Yesterday I saw WALL-E with my family and friends. It is truly a great movie as everyone else is saying. It was also my kids (and their friends) first movie in a theater.
WALL-E is a trash compactor robot (Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth class). Part of what makes him human (besides the 25 years of hard-work and perfection by Pixar team) is his tendency to collect things he finds interesting. They include a rubik’s cube, egg-beater and a sheet of bubble wrap. Much of the movie is about a particular thing he picked up: a plant sprout.
Like WALL-E, we may be hard-wired to collect junk as well.
According to the experts, the tendency to hoard is animalistic and has its roots in food hoarding. I believe this theory as I observe it in my twins. Anirudh and Sahana have a separate collection of tiny trucks, cars and animal figurines that they do not want to play with, but just store in a special place. They are just 3 and their behavior is more inborn than acquired.
The Economist opinion (Curse of Untidiness; DNA all over the place) I referred to in my previous post talks about how this tendency could explain few things while at odds with the modern desire to be tidy and a minimalist.
The economist in Anand (pun intended) referred me to this “Endowment Effect” behavior, an effect observed 28 years ago. Apparently, the value of a thing intrinsically increases when one owns it and this has been demonstrated in several experiments (not just amongst humans but also chimps and capuchin monkeys).
What is even more interesting is how this irrational behavior conflicts with the rational world of markets.
I tend to agree with the other interpretation that this behavior is not exactly irrational but just “differently” rational. May be this behavior could be a variable in Willingness to Pay and Choice Modeling.
As much as we tend to accumulate, there is also value in being a minimalist and agile. There are costs associated with compulsive hoarding and disorganization.
How do we reconcile our urges and still feel organized? WALL-E has his ambidextrous limbs and neat array of bins in his truck to store and find things. And he probably has petabytes of RAM and SSD to remember where he placed his stuff.
How can we mere mortals have the same control as we collect more and more paper and digital documents which hold critical personal information?
Get a OfficeDrop account. Get and feel organized, simplify your life, and go paperless.
July 1: Corrected Water -> Waste
