Skip to content
Home » STUFFED: The Unintended Result of Our Attachment to Personal Belongings: Matt Paxton (Transcript)

STUFFED: The Unintended Result of Our Attachment to Personal Belongings: Matt Paxton (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of Matt Paxton’s talk titled “STUFFED: The Unintended Result of Our Attachment to Personal Belongings” at TEDxBethesda 2019 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Power of Music and Memories

1984, I was nine years old. I was in my bedroom in Richmond, Virginia, and this song was playing in my head. I was Danielson. I was the karate kid, I was ready to do the crane. Four years later, I’m in Morbius Middle School. My best friend Sean Harrington, we’re preparing for a track meet, and he hands me the headphones. He said, “This will get you pumped up.”

“Push it real good,” all right? I did not know that three women from Queens would change my life forever. A few more years, I’m walking into my dorm, first day of college, at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, and I hear this song at the end of the hall. I still don’t know that song, but I still sing it every time I hear it on the radio.

I eventually walked into that room, and I met Hilario Ellis, a guy that would eventually become my best friend, an investor in many of my companies, and the namesake of my third son. The cheeseburger, not the two bananas.

The Emotional Connection to Stuff

We’re talking about music here for a minute, because that music, man, it brings us right back where we are, right? And the music is about the memories. So I’m the guy from Hoarders, am I here to talk about music?

No, all right, I’m going to talk about stuff. I’m going to talk about a lot of stuff, but just like music, the memories attached to our stuff put us right back in a really happy place. If you don’t know me yet, I’m Matt Paxton. I am from that TV show “Hoarders,” man, I have seen it all, all right? I’ve seen everything from 300 cats to actually finding Babe Ruth’s baseball bats. I’ve been on Howard Stern, I’ve written books, I even got to clean out an office with Jimmy Kimmel.

But I have spent almost 20 years helping people deal with their stuff, at a very personal level. I’m in the offices, I’m in their homes, I’m going through their closets, I’m going through their memories. The one thing I’ve learned in my 15 years is the stuff actually holds us back. We buy the stuff because it brings us happiness, or we think it’s going to bring us happiness.

What I’ve found out is, just like heroin, anybody want to believe me on this, all right? It’s short-term gratification. It’s not long-term.

The Psychology of Hoarding

Let’s talk about my Hoarders. That’s a nice little level 5 Hoard, that’s a much skinnier version of me, I need to update that picture.

All my Hoarders, they’re good people, really good people. Bad stuff has happened to them. They’re looking for their happiness and self-worth in stuff, and it turns out they look for so much happiness, they’re trying to cover up that pain, and so they go to buy more stuff, and it doesn’t solve that pain. All it does is build up, and it actually holds them back from living. Most of my clients, they’ve lost their jobs, they’ve lost their spouses, they’ve lost their homes, they’ve lost everything in hopes that they would get it.

I actually had a lady, she collected yarn, skeins, right, not scones. Scones you eat, skeins you knit, and she had 8,000 things of yarn in her house. She did it because she made blankets for babies, and she’d give them away, and people would say, “Oh, you’re the best, thanks,” and they’d give her hugs, and they’d say, “I love you, awesome.” So she started buying more yarn, because the more yarn she bought, the more blankets she made, the more love she received. The problem was, she couldn’t give those blankets away fast enough, and couldn’t make them fast enough, and she actually lost her house because she had so much yarn, and it actually was the mice that were living inside the yarn that was the problem.

Generational Differences in Stuff

Now I work with my downsizing seniors. This is our grandparents, their stuff represents decades and decades of hard work, and their self-worth and happiness comes from passing it back down to the next generation. The dining room is a great example of this.

Our grandparents, my mom and my aunt fought over who got the china cabinet. The grandkids were fighting over who has to take the dining room cabinet. The problem with all that stuff is, I think we got a bunch of millennials in here, nobody wants it, nobody wants any of that stuff. And I’ve learned is the reason our parents held on to the dining rooms, well, it’s because their families, their time with their family, their loved ones, their happiness, their self-worth, it started in that dining room. But now, ours is in the family room, or it’s in a car, or it’ll go on vacation somewhere else.

ALSO READ:  We Are Generation Opportunity: Madeline Toal at TEDxYouth@InnovationDrive (Transcript)

Many of my senior clients now, they actually can’t move out of their house, because they’re dealing with their stuff. How many of you have your adult children’s stuff still in your house? How many of you still have your adult children in your house? It’s kind of a thing, all right?

And a lot of my clients can’t move, because they’re holding on to that stuff, they’ve become storage units. Then there’s Gen X, that’s me. And we’ve spent a long time trying to buy everything for our kids. We work so hard to provide everything for our kids: cars, schools, camps, toys, clothes, books.

Man, I spent $900 on a cell phone the other day. Would my grandfather spend $900 on a cell phone? Not a chance. He would literally spank me for doing so, all right?

My self-worth comes from buying all that stuff. And so I go to work, and I work really, really hard to get as much money as I can to buy those things.