The key difference being that if you eat less, you actively have to change your behavior, whereas if you have an unrealistic amount of books to read of which you eliminate some, you’re not. Instead, you’re just updating your perception of the situation to involve less wishful thinking and to be more in tune with your actual resource constraints.
So if you throw out some of those books, you wouldn’t be changing your daily reading behavior, you’d just acknowledge the reality of the situation, and nothing of value would be lost, merely an excess of books which you’d never have read anyways.
But dealing with a book-hoarding problem in anything other than the short term requires behaviour changes too: buying fewer books and/or losing timewasting habits that get in the way of reading more.
And throwing out books is as difficult psychologically for book-hoarding types as eating less is for most people.
The key difference being that if you eat less, you actively have to change your behavior, whereas if you have an unrealistic amount of books to read of which you eliminate some, you’re not. Instead, you’re just updating your perception of the situation to involve less wishful thinking and to be more in tune with your actual resource constraints.
So if you throw out some of those books, you wouldn’t be changing your daily reading behavior, you’d just acknowledge the reality of the situation, and nothing of value would be lost, merely an excess of books which you’d never have read anyways.
But dealing with a book-hoarding problem in anything other than the short term requires behaviour changes too: buying fewer books and/or losing timewasting habits that get in the way of reading more.
And throwing out books is as difficult psychologically for book-hoarding types as eating less is for most people.