how does hording also play into the saving of ideas. when a person thinks all of their ideas are worth keeping a record of, which I could see going into the saving of digital files, digital photos, and even version control of digital input, weather it be software or written text.
Yes — this is a recognized phenomenon, though the academic literature is thinner and less settled than for physical hoarding. The relevant concept is digital hoarding (also "digital clutter," "e-hoarding," or "cyberhoarding"), and what you are describing — ideas, notes, files, photos, version histories — sits at its core. The extension you intuit is real, but it requires careful qualification, because the boundary between pathological hoarding and rational information-keeping is far blurrier in the digital domain than the physical one.
The state of the research. Digital hoarding was first formally described by van Bennekom et al. (2015) in a case report of a man who, after treatment for physical hoarding, compulsively photographed and saved hundreds of thousands of digital images and could not delete any. Since then a modest literature has developed (notably Sweeten, Sillence & Neave; Neave and colleagues at Northumbria), proposing it as a distinct but related pattern. It is not a recognized diagnosis — it appears in neither DSM-5 nor ICD-11. The dominant clinical view treats it as a possible digital expression of the same underlying mechanisms as physical hoarding, not as a separate disorder, and the evidence base remains small, largely questionnaire- and case-based, and without longitudinal or neurobiological grounding. Treat strong claims here as preliminary.
Why your specific examples map onto it. The four-factor cognitive model transfers almost directly:
The critical qualifications — where the analogy breaks down. This is where your framing needs the most care, because three features make digital hoarding genuinely different, and make over-diagnosis a real risk:
First, the absence of physical consequence. Physical hoarding becomes a disorder substantially through tangible harm — blocked exits, fire risk, sanitation, inability to use rooms. Digital accumulation imposes almost none of this. A drive holding 500,000 files looks identical to one holding 500. The clinical threshold for physical hoarding (impairment of living space and function) often simply does not apply, which is precisely why digital hoarding is hard to define as a disorder at all. The proposed harms are subtler: anxiety, stress, difficulty finding things, security/privacy exposure, decision paralysis, and time cost — real, but rarely incapacitating.
Second, and most important for your examples, much of what you describe is not pathological at all — it is correct practice. Version control (Git and similar) is the deliberate, disciplined retention of complete change history, and it is a professional standard precisely because keeping everything is rational when retrieval is cheap and the cost of lost work is high. A comprehensive note system (a "second brain," personal knowledge management, Zettelkasten) is an evidence-supported productivity method, not a symptom. The distinguishing line is function versus dysfunction, and it does not run along volume: the question is whether the system is organized and retrievable and serves the person, or whether saving is compulsive, indiscriminate, anxiety-driven, never revisited, and itself the source of distress. Saving ten thousand well-tagged notes you use is not hoarding; being unable to delete a single screenshot, feeling distress at the thought, and never looking at any of them, is closer to it. Volume alone is diagnostically meaningless here.
Third, the friction that normally limits accumulation is absent. Physical hoarding is self-limiting to a degree, because space and money run out. Digital storage is effectively unbounded and nearly free, so the natural brake — the one that physical scarcity imposes — never engages. This is why digital accumulation can reach scales physical hoarding never could, and why it can persist entirely without the external feedback (a full room) that might otherwise prompt insight.
The behavioral-economics layer you have been building maps on cleanly. Opportunity-cost neglect is amplified: the cost of keeping a file is so close to zero that the foregone alternative is even less visible than with money. Loss aversion attaches to ideas and drafts — deleting feels like destroying potential. The endowment effect applies to one's own generated content with particular force. And the near-zero friction of saving removes the "pain of paying" almost entirely, which is exactly the condition under which acquisition runs unchecked.
On the "ideas" framing specifically. The belief that all of one's ideas are worth recording is best understood not as a discrete condition but as the intersection of the future-usefulness belief and the identity/memory belief, applied to the products of one's own mind. It becomes a problem on the same functional criterion as everything else: when the recording is compulsive rather than chosen, when it produces anxiety rather than serving the work, when the archive is never used, and when the inability to let an idea go causes distress. Where it is a deliberate, retrievable practice that supports thinking, it is not hoarding — it is scholarship.
A caveat on the whole picture: because digital hoarding is under-researched and intuitively plausible, it is prone to over-application — it is easy to pathologize ordinary, sensible information-keeping. The responsible position is that the mechanisms of hoarding clearly extend to the digital domain, that this is a legitimate and growing area of study, but that the diagnostic status is unsettled and the function-versus-dysfunction distinction, not the sheer quantity saved, is what carries the weight.