Hoarding: When is it too much?

That's the size of our flat; and this is not considered small here. I guess there are different priorities here though - people want to live close to the centre of the city so we cram ourselves in tight.I am still a bad hoarder, though. One of the plus points in buying this flat was that it has a space in the cellar where we can shove stuff; and is designed very well from the point of view of storage space in the flat itself.Hoarding is definitely not only an American thing, although I have noticed that minimalism seems to be in fashion at the minute. I live in a cluttered mess - never been concerned about fashion.The most fascinating type of hoarding to me is longterm storage. There are a surprising amount of people who pay very large amounts of money to keep items in storage for years or even decades for which they never return.

I have the same issue, but primarily just with ebooks and comics. At the rate which I manage to read them now, there is no possibility of me actually finishing the collection I have within an average lifestyle, but I still keep acquiring more.As you say, this is not a space concern, since a few external hard drives take up very little physical space; unlike the ever growing pile of dead tree books. When I sit and think about it, though, the time I spend gathering and filing the collection could be much more productively spent reading more of what I already have.I do wonder if this behaviour is a modern manifestation of something that made sense for a stone age hunter gatherer.