I'm that hoarder, and granted, not in terminal stage, but enough to severely impact my quality of life. And I disagree, I think it would take me two days to clear out the house, but mostly lack the energy and motivation to do it. So no, burning down the house would be way way worse.
If you don't care about the possessions you could remove it quickly. The problem is that when you try to clean it, they want to evaluate every single item for if it should stay or not.
Throwing it all in garbage bags and then in the bin takes much shorter amount of time.
I just recently helped a buddy clean out his dead relatives hoarder house. The only real decisions were "consignment, charity, or dump?" It took us weeks. I'm sure if we threw a ton of money, people, and vehicles at it we could have done it quickly, but that's not your typical scenario.
The problem is having to make an item-by-item decision for thousands of items.
If the decision is just "dump", the problem become easy: you strip the house bare and throw it in a dumpster. There was a hoarder house near me that was cleaned out in a couple days that way - they parked a dumpster in the front yard, hired a couple guys to toss everything in the house in garbage bags and toss all the garbage bags in the dumpster, gutted it down to the studs, remodeled it, and sold it.
The trouble is it's hard to get the hoarder to agree to do that, that's part of the disorder over valuing items that are junk, and also depends on the severity of the hoard. Sometimes the intervention can happen before it's all rotted to junk and there is legitimately items worth selling or keeping in the mess and the person just needs help letting go of the volume of random crap.
I would not be surprised if they would be money ahead hiring someone to sort through all the "junk" and make the decisions. There likely are a lot of things that have value in the mix that got sent to the dump.
You don't need to throw money at people. When we first moved abroad we ended up in this exact situation with quite a lot of belongings that we mostly just wanted to get rid of. We posted on Craig's List (maybe Facebook would be the goto now a days?) and literally within 30 minutes there were people there with professional moving gear clearing with us and then organizing/moving everything out that we didn't want.
They regaled us with a tale of how they just got to the city and were looking forward to being able to furnish/populate their house, but it was obvious that they were just grabbing and selling everything as a career. No harm no foul though, as we just wanted stuff cleared out and it certainly ended up 'in circulation' for folks that could use it.
When time came for my incapacitated-by-stroke father to move after we sold the family house to his new apartment, he did exactly this:
> they want to evaluate every single item
I almost gave up on him and only resumed when he was literally crying for me to come back. Did not regret coming back.
When he died 5 years later, my poor mother needed WEEKS to throw away all the useless shit he had accumulated in his apartment. Then I did regret not being harsher on him, but he was mentally and physically ill.
To anyone reading this: You are not the only one being hurt when you are a hoarder. Let people help you.
I suspect that many hoarders know this deep down. But the effort required for them to change their own behaviour is so great that they, most likely unconsciously, dismiss the harm it does to others as a lesser evil.
The hoarder houses I've been part of cleaning also require ripping up and discarding the carpeting. Some walls could merely be repainted, some required that special paint for trapping decades of cigarette smoke, and some required replacing the sheetrock that had been damaged by unspayed pets "marking" the walls.
Comments can be productive whether they are intended to be helpful or not. Just calling out a common case/rationalization can make the other person see it as a possibility. Or make others identify it as some problem they also have.
No helpful disposition is required behind the "calling out" for that to be the case.
The (unverifiable anyway) intention doesn't add some magic dust to a comment to make it good or bad.
Doesn't work. Did that with my sister. I managed to clear out the dining room so that it wa possible to sit the family around the table to eat. Went back six months later and not only was that room uninhabitable but the amount of junk in other rooms had increased and the family was eating off trays in front of the television.
It's not the junk that is the problem, it's the way of thinking that leads someone to refuse to discard it. Or more likely there is some even deeper rooted cause that makes them think that way.
It can also be the case that the people they live with don't help either.
Yeah - I read that and was like 'yeah' and didn't even realize at first that they were trying reductio ad absurdum. At some point demolition is the best step.
Don't agree in demolition of the USG though - it's actually quite effective when you think about it.
> It's funny that you chose to use this analogy because most people improve old buildings by blowing them up and rebuilding everything
It's not funny, it's practical.
Even if we were to demolish and rebuild first there's cleanup. Then there is a survey. And then planning, input design and then after all that, construction.
If you were going to do all those tasks inside that building you already destroyed, it's now much harder to rebuild.
And in trying to merely restructure you're also running the risk to carry over all pathologies, bad actors, "code debt", and general baggage, of the thing you're trying to restructure.
Yeah, I think this is why starting with a smaller part(s) of a big system that is more-or-less working and building on that is maybe the best we can do.
If only someone thought of this 240 years ago when some peeps got frustrated enough with their government to fight their way through a separation from that government.
We can never reduce the size of the federal workforce because it means people will lose jobs?
We can never cut any federal benefit or subsidy regardless of the cost, importance, or overall value to society because someone, somewhere is benefiting from it?
Here is a reference to the "Reinventing Government" effort that was implemented during the Clinton administration and considered highly successful (and legal):
Yes, I am questioning whether the parent poster would have supported those cuts or uttered the same cry, as some individuals and communities were absolutely worse off after those cuts.
Democrats significantly cut the government and Al Gore led the effort. It had some issues though is widely considered a success in hindsight. That was a scapel, DOGE appears to be a drunken flamethrower.
Democrats cut the government because they were unable to resist Republican cuts, so if we’re drawing a causal link I think it would be fairer to say Republicans made the cuts during a time when a Democrat was president. Also the public blamed the Republicans for the shutdowns which reelected Clinton and is probably the reason the Republicans stoped caring so much about the deficit.
Yes, I understand that Democrats have cut government in the past.
I was young, but I remember cries of "you can't do this to people!" then as well, just like we hear from a select group of people every time any cut is contemplated, which is why I asked the parent poster what exactly they mean by their comment.
How do you think policy that affects whole groups of people, or even a whole country, is made? Not talking about just Trump/DOGE, or even just US or just 2025. In general and globally.
Goverments and lawmakers do get to "do that with people's lives". And they do that, affecting them, all the time. Including affecting them negatively a lot of the time.
And it gets worse: ineffective bureucracies (or incompetend ones) also "get to do that with people's lives"
["that" being: affecting them negatively, destroying their livehood, even causing deaths, e.g. consider some country's organization similar to FEMA being incompetent when there's a crisis].
Who said anything about rebuilding? The party in power wants the government (of the people) to have less of everything except authority for their own role.
My house was so difficult to walk through with the years of stuff piled up. Much easier now that it's all been burned to the ground!