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So, my wife isn't exactly a horder. In fact she's pretty aggressively in favor of getting rid of stuff. The problem is she can't throw anything out. Everything must be optimally upcycled: Gifted to friends or family. Or listed on Craigslist free. Or de-composed into rags for cleaning or kindling for making campfires. Or set aside for fabric recycling. Or set aside for dedicated styrofoam recycling runs at the dump. Meat/bone scraps? Turned into soup stock. Egg cartons re-used for next trip to the egg farm. Etc. Etc.
She even refuses to take stuff to Goodwill (across the street!) because she just knows they ruthlessly throw away everything that's not economically viable and that just won't do.
It's really a perfect homesteader attitude. She would be perfect in a Fallout-style apocalypse. When she had time for this it was very cute.
But we have kids now and all of this bullshit is piling up faster than we can get rid of it in our storage room (aka my office) and it's an unsightly mess and she just stresses all of the time about how she has no time for any of this stuff and she beats herself up because if I take the kids out to give her time she's caught up between either exercising or trying to make a dent on this gigantic pile of garbage and it's mounting and there's no actual time in there for her to just chill and enjoy the empty quiet house.
Of course we homeschool so there's really actually no other time to do this because there are kids up her ass otherwise.
How do I convince her to... just throw all of this shit out? It's such an unbelievable waste of time and energy to be thinking about perfectly upcycling all of this shit all of the time, IMO.
Is this a sub-specialty of horderism she would be diagnosed with?
Imo, pretend you don't care about the clutter, focus on the stuff she feels guilty not having time to do stuff with. Sort the set-asides into bins for her, and stick them outside. Out of sight, no stress, eventually get rid of most of it.
Tell her you'll do the stock together next time you buy a lamb or half a cow. Doing a big batch is way more efficient than boiling two chicken thigh bones and a wing.
I hoard stuff too, but it's great. There's a complete set of backup kitchen appliances wrapped up in an outbuilding. When my fridge-freezer broke this week, I just rolled a smaller one in on a dolly and moved all the important food into it. Now I've got the regular one fixed the backup can go back out to the barn for a few more years.
Hoarding reduces stress if you do it right, but letting it build up low-productivity tasks is awful. Getting the "upcycling pile" turned into "upcycling garbage bins" is the key.
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