If a 1,700-square-foot triplex condo sounds like the answer to your space-deprived dreams, you might want to be careful what you wish for, especially if you're single.

This weekend's The Hunt column in the NY Times reminds us of the darker side of supersizing real estate past the point of reasonable consumption. Much like goldfish, “we expand to the size of our containers," observes The Hunt's subject, who settled solo into the New Jersey condo after a divorce. She confesses to filing her rooms with furniture and her closets with clothing, handing the cats their own bathroom, renovating the bathrooms and kitchen--and then spending most of her time on the third floor with the cats and the TV.

She spent 15 years as a goldfish before downsizing to a 950-square-foot one-bedroom Jersey City condo this winter. But first she had to retrain herself to get rid of stuff rather than accumulate it, which she did through reverse psychology, by watching multiple episodes of "Hoarding: Buried Alive."

(NYTimes.com)