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To be fair about this, those who’ve recently wondered where the house is, under all the accumulated Things, know what the guy’s talking about. The garage which has somehow become the family museum is another case in point.
TIME Magazine:
"Stuff starts to overwhelm you," says Dave Bruno, 37, an online entrepreneur who looked around his San Diego home one day last summer and realized how much his family's belongings were weighing him down. Thus began what he calls the 100 Thing Challenge. (Apparently, Bruno is so averse to excess he can't refer to 100 things in the plural.) In a country where clutter has given rise not only to professional organizers but also to professional organizers with their own reality series (TLC's Clean Sweep), Bruno's online musings about his slow and steady purge have developed something of a cult following online, inspiring others to launch their own countdown to clutter-free living.
A bit of creative auditing seems to have crept in during the process with some minimalists:
One of the trickier questions is what counts as an item. Bruno considers a pair of shoes to be a single entity, which seems sensible but still pretty hard-core when you're trying to jettison all but 100 personal possessions. Cait Simmons, 27, a waitress in Chicago, takes a different approach. Although she has pared down her footwear collection from 35 to 20 pairs, she says, "All my shoes count as one item."
As usual, there’s an industry attached to all this Stoicism. Like any great ideal, it now has full time professionals trying to make it work. In this case, the Organizers Industry. They’ve certainly found a niche in uncertain times. The several tons of Things which people glue to themselves do take a bit of organizing.
But what about Christmas ornaments? Family heirlooms? Those skinny jeans you hope to--but will probably never--wear again? "It's a very emotional process," says professional organizer Julie Morgenstern. Her new book, When Organizing Isn't Enough: SHED Your Stuff, Change Your Life, lays out a plan for clearing out both physical and sentimental clutter. "Often these are things that represent who you once were," she says. "But once their purpose is over, they just keep you stagnant." SHED, by the way, is an acronym for "separate the treasures, heave the trash, embrace your identity from within and drive yourself forward." Which is a handy little guide to Dumpstering your way into a state of Zen.
“Who you once were” sounds like the beginning of a sort of Consumer Freudianism, associating that pair of socks with identity, and presumably that blender with sexual frustrations.
Not want to sound anything less than enraptured by the idea, but I see a few possible Mentoring and Life Coaching scenarios emerging from this. Sophistry usually starts with things people don’t understand, and systematically reduces understanding to sell more products by spinning information.
Say someone tells you a pair of shoes represents your basic insecurities and a hidden sexual attraction to traffic lights, which represent your relationship with Things. They say you’ll be much more secure, particularly living in a city, without shoes. You’ll save money and be morally superior because you’ll have fallen arches sticking out of your ears.
Of course you need to pay someone $1,000 an hour to tell you that you should ask the giant carnivorous duck in the bathroom to move back to the convent.
Anything can be called unnecessary, and space created in people’s lives. Particularly for a price, usually a large one.
Which sort of raises the question of what people do with space. Usually, people just fill it again. There’s a borderline overlap between Things and their associations, where you could reasonably ask if your sentiments are useful, too.
But the space does represent something, to some people:
"It comes down to the products vs. the promise," says organizational consultant Peter Walsh, who characterizes himself as part contractor, part therapist. "It's not necessarily about the new pots and pans but the idea of the cozy family meals that they will provide. People are finding that their homes are full of stuff, but their lives are littered with unfulfilled promises."
Walsh isn't surprised that decluttering is so popular these days. Between worrying about gas prices and the faltering economy, people's first reaction, he says, "is often, 'I need to get some control over my life, even if it is just a tidy kitchen counter.'"
What? There’s some sort of commercially available product that
doesn’t reinforce family values, improve your sex life, and cure all known diseases?
While cleaning, dusting, preparing meals, and doing minor chiropractic treatments on total strangers so your insurance company can feel good about itself and not run away?
“Unfulfilled promises”, indeed. If I thought my CD holder wasn’t a combination survival kit, fallout shelter, and diamond mine, I’d be really… concerned. Possibly rabid. Not that I’d notice, because my teacup has a degree in psychology. (Which, admittedly, it won in a raffle, but it can raise the dead and talk them into buying tickets in raffles.)
The whole idea of materialism has always, somehow, managed to miss the point. The person being materialistic attaches themselves to things which are supposed to mean something to them, or have some purpose.
Really.
Junk is largely in the mind of the beholder. If you think something’s junk, to you, it is.
Support, however, is always at hand.
I’m surprised that the TIME article doesn’t mention all those selfless people who are prepared to help people get rid of their junk.
Even me.
If you happen to have:
Any of those tacky old Da Vinci originals, or
Are buried under superfluous Gauguins,
Have plagues of supermodels, or
The diamonds and precious gems are starting to cause subsidence, or
Can’t get into the kitchen because of the gold bars you were talked into hoarding,
Do let me know.
