Let me tell you about the Miser Paradox.

We will use that archetype of all misers, Ebeneezer Scrooge.

Here is a man whose every waking moment is devoted to the acquisition of wealth. This pursuit has twisted his once gentle soul onto that of a hard, bitter, callous, grasping wretch who is almost as miserable inside as he makes the lives of others.

What makes this a paradox is that all his wealth gathering neither makes him happy nor makes his life any better. He cannot bring himself to spend even a tiny fraction of his considerable wealth on any sort of creature comforts. small pleasures, or anything that might bring him joy.

So he is a man driven by the need to acquire wealth he will never use. That is the paradox. The pursuit of wealth is the end unto himself. He gathers money compulsively, blindly, and this compulsion is so strong, so dominant in his psyche that he cannot bear to spend any of it (besides the bare minimum for survival) because that would mean letting go of it.

Essentially, he is a hoarder of wealth. He is no different than the people who gather all kinds of garbage not because they rationally ever have any use for it, but because their compulsion is so strong that completely dominates their psyche and blinds them to anything but that drive for mindless acquisition.

The difference, of course, is that trash hoarders, pet hoarders, food hoarders, hoader-collectors, and their ilk live sad lives of pathetic squalor and unbelievable misery and horror, whereas, for some reason, we let wealth hoarders more or less rule the world.

The parallel is so close, in fact, that I think wealth hoarding (and its close relative, status hoardind) should be in the DSM as a genuine mental disorder which honestly does make the sufferers a threat to themselves and others on so very many levels.

And just as trash hoarders develop “clutter blindness”, where they honestly lose the ability to perceive how nasty or cluttered their environment has become (because to perceive that might lead to the conclusion that they should stop hoarding, and that is absolutely unacceptable to their disease), I think wealth hoarders have a similar pathology I will call “wealth blindness”, where no matter how much money they have, they will still feel like they desperately need more.

There is no such thing as “rich enough” to a wealth hoarder.

That is why they scream so loudly about their taxes and will actually spend 2 dollars to avoid 1 dollar in taxes. Being hoarders, there is nothing worse to them than a reduction in the hoard. To them, it is worse than a death in the family or the loss of a limb. Hoarders identify with their hoard beyond the point of total insanity, well beyond the horizon of mental illness, and therefore the slightest reduction in their hoard fills them with a sense of loss so profound that it only further cements their determination to make sure it never happens again, and keep the hoard growing.

That is the only thing that keeps them even remotely sane, and when someone needs something to keep their head just barely above water, you can bet they will not be rational or flexible about it.

They are powerfully addicted to the pleasure of acquisition. And like all addicts, they can seem perfectly normal and rational and calm when their supply or access to their addiction is secure.

That’s why when you watch these programs about hoarders, they always seem quite friendly and rational at first… until someone suggests taking something, anything, from their hoard, and then the madness rears its ugly head and they start screaming like you are trying to kill one of their children.

With wealth hoarders, of course, it’s taxation that brings out the screaming and incoherent animal madness in their blood. They absolutely cannot stand the idea of money leaving their hoard against their will. You might as well be raping them with a red hot stovepipe.

Now you might think that a person like me is fairly immune to hoarding. I don’t have the money to hoard anything, after all. Not money, not stuff. I have a lot of books but those have been acquired over a very long time as I can rarely afford even used books.

Perhaps if I had more money, I might be a book hoarder. I do love my books.

Otherwise, me, a hoarder? How could that even be possible?

Today, I answered that question. Typical of me, my hoarding is entirely internal. It happens all in my mind. It is a kind of cerebral hoarding.

And what do I hoard? Ideas. Inspiration. Information. Insight. All the magical products of my overflowing imagination and extraordinary intellect. I do nothing with most of them. They just build up in my mind, and I think I take some comfort from that, as though I have turned hoard of ideas and so forth in my mind into a fortress which protects me from the harsh outside world.

And so when it comes time to try to bring one of them to life, I have to deal with the same profound sense of imminent loss that any hoarder feels when faced with the prospect of letting go.

I think this is a large part of what has been holding me back from tapping into even a fraction of my creative potential. Keeping the thoughts and ideas and whatnot inside adds more bricks to that fortress, more soft and cozy lining for my next.

Bringing those ideas into harsh reality means giving up some of that security and grappling with the conflict between my desire to express myself and my emotional dependence on this internal hoard.

I have an enormous fortune in ideas and inspiration inside me. Thoughts, theories, insights, ideas… my mind teems with them. There are more than I could ever use in a lifetime.

And yet, I never spend this fortune.

I am a mental miser.