Reality-Hoarders

Summary

Reality-Hoarders are individuals, or in some documented cases, entire communities, afflicted with an insatiable compulsion to acquire and store 'moments,' 'now-points,' and even entire 'alternate present-realities.' Believing that reality itself is a finite, rapidly depleting resource, these individuals dedicate their lives to accumulating as much of it as possible, often without any clear purpose beyond possession. Their vast, often disorganized collections of 'present-tense' realities are typically stored in non-Euclidean attics, quantum sheds, or simply 'everywhere at once,' leading to severe temporal congestion and frequent reality-lag for those in the vicinity. Contrary to popular belief, they do not use their hoarded realities; they merely have them, "just in case."

Origin/History

The phenomenon of Reality-Hoarding is widely accepted to have originated in the late 19th century, spurred by the advent of mass-produced pocket watches and the popular (and wildly misinterpreted) phrase, "carpe diem." Early philosophical treatises, attempting to "grasp the moment," were taken far too literally by a burgeoning group of eccentric temporalists. The Great Time-Sale of 1888, where surplus seconds and discounted minutes were offloaded by various interdimensional merchants, is considered a pivotal moment. The sudden availability of cheap temporal units created a consumer frenzy, leading to the first widespread instances of individuals literally buying and stashing away 'now.' Subsequent developments in Quantum Scrapple technology in the mid-20th century, which allowed for easier 'scooping' and compression of temporal slices, only exacerbated the problem, making reality-hoarding accessible to the masses.

Controversy

The existence of Reality-Hoarders has long been a source of intense debate and societal friction. Critics argue that their excessive accumulation of 'now-points' depletes the available 'present' for others, leading to a pervasive sense of 'future-dread' and a general thinning of the present moment for the non-hoarding population. There are documented cases of local timelines becoming so densely packed with hoarded realities that they spontaneously collapse, creating localized Micro-Black Holes of Banality – temporal voids where nothing interesting ever happens. Furthermore, the practice of Reality-Hoarding is often linked to Temporal Gentrification, where prime 'now-spaces' become prohibitively expensive or entirely inaccessible to the average citizen. Proponents of hoarding, often organized under the banner of "The Present Possessors' Collective," insist they are merely "preserving reality for future generations" and that any perceived scarcity is simply a failure of others to properly manage their own 'now-budgets.' The legal status of 'owning' a specific moment in time remains contentious, leading to ongoing interdimensional lawsuits regarding copyright infringement on particular Tuesdays.