I want to bring your attention to this thought-provoking article on Unclutterer, Depression-era mindset and clutter. While not in the frugality niche, per se, it struck a chord with me because it made me realize how disturbing I find the glamorization of Depression-era thinking in the frugality blogosphere.

“Frugality bloggers glamorize the Great Depression! Surely you don’t mean that!” But, come on, it’s everywhere. From articles that ask us to consider if a recession might really be a good thing, to Dollar Stretcher articles that talk about cutting the bad spots off half-rotten fruit because goddammit, our grandparents only got a single orange for Christmas, to that old saw, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without”… it’s clear that frugality bloggers believe that there is great wisdom in the mindset of people brought up in great poverty.

Let’s look at the other side of the equation, as Unclutterer has done. I’m sure it’s not a 1 to 1 correlation universally, but there’s a strong connection between that kind of thinking and hoarding. The down side of growing up with not a lot is that suddenly your mind switches into famine mode; everything that passes through your hands must be kept for the hard times ahead. “Well, what’s wrong with that?” Within reason, nothing. However, it is often coupled with an ingenuity that might lead such a person to refill ketchup bottles with ketchup packets from fast food restaurants or save butter wrappers to grease pans. Stuff builds up, because everything is potentially useful; in the end, this Depression-era hoarder ends up drowning in their own stuff, bereft at the thought of letting any of it go.

If you think I’m exaggerating any of this, imagine me, eight years old, spending my after-school hours and summers with my grandmother, born in 1925. She lives with my aunt in a tiny house that couldn’t even be generously called a “ranch.” It’s a single floor, cobbled together from spare lumber. There are two bedrooms and one bath off a central kitchen and living area; and a screened porch.

It’s a tiny space, and yet every spare inch is filled to capacity with: old newspapers, old TV Guides, my mother’s childhood toys, my childhood toys, clothes my grandmother bought at garage sales and never wore, clothes and other personal items my grandmother received as gifts and never used, and on and on.

Some of my unhappiest moments of that time revolved around my aunt’s attempts to clean. She did her best to keep the place manageable - she worked as a house cleaner, after all - but any time she tried to throw out, say, a stack of old and unread newspaper, my grandmother would yell and scream and cry and be totally lost. I still remember the blank look in her eyes when my aunt tried to do this.

I think the culmination of my grandmother’s hoarding behavior was that one day, I walked into her bedroom to discover that she had been saving the used urine test strips she used to manage her diabetes.

After my grandmother’s death, my mother spent months cleaning up all this crap, finding, among this, young children’s toys that my grandmother had bought as gifts to me but had never given me. My mother’s insight on this would be to point out an estate sale she once attended, where everything a deceased woman had owned - literally, everything - was thrown on the lawn to be sold. Dresser drawers had been upended, and the woman’s old ratty underwear were scattered in the breeze.

This is why I reject this kind of Depression-era thinking, even while being a frugality blogger. I think it leads down the road to hoarding; to a life remembered by crap no one else wants to clean up.

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