I'll never actually do that

I'm not a hoarder, to be one of those you need to be unwilling to dispose of anything, wanting instead to hold onto things for as long as you can because you either don't want to part with them or you convince yourself that they will serve a purpose at some point, that they may be useful or that there'll come a day when you'll need one of those.  I can part with things that I no longer need, I do this quite often, once a year at least with my wardrobe I look at what no longer fits and give it to charity, I look at things I hold onto and ask whether I'll ever need it or whether it will actually serve a purpose one day.  I can at least be realistic about that question and its answer when I want to be.

There are still a lot of things I hold onto.  The reason I hold onto those things is because I tell myself that I will do something with them at some point in the future.  For example I hold onto an old laptop that is broken, it needs the CPU fan replaced and it needs a RAM upgrade because it can't keep up with the demands of the latest version of Windows 10.  Realistically I will never actually do any of this if I am honest.  The PC I am using right now is a desktop and it is my main computer.  This PC was built in stages, over the course of 2 years it eventually cost around £700 [$900] all things factored in.  I use this PC for quite a bit, from low utilization tasks like writing, listening to music, watching videos, through to more intensive tasks like games development, 3D rendering, and gaming in general.  If anything happened to this machine I would pay to get it fixed, for another few years at least because there is a lot of life left in this machine.  If I ever had to travel however I wouldn't risk taking this machine with me, I wouldn't want to damage it.  I would actually need a laptop again and to be completely honest I would probably end up buying a new one before I would actually get the old one fixed.

My old laptop is about 8 years old now, it lasted longer than I expect most laptops to last.  A desktop I expect to last about 5 years on average, you can extend the lifetime if you look after it, which I hope to do with this desktop.  As for laptops I expect them to last around 3 years, again with care you can get them to last a lot longer and the fact that laptop lasted around 7 years before it started to develop problems was remarkable in itself.  The point I am trying to make here is that the laptop has realistically surpassed its life expectancy and although I could get it fixed, if I did need a laptop I would want it to last quite a while so I'd be more likely to buy a new one - assuming I could afford to do that.

There's a distinction to be drawn here between this mentality and that of procrastination.  In he case of the latter, procrastination implies something we eventually do, we just keep putting off when we actually do it.  If you never do the thing in question then it's not really procrastination.  You could argue that you eventually intend to do it, but again there is a distinction to be drawn here in that you will admit if you stop and really think about it that you actually have no intention of doing it, you're only convincing yourself you will so that you hold onto the things that are the focus of that mentality - that's the dangerous part because that mentality is the one that leads to hoarding if you let it take hold.

The fact we can convince ourselves of things so easily, even when we know it's not true on some level, and even when the only person that this really has any impact on is ourself is perhaps one of the most intriguing parts of this whole behaviour and thought process.  It makes you wonder what else in your life you have convinced yourself of so easily when on some level you know it's not true.  With things like that old laptop there is at least a physical reminder, a token of sorts that can be used to make you see and realise what you've done, but what about the things that don't have physical manifestations, the beliefs and the thoughts that we have not out of conviction but simply because we didn't put any effort or energy into challenging the thought process that led us to forming them in the first place.  I've said before that I often stop and think about what I say or my behaviour and ask myself if it is the way I really want to behave, this whole mentality is one reason why I do this, in essence I audit my behaviour and beliefs to check that there is a real reason behind my motivation or if it's just something I am doing for the sake of doing it or because it's something I've always done - it's perhaps not surprising that there aren't many things I do that I would consider habits as this process is quite good at preventing them from forming or taking hold. I recognise it's not easy to do at first, it takes time to develop this mentality and to think in this way.