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EvelynM comments on How To Have Things Correctly - Less Wrong
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This is a fairly common problem. Mostly with girls–it's kind of a Western-cultural thing for girls to go shopping "for fun" and get pleasure from acquiring stuff, which they won't necessarily use frequently. I don't have this problem either, mostly because my threshold for actually buying stuff is really high and I've integrated "being thrifty and good at saving money" as part of my self-concept. But I observe it a lot.
There's also the aspect that using stuff is a good way to increase your day-to-day physical pleasure. A cloak feels nice on your skin, it's warm, it's comfy, etc...and reminding yourself to use it increases the amount of attention you pay to those simple, easy-to-obtain pleasures.
I object to your attributing this failure mode mostly to women, without additional support.
I've witnessed a lot of men having this failure mode in the form of buying new computer games (particularly from services like Steam or Good Old Games) when they still have loads of completely unplayed old ones. Or buying lots of books and only reading a small part of them.
Sure, but women doing shop therapy codes as normative in Western society, while guys overbuying boardgames is considered inexplicable by society as a whole.
Swimmer963 doesn't need to endorse the normative desireability of this gendered social setup to note its existence, especially when she explicitly noted the cultural context.
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I was talking about what people actually do, as opposed to what the cultural attitudes to it are. (Note that "it's kind of a Western-cultural thing" can be interpreted to refer to either - I'm not sure which of the two interpretations Swimmer963 had in mind.)
I don't expect the one about books to be substantially more common among men than among women.
(As for me, I once resolved to never buying a book before finishing reading the previous one (or giving up), to prevent that. Now I'm more lenient with myself about that, but I still try to avoid bookstores when I have more than half a dozen books in the ‘queue’ -- including electronic ones.)
I'm myself someone who ends up with this "failure mode", but I do like the empowerment from having a bunch of unplayed games at my disposal to choose from according to whatever mood or wants I have at that particular time. Not to mention the ability to instantly play any of these with friends if some of them have one of them and the game has coop/multiplayer, though with my current internet bandwidth that's much less of an issue than it used to be.
However, this doesn't seem like it's nearly on the same scale. Steam probably has a much larger userbase than GoG, and based on the stats I've seen fairly recently it would seem that less than 3% of Steam's 8 million "active" users actually own more than 500$ worth of steam games, which I consider a pretty decent guesstimate as for how much one would usually have to spend before we can consider them more likely to fall into this failure mode.
Those est.-250 000 people seem somewhat of a very minor problem compared to the tens-if-not-hundreds of millions of women falling into the failure mode of "shopping".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haul_video comes to mind.