I walked into a client’s home to conduct an intake assessment. My plan was to help them find housing and help them improve manageable behaviors and reduce maladaptive outbursts. Outside of the home, broken glass was littered on the walkway. I knocked on the door and covered my mouth and nose from the putrid smell. The home smelled of stale urine, feces, and rotting food. I held my breath and ventured onward. Boxes were stacked 8 feet high with a small walkway leading to the living room, kitchen, and bathrooms. I waded through the boxes and wondered, “How did this home come to be in such a decrepit state?” The family offered me a place to sit down on the couch and I politely and strongly declined.

Hoarders are one thing. Hoarding’s an anxiety disorder that’s pretty tough to treat. Their impact on others is minimal. Then there’s space junk. Space junk’s a growing problem that we’ll need to address rather quickly. Satellites have crashed into each other at thousands of miles per hour in low-Earth orbit. The number of satellites will continue to grow and these damaging collisions will be more prevalent than ever. This is a serious issue and can cause countless amounts of damage to spacecraft and impede our chances at becoming a space-faring society. Our universe may or may not be infinite, but Earth’s low orbit only has so much space.

What about digital hoarding? Should we be concerned about the cloud? Are the memes we’re all collecting and sharing each day concerning? There’s virtually unlimited space for content on the cloud. Those Epstein memes aren’t going to crash Amazon’s web-hosting services. What about those Italian AOC memes? How about those 50,000 unread emails in your Gmail? I wouldn’t be too concerned about the capacity of Tech companies’ cloud servers. I’d turn your concern inward to mental health. Technology is becoming ubiquitous and it’s a risk we should consider.

Mental health is vital. Hoarding images and emails that you’ll never use isn’t a major problem yet. Then again, a psychologist coined Internet Addiction Disorder in 1997 and was ridiculed. Having an unorganized desktop can be stressful and will negatively impact your mental health. Unlike hoarding physical objects, digital objects are fairly easy to rid yourself of. One can delete a folder with 70,000 memes — on one’s desktop or the cloud. It’s a quick fix, but problematic if you have obsessive tendencies — or an OCD diagnosis. My desktop has 111 icons on it — And I’ll spend the next 20 minutes deleting them and organizing everything. Digital hoarding can be a minor scare, but fixing it’s also an easy solution. If my home was filled with 111 heavy boxes on the other hand, my quality of life would be much lower. Digital hoarding risks will increase in the future and just like physical hoarding, it will affect a small percentage of the population, but I wouldn’t be too worried just yet.

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