everything in it when we moved in to get it out of the other place as soon as possible. It became a maze of stuff, and it was never really solved. However, this time we made sure to get a storage unit so we could go through everything and nix the stuff we don't need, since this apartment is even smaller than the house.
My mom joked that she wish she'd been more of a hoarder; if she had not spent so much money eating out, she jested, she'd just have a bunch of stuff to sell instead of being obese. I feel that. I am not so skinny anymore myself. I think a lot of people try and psychoanalyze their addictions; they point to this trauma or that one, and reason that the addiction must be some sort of self-medication to fill the void it created. I'm not saying this isn't a valid outlook, but when I look myself and my own vices: gluttony, overeating, drinking... I can't say I do these things to escape some pit of gloom. Rather, I just enjoy food and alcohol because 99% of the time I have a good time when I indulge in these things. I guess I'm something of a self-enabler; I used to beat myself up and agonize over my moral weakness, and the thought of losing weight or quitting drinking would consume so much of my mental energy. Now, I see things more positively; as a good friend of mine asked me, why would I do the things I do if I don't enjoy them? I don't. I do them because I enjoy them, so why guilt-trip myself?
Self-improvement is seductive, and it's natural to want some objective metrics for assessing the process. However, at the end of the day, we will all be objectively dead. Most people hate it when other people objectify them, so I figure, instead of outsourcing my self-esteem, why not skip the middle man and subjectify myself instead? Subjectively, my life is the opposite of what it is on paper: I have a core set of guiding principles I follow; sometimes they are simple maxims, like "keep it simple, stupid," but other times they are more specific like "make sure to take your medication at the same time each day." I think now of a book I read when I was fifteen: Dimensions of Tolerance. In there, I think it said something like 85%+ of all young people in the 1960s considered having a personal guiding philosophy to be very important, whereas in the 1980s less than a third considered it to be somewhat (or more) important. I'm not sure what things would look like if we interviewed people today, but I just know that I hope the trend didn't/doesn't continue, and if the pessimists are right and I'm just a statistic, I'd like to say I played my part in making the stats look nice.