Don't Hoard and Waste Away

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” writes Dante Alighieri in the book “The Inferno” of the epic poem “The Divine Comedy”. In the Fourth Circle, 7th Canto in the bowels of Hell, the guide, Virgil, introduces Dante to the Hoarders and Wasters. Their divine retribution is being bound to incredibly burdensome weights, constantly battling each other. I used to be a Hoarder. I would accumulate games, books, movies, clusterings of material belongings that I thought I would need later on down the line. Now, I was a sophisticated Hoarder, meaning I actually organized and categorized the “Hoard”. The scariest thing about Hoarding is you just maladaptively develop a process of saving and storing, so you aren’t even aware of this burdensome dump of garbage you’re developing.

But the key here is to not abandon all hope. Don’t vacillate to the other extreme, throw out everything, the baby with the bathwater, and become a waster. Never Hoard and never Waste, but sustain conviction in your own certainty. Keep the hope, ditch the hoard, and feel connected with your life!