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0104 NASA 的月球基地
NASA Advance Lunar Construction
Technology for Moon Missions
Maker Faire Rome, Published Dec. 14, 2022
One step closer to the first-ever construction on the Moon
NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration has
granted ICON $57.2 million to continue Project Olympus and the
development of a lunar surface construction system that will target
humanity's first-ever building on another planetary body.
Together with ICON, the selected contractor, BIG – Bjarke Ingels
Group – the world-reknown architectural firm – will continue
designing sustainable lunar habitats and infrastructure for thermal,
radiation, and micrometeorite protection.
The contractor: ICON
NASA has awarded ICON, a cutting-edge construction firm located
in Austin, Texas, a contract to develop construction technologies that
could help build infrastructure such as landing pads, habitats, and
roads on the lunar surface.
The award is a continuation of ICON's work under a Small Business
Innovation Research (SBIR) dual-use contract with the U.S. Air
Force, partly funded by NASA. The new NASA SBIR Phase III
award will support the development of ICON's Olympus construction
system, which is designed to use local resources on the Moon and
Mars as building materials. The contract runs through 2028 and has a
value of $57.2 million.
ICON, known for its 3D-printed homes and military barracks has
landed a $57.2 million contract for Project Olympus, the company's
effort to develop spaced-based construction to support exploration of
the moon and beyond.
The final deliverable of this contract will be humanity's first
construction on another world, and that is going to be a pretty special
achievement.
Dune Alpha: simulated Martian habitat
ICON 3D printed a 1,700-square-foot simulated Martian habitat,
called Mars Dune Alpha, that will be used during NASA's Crew
Health and Performance Analog, or CHAPEA, analog mission
starting in 2023.
ICON also competed in NASA's 3D Printed Habitat Challenge. The
company partnered with the Colorado School of Mines in Golden,
and the team won a prize for 3D printing a structure sample that was
tested for its ability to hold a seal, for strength, and for durability in
temperature extremes.
Ready to be on the moon by 2026
NASA could use ICON's technology on the moon as soon as 2026.
Hoping to work with materials native to the moon, ICON engineers
will examine lunar regolith — dust and broken rocks — to determine
their mechanical behavior in simulated lunar gravity.
Working with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville,
Alabama, the team will use a stimulant of lunar soil to investigate
raising habitable, 3D-printable structures with materials found on
Earth's satellite, sturdy enough to withstand atmospheric pressure
there, as well as cosmic and solar radiation.
Company officials say the findings will inform future lunar
construction for critical infrastructure like landing pads, blast shields
and roads.
Creating capabilities to go further
To explore other worlds, innovative new technologies need to
adapted to those environments and exploration needs. Pushing this
development forward with commercial partners will create the
capabilities NASA need for future missions.
0105 2023：那些将稍微影响世界的小事
Events to Shake, or Gently Rattle, the World
in 2023
Planning your calendar for next year? Here are some events to look
out for.
By Masha Goncharova, The New York Times, Published December 9,
2022
"War, what is it good for?" belted out Edwin Starr in 1970.
The answer is the same today as it was more than 50 years ago:
"Absolutely nothing!" But in February 2022, seemingly expecting
an easy victory, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an
unprovoked invasion into Ukraine that is now estimated to have
killed more than 40,000 civilians and displaced up to 30 million
more. As the war grinds on into the winter, Russia has adopted
the tactic of striking key Ukrainian infrastructure facilities, leaving
millions without power, heat or water for extended periods. But Mr.
Putin can't escape history, and within Russia, internal divisions and a
declining population show that, as far as the confidence and unity of
his own people goes, he may have already lost.
Outside of Russia's war, 2022 offered little by way of consolation:
In June, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the
constitutional right to abortion in the United States; in August,
flooding devastated hundreds of villages in Pakistan, killing around
讲解文本
2023：那些将稍微影响世界的小事
1,500 people and affecting more than 33 million; then in September,
Queen Elizabeth II, the most steadfast and drama-free member of
the House of Windsor, died, and the British pound hit a historic low
against the U.S. dollar. As the year drew to a close, central banks
around the world hiked interest rates to curb inflation and warned of
the likelihood of a global recession.
Now, 2023 has us in its sights. From the launch of the largest offshore
wind farm in Japan to the 100th birthdays of The Walt Disney
Company and Warner Brothers to a celebration of dogs in Nepal—
read on to find examples of perseverance and ingenuity in action.
JANUARY
CROATIA, Jan. 1: Nearly a decade after joining the European
Union, Croatia adopts the euro and becomes part of the Schengen
visa-free travel area. Undeterred by a looming recession in
the eurozone, the Balkan nation hopes to reap the rewards of
membership by attracting tourists to its Adriatic coastline.
ITALY, Jan. 16: Venice enacts a "day-trippers" fee for visitors who
come to the city for a few hours but don't stay the night. City officials
have been working on the measure, designed to limit transient
travelers who strain the city's fragile infrastructure, since before the
Covid-19 pandemic. The fee will range from 3 to 10 euros, depending
on how crowded the city is on a given day.
UNITED STATES, Jan. 23 and April 4: Two Tinseltown titans
turn 100: Warner Brothers and Disney, of course! Both studios are
planning elaborate celebrations involving their extended families of
theme parks, video games, television channels and streaming services
throughout the year.
FEBRUARY
AUSTRALIA, Feb. 17–March 5: Grab your rainbow flag and pop
the champagne: WorldPride is coming to Sydney. More than 500,000
people are expected to attend the 17-day festival. Not all members
of the L.G.B.T.Q. community feel welcome, however. Some
commentators have called the events "elitist," given the ticket prices.
For example, the three-day human rights conference costs $1,497 for
general admission, and tickets for the Bondi Beach party start at $179.
UNITED STATES, Feb. 12: Nearly five years after her last
performance at the 2018 Grammy Awards, Rihanna—who dominated
the Billboard charts from the 2000s until her last album, "Anti," in
2016—returns to the stage to perform in what is always one of the
world's most-watched musical events: the Super Bowl halftime
show. The impressive get is seen as a power play by Apple Music,
which takes over from Pepsi as the lead sponsor of the show.
MARCH
UNITED STATES, March 12: Clocks in the United States spring
forward one hour, perhaps for the last time. The Sunshine Protection
Act, which the Senate passed in March 2022, will make daylight
saving time permanent in the United States. Proponents of the bill
include Senator Marco A. Rubio, Republican of Florida, who says
that more daylight hours would lower the number of car crashes and
accidents, reduce robberies by 27 percent and cut energy usage.
APRIL
FRANCE, SPAIN and the UNITED STATES, April 8: To mark the
50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso's death, museums around the world
will participate in "Picasso Celebration 1973-2023," organized by the
Musée National Picasso-Paris and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, the artist's
grandson. The featured historiographical exhibits include "Picasso
1969-72: the End of the Beginning" at the Musée Picasso in Antibes
(April 8-June 25); "Young Picasso in Paris" at the Guggenheim
Museum in New York (May 12-Aug. 7) and "Picasso vs. Velázquez"
at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid (September-November).
MAY
UNITED KINGDOM, May 6: Charles III, who once described the
prospect of being king as a "ghastly inexorable" experience, will be
crowned in a ceremony at Westminster Abbey. Buckingham Palace
has indicated that Charles's coronation will be short—just over an
hour—and less extravagant than his mother's, which lasted nearly
three hours and featured a congregation of 8,000 dignitaries.
JUNE
EGYPT, June 30: The first phase of construction of Egypt's new
administrative capital, a $30 billion project east of Cairo, is scheduled
for completion. The new capital promises practical solutions in the
form of jobs and housing for residents in overcrowded Cairo, as well
as more ambitious plans like the Olympic City, the second-largest
sports complex in Africa, which Egypt hopes to use in its bid to host
the 2036 Olympics.
JULY
LITHUANIA, July 11–12: NATO holds a summit of its 30 member
countries in Vilnius, a mere 138 miles from the Russian border. It
will be one of the largest summits ever hosted by the Baltic nation
and will cost around 30 million euros.
AUGUST
WORLD: Four Airbnb judges choose the 100 quirkiest home ideas
from around the world. Sponsored by Airbnb's OMG! Fund, the
contest gives 100 people $100,000 to build the "craziest places on
earth." Winners so far have included a potato hotel in Idaho and a
retro' 60s camping bus in Portugal.
NOVEMBER
NEPAL: The Nepalese Tihar festival is a multiday celebration of
good over evil akin to Diwali, the Indian festival of lights. The
second day of celebration—Kukur Tihar—is dedicated to dogs, who
are considered to be sacred messengers of Yarma, the god of the
dead. On that day, across Nepal, domestic and stray dogs are given
baths, treats and rewarded with marigold garlands placed around
their necks.
总觉得别人的生活更精彩？你不是一个人 1/2
Shoulda, woulda, coulda: why FOMO won't
let go of us
By Josh Cohen, The Economist, Published Sep. 26, 2022
My heart tends to sink when FOMO, or fear of missing out, comes up
in my consulting room. Sufferers beset by FOMO believe that out of
all possible options available, one alone is right for them. Once they
are trapped in this mindset, other people – friends, colleagues and the
endless proliferation of digital acquaintances on social media – are
liable to become avatars of the life they should or could have had.
FOMO can seem like a minor anxiety that will resolve itself, the fear
of choosing the wrong party or restaurant or Tinder date. But what
if it were closer to a mental structure, a fundamental aspect of one's
own life? After all, it is an ineliminable fact that we are all missing
out, all the time, simply by virtue of the constraints of time and
space, and of having just one, finite life. FOMO can never resolve
itself, because it's predicated on the unconscious assumption that the
best life isn't mine.
The unconscious element is particularly insidious. We may
consciously assure ourselves that we are working in our interests.
But this only conceals our underlying tendency to believe that our
choices will be the wrong ones. FOMO effectively excludes us from
contentment. The best choices will always be someone else's.
In its most debilitating form, FOMO is the expression of roiling
discontent with yourself, a conviction that if my life was really that
good, it wouldn't be mine. It is the compulsion to locate value beyond
one's own experience. Seen through this filter, other lives are engines
of perpetual momentum. Ours are stuck crawling in traffic.
Recent studies in academic psychology bear this out. FOMO is
related to symptoms such as poor sleep, low life satisfaction, social-
media addiction and even increased substance abuse. A study by
three Turkish psychologists suggests that it induces an aversion to
repeating an experience that could be inherently satisfying. "Mere
awareness of the missed opportunities", they write, "may lead one to
perceive alternatives in a positive light, relatively leading to lower
valuation of one's current situation." In other words, there is a kind
of masochistic spiral between the perception that all the fun is being
had elsewhere and the denigration of our own circumstances.
One of the intriguing consequences of the first lockdown in Britain
during the pandemic was the widespread feeling, palpable in my
consulting room, that fomo was dissipating. Our lives had contracted
drastically. Parties, restaurants, theatre trips and other reliable sources
of fomo were banned or closed, reducing to a minimum the potential
for wistful or envious glances at social-media feeds.
Lockdown, in other words, appeared to reveal fomo as a phenomenon
of the present, where consumer culture, amplified by social media,
assails us at every moment with an abundance of tempting images
and scenarios, offering us everything from dating partners to financial
investments in a few clicks.
But this doesn't mean that we should be seduced by nostalgia for a
once-contented humanity in a faded past – before the advent of the
internet or mass production or capitalism. From a psychoanalytic
perspective, the fear of missing out is inherent in the human condition
rather than a problem of a particular culture or society.
FOMO begins at birth, from the moment that we are expelled out of a
bounded environment that catered seamlessly to all our bodily needs
and delivered into a strange, ominous place in which those needs
afflict us almost constantly. Here we become subject to desires that
cannot be quenched – not only for food and warmth, but also for the
love and attention of the adults who provide them.
Infancy and childhood initiate us into a permanent state of
dissatisfaction. Our cries for milk or a comforting hug habituate
a reflex to demand things, which will become ever more elaborate
and sophisticated. Infantile appeals for nourishment and affection
graduate to pestering for Pokémon cards and video games. Desire
and rivalry become a basic fact of daily life.
This desire is ultimately less for the possession of material objects in
their own right than for the feeling of recognition and inclusion.
总觉得别人的生活更精彩？你不是一个人 2/2
Shoulda, woulda, coulda: why FOMO won't
let go of us
By Josh Cohen, The Economist, Published Sep. 26, 2022
Confirmation of this basic human predicament is found throughout
the history of literature – even if FOMO is rarely called out by
name. Perhaps FOMO is a particular concern of fiction because the
experience of reading a novel shares some of its characteristics:
a sedentary individual learns about intriguing events happening
elsewhere.
In 1759, when the English novel was relatively new, Samuel Johnson
wrote a philosophical novella called "The History of Rasselas, Prince
of Abyssinia". Its protagonist travels across different lands with his
mentor and sister seeking to discover the best "choice of life". He
comes to realise (spoiler alert!) that every decision from childhood to
old age is beset with frustrations and limitations.
In the chapters on marriage, Rasselas's sister Nekayah expounds on
the difficulties with the various options. Early marriages are born
of the pain of being apart. But once a young couple wed, their best
selves quickly dissolve and, in their mutual disappointment, "they
wear their life out with altercations".
It's no more advisable to marry late, "when opinions are fixed
and habits are established", leaving no room for compromise and
accommodation. If the timing is always wrong, perhaps it's better to
remain single? Not so, says Nekayah. Those who live by themselves
"dream away their time without friendship, without fondness…
Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures."
In shifting our focus away from the world, we were free to re-engage
with our neglected interests, thoughts and desires. FOMO seemed
to give way to JOMO – the joy of missing out. This coinage began
being used regularly only in the late 2010s in an atmosphere of
millennial weariness and over-stimulation. During lockdown, JOMO
came into its own.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, FOMO has its source in the social
dimension of our selfhood and our need for affirmation and approval.
It expresses the wish to be seen in the right places, to have the most
desirable experiences in the eyes of the world. Winnicott called this
the "false self". He didn't mean this pejoratively. He insisted that
we neither can nor should do without a false self – a public persona
is necessary because it shields the private self. That "true self"
would find unwanted exposure to the harsh light of the world's gaze
traumatic.
The true self wishes to reside in silence and cultivate solitude with
only our own ideas for company. Here, away from social media,
JOMO thrives and we can experience a life of contemplation and
imagination.
There has been a rebalancing of the competing pulls of FOMO and
JOMO, of expansion and contraction of oneself. We needed to break
out of the home because our outward-facing self requires nurturing.
But the pandemic helped us recall the existence of an inner life that
had been much neglected. Perhaps this collective experience will
serve as a reminder to us all that as much as missing out is our great
fear, it is also a secret wish.
0118《经xx人》长文：爷爷奶奶带孩子正成为全球趋势 1
International | The generation game
The age of the grandparent has arrived
The ratio of grandparents to children is higher than ever before. That
has big consequences
The Economist, Published Jan. 12, 2023
BEIJING, DAKAR, MEXICO CITY AND STOCKHOLM—
The most saccharine song of 1980 was "There's No One Quite
Like Grandma", performed by the St Winifred's School choir from
Stockport, England. It shot to the top of the British charts as kids
everywhere gave it to granny for Christmas. "Grandma, we love
you," they sang. "Grandma, we do. Though you may be far away, we
think of you."
Today, as the once-cherubic choristers start to become grandmas
and grandpas themselves, grandparenting has changed dramatically.
Two big demographic trends are making nana and gramps more
important. First, people are living longer. Global life expectancy has
risen from 51 to 72 since 1960. Second, families are shrinking. Over
the same period, the number of babies a woman can expect to have in
her lifetime has fallen by half, from 5 to 2.4. That means the ratio of
living grandparents to children is steadily rising.
Surprisingly little research ha
could not find reliable figures for how many living grandparents there
are, so we asked Diego Alburez-Gutiérrez of the Max Planck Institute
for Demographic Research in Germany to produce some estimates
by crunching UN age and population data with models of kinship
structures in each country.
We found that there are 1.5bn grandparents in the world, up from
0.5bn in 1960 (though the further back one goes, the fuzzier the
estimates become). As a share of the population they have risen from
17% to 20%. And the ratio of grandparents to children under 15 has
vaulted from 0.46 in 1960 to 0.8 today.
By 2050 we project that there will be 2.1bn grandparents (making
up 22% of humanity), and slightly more grandparents than under-
15s. That will have profound consequences. The evidence suggests
children do better with grandparental help—which usually, in
practice, means from grandmothers. And it will help drive another
unfinished social revolution—the movement of women into paid
work.
Since fertility rates and life expectancy vary enormously from
country to country, the age of the grandparent has not yet dawned
everywhere (see chart 1). They are 29% of Bulgarians but only 10%
of Burundians. Their average age varies widely, too, from 53 in
Uganda to 72 in Japan (see chart 2). To understand what a difference
plentiful grandparents make, a good place to start is in a country
where they are still scarce.
Consider Senegal. Most rural Senegalese are subsistence farmers.
Although fertility has dropped from 7.3 babies per woman in 1980
to 4.5 today, large families remain the norm. Children under 15
outnumber living grandparents by 3.5 to 1.
Amy Diallo, an 84-year-old matriarch wrapped in a blue and white
hijab, has to think carefully when asked how many she has. "Thirty,"
she concludes, looking up from her cross-legged position on the floor
of her home in Tally Boubess, outside Dakar, the capital, on a street
where horses and carts jostle with sheep and cars.
As the oldest member of her family, she commands respect. She
offers moral guidance to the young: be honest and pious, uphold
tradition and stop hitting your younger brother. Every year she leads
a family pilgrimage to Tivaouane, a Muslim holy city, with children,
grandchildren, great-grandchildren and various in-laws, perhaps a
hundred in all.
Grandparents pass on traditional beliefs, stories, songs and a sense
of history. More prosaically, they bring an extra pair of hands.
That helps both parents and children. A study in rural Gambia,
for example, found that the presence of a maternal grandmother
significantly increased a child's chance of living to the age of two. In
sub-Saharan Africa the odds of being in school are about 15% higher
for children living with a grandfather and 38% higher for children
who live with a grandmother.
As for Mrs Diallo, she has never worked outside the home. But
she has helped some of her offspring to do so. Ndeye, one of her
daughters, got a job in an office despite having eight kids herself,
because Mrs Diallo helped out with the children.
Yet for all her sense of love and duty, Mrs Diallo cannot babysit all
30 grandkids. The state offers little help. Unlike Ndeye, many of Mrs
Diallo's daughters and granddaughters have never worked outside
the home. This is common: barely a third of working-age women in
Senegal are either in work or seeking it. Grandparents in the poorest
countries do their best, but there are not enough of them.
《经济学人》长文：外婆带孩子正成为全球趋势 2
International | The generation game
The age of the grandparent has arrived
She's there in times of need
In richer places, fertility has fallen much further than in Africa.
A typical Mexican woman, for example, can expect to have only
two children, down from nearly seven in 1960. Mexico's ratio of
living grandparents to children is three times higher than Senegal's.
Mexican abuelas thus have more time to lavish on each grandchild.
Irma Aguilar Verduzco lives with her daughter, also called Irma, and
two grandchildren, Rodrigo and Fernanda. She cooks, does school
runs and reads with her grandchildren. Ever since he was three,
Rodrigo, now 16, has liked to take a cup of coffee and sit down for
a chat with his grandmother. Fernanda, now 12, still likes to get into
bed with her. Irma junior, meanwhile, has long worked 12-hour days,
currently as a manager at the Maya Train, a big rail project. She is
divorced, and says her ex-husband "does not help". She "could not
have done anything" without Irma senior's help.
Grandmothers are the main source of non-parental child care for
young children in Mexico, especially since covid-19 forced many
nurseries to close. They watch over nearly 40% of sprogs under
six. Before grandma moved in, Irma was struggling. "There is no
understanding or flexibility for working mothers in Mexico," she
complains. Her kids were often home alone. "Sometimes I paid
people to look after them but it was hard to afford and hard to trust
people." One day, years ago, Rodrigo came home from nursery with
a broken bone; Irma suspects mistreatment. With her mother around,
she feels relaxed.
Miguel Talamas of the Inter-American Development Bank and his
colleagues have tried to estimate how much Mexican grandmothers
help their daughters get paid work. They looked at what happened
to families after grandmothers die. An abuela's death reduced by
27%, or 12 percentage points, the chance that her daughter was in
the labour force, and reduced her earnings by 53%. (The same study
found no effect on the employment rate of fathers.)
Living with grandparents is not always easy. They may have
outdated ideas or demand too much deference. In India, where
couples traditionally live with the husband's parents, a genre of
television drama turns on the fraught relations between wives
and mothers-in-law. A study of rural Indian women in 2018 found
that those who lived with their mummyji (mother-in-law) had little
freedom. Only 12% were allowed to visit friends or relatives alone.
A grandma who enforces old-fashioned norms of wifely subjugation
can make it harder for her daughter-in-law to work outside the
home. But an intriguing study finds that on average, this effect is
outweighed by the help the mother-in-law gives with domestic
chores. Such help has become more concentrated as India's fertility
rate has fallen, from six in 1960 to just over two today. Madhulika
Khanna of Amazon and Divya Pandey of 3ie, a think-tank, looked
at what happened to Indian women if mummyji died. They found
the daughters-in-law were 10% less likely to do or seek paid work,
probably because they had to spend more time collecting firewood
and minding their children. Even overbearing grandmothers can
inadvertently do their bit for female emancipation.
Rich countries generally provide services that help women juggle
child-care and work. But many parents seek extra help from
grandparents nonetheless. Old-age pensions help, by allowing
grandparents to give up work. According to one survey, 50% of very
young children, 35% of primary-school-aged children and 20% of
teens in America spend time with their grandparent in a typical week.
This can make a big difference. Janice Compton of the University
of Manitoba and Robert Pollak of Washington University crunched
American census data and found that living within 25 miles of a
grandmother raised the labour-force participation rate for married
women with small children by 4-10 percentage points.
"Granny nannying", as some call it, can have downsides, too. A
British study found grandparents are more likely to leave their wards
near fire hazards than nurseries or nannies. Studies from America,
Britain, China and Japan suggest that a child around grandparents
is more likely to be obese, though whether this is due to spoiling or
other factors is unclear.
新的一年，从整理自己的房间开始
How to help someone with a hoarding
disorder
By Rosalind Moran, Reader's Digest, Published Jan. 18, 2023
Clutter. Acquisition. Compulsion. Marie Kondo. Hoarding has
many popular connotations, but hoarding disorder itself is far more
complex than is often acknowledged and is frequently misunderstood.
Hoarding disorder can be hard to identify, not least because its
manifestations evolve in response to changing external stimuli.
Common perceptions of hoarding range from jokes about having
"shopping problems" to dragons encircling treasure on the silver
screen. However, such simplistic understandings and representations
of this behaviour do an injustice to those living with hoarding
disorder.
So, what is hoarding disorder, and how are current global events
impacting the ways individuals understand and experience it?
What is hoarding disorder?
Hoarders collect so many items around them that it starts to
negatively affect their life. Hoarding is a disorder where a person
accumulates items and stores them in a typically chaotic manner,
often to the extent that their environment grows cluttered and
overwhelming or begins to impede the person's ability to live their
life.
Imagine a house so filled with objects that inhabitants can no longer
access certain rooms, their presence and sheer volume provoke stress
in their owner.
The hoarded items will not necessarily have monetary value. This is
because hoarding behaviour is more often a manifestation of other
preoccupations and anxieties in a person's life than it is a reflection of
the value of the actual items that are being hoarded.
How is hoarding disorder different from being messy?
Identifying hoarding disorder can be challenging for various reasons.
These include the fact that people experiencing hoarding disorder
might be skilled at hiding this behaviour, such as by avoiding inviting
guests into cluttered living spaces.
Diagnosing hoarding disorder is also complicated by factors like
finances, classism and cultural background.
For example, class and financial resources can influence how
hoarding is perceived and addressed. If someone can pay for storage
spaces or lives isolated in their own property filled with clutter, they
may be dismissed as benignly eccentric and avoid public scrutiny.
Those individuals with fewer resources, who may live close to others
or in public housing, often draw far more public approbation due
to the risks posed by clutter, including fire-related risks, sanitation
issues, and unsightliness and inconvenience for others living around
them.
Nevertheless, health practitioners can identify hoarding disorder
with substantial accuracy based on the evidence of certain diagnostic
criteria. The accumulation of clutter is one such criterion, alongside
difficulty discarding items due to a perceived need to save them.
Academic clinical psychologist, Professor Jessica Grisham of UNSW
Sydney, notes that hoarding disorder's diagnostic criteria are unusual
among other psychological disorder criteria because they include
indicators located externally to the person who is experiencing the
disorder.
Hoarders retain items for different reasons
Hoarding is complicated, not least because the underlying triggers
for compulsive collecting vary from person to person. Some hoarders
save items because they can imagine future uses for them, whereas
others resist discarding objects for reasons rooted in grief or fear.
Miriam, for example, developed hoarding disorder following the
death of her husband.
"I didn't used to have a problem with getting rid of things," she
explains. "Since my husband's passing, however, I have found it
extremely hard to part with anything that belonged to him, or even
just with miscellaneous items from our shared life."
How might external factors impact hoarding in 2023?
Complexities particular to this day and age are impacting triggers
for, and development of, hoarding disorder, as well as people's
experiences of living with it.
The cost-of-living crisis, for example, has amplified fears of scarcity
and anxieties about the future worldwide. For many people who are
either experiencing hoarding disorder already or are on the cusp
of developing the condition, external pressures like this tend to
exacerbate their hoarding tendencies.
Anxiety and grief related to the coronavirus pandemic, and stress
regarding lockdowns and the lifting of restrictions, have also
exacerbated hoarding tendencies among some individuals.
Moving forward in addressing hoarding
Every hoarding disorder case is different, so compassion is key when
addressing it.
Compassion is an important part of seeking to understand hoarding
disorder. Especially in difficult times, safeguarding items might
be, to some extent, advisable, which is why it can be easy for some
individuals to tip into hoarding behaviour.
Professional organiser and declutterer Heather Tingle, meanwhile,
highlighted how hoarding tendencies can be a learned behaviour
passed down through family ethos. "My grandfather kept
everything," she explains, "as growing up during the Depression,
his family impressed on him the need to keep anything that could
come in useful one day. This emphasis on preserving resources and
avoiding being wasteful was passed down to me."
However, putting systems and steps in place around item
management can make everyday life easier for those experiencing
hoarding disorder, and can lessen such tendencies over time.
What is important, especially in present circumstances, is to be aware
of and compassionate towards the way that external stresses may
be pushing vulnerable individuals to develop or deepen hoarding
behaviours. No socioeconomic era lasts forever, and help is available.
Some things one does not have to keep.