Why do I hang onto things?

I am in the process of packing up an apartment full of stuff ready to leave Paris and move to the UK. I have lost count of how many times I have moved house in the last 10 years but every time, I find myself packing up large collections of things that I never use.

For example, I have about 900 CD’s that I burned onto my PC some years back. I play all my music from my PC or my iPod and I don’t actually have a dedicated CD player anymore (although the DVD can play them of course), and yet I still drag them around with me. I also have about 500 books, some of which I have had well over a quarter of a century and I spent most of the day yesterday packing these into boxes and moaning about it to my friends on Facebook.

So, if I play music off my PC and iPod and if I have a backlog of new books to read that stop me reading my old books for a second time, why do I lug these things around the world with me repeatedly?

In the case of the CD’s I defend myself with the argument that I like the sleeve booklet and enjoy looking through the packaging to read all the lyrics and thank-you notes and that if I lost the contents of my PC then I would need them again. Both arguments are complete rubbish of course; I never look at the sleeve notes and my PC is fully backed-up.

When it comes to the books I suppose there is a bit of a stronger defence in that it is more difficult to back up a book and that it is traditional to keep a library of one’s reading collection. However, I know for a fact that I will never read the vast majority of my collection again; some are simply the wrong genre and others were rubbish the first time I read them and they are unlikely to improve with a second visit. When I was a teenager I read a lot of science fiction and these days I struggle to get past the first page of a sci-fi book, so really there is no excuse and they need to go.

So the question is; why am I so attached to these large collections of things I am highly unlikely to ever use again? In both cases I could probably turn them into money if I put a bit of time into selling them.

I hate to admit it but I think I am a hoarder. It is only the fact that I have moved house every couple of years that has stopped me having a yard full of lumps of wood and bits of metal that “I never know when I might need”, and a garage full of broken electrical items that “will come in useful one day”. It is only the fact that my better half has a sense of fashion that stops me keeping clothes from 20 years ago on the basis I will wear them again when I walk the dog around a muddy field on a rainy day. (The fact that we don’t have a dog is irrelevant).

If you know of a tablet I can take to cure me of my hoarding then send me the details. In the meantime I am off to pack up the last of my books before we move...