Decluttering

Thoughts on resisting yourself

I’ve been going through our home lately trying to clear out clutter—all the stuff you were going to go through and forgot about, that you saved for some reason you don’t remember, things that have no point anymore (boxes and manuals for devices or appliances that are broken and replaced), etc.

In between all that stuff—the chaff, the hay, the dirt—you find things that you actually want to keep, or that you had been looking for. It’s funny how physical clutter seems to cause mental clutter.

I remember years ago when everyone was talking about Marie Kondo and her simple suggestion for decluttering: keep the things that “spark joy.” I remember some people reacted to that by saying “joy” is too narrow. What about things that are meaningful to you but are sad, for example? I think that was just online discourse-mill nonsense (“now we need to come up with takes on the takes about the takes!”)

I’m pretty sure her philosophy isn’t “be happy all the time through stuff.” If grandpa’s ashes make you feel sadness but remind you of happy memories—of course that falls under the broad umbrella of joy. If grandpa’s urn makes you go “Remember that bastard? Good thing he’s in there now!”, maybe you should have him respectfully interred somewhere else for the good of both of you.

The “spark joy” guideline is really quite insightful, actually. There are things in our home that make me think “Oh right I was supposed to fix that” or “That idiot sent me that book, I’m never going to read it” or “Oh yeah that pile of magazines I worked on, those people went crazy, I’m glad I never wrote for them again!” There are plenty of things like that in my parents’ home too. You know, keeping your old stuff at your parents’ house is like burying nuclear waste—not a permanent solution, but good enough.

But is it? Maybe it’s really not good to keep things in your home space—in your inner sanctum—that remind you of things you never did or people you don’t like. Maybe there’s something almost metaphysically harmful about it.

You can say, oh I’ll use this to practice my forbearance and Christian virtue, and learn not to react that way. Or you can say Oh this time I’ll finally fix that thing! But you know what, your home is not a psychological endurance test, and sometimes you have to pay some tribute to your vices. So out they go. These things feel like moral struggles while they’re there in front of you, and then when they’re gone, it’s like they never existed. How much time do we spend reading high stakes into things that don’t matter at all?

There were these cooking magazines and Trader Joe’s flyers that I read to my wife at night and add funny comments and stuff. I had accumulated a big pile of them. I was about to recycle them, and then the thought popped into my head, what if we’re an old couple and I want to read something to her from the old times? And I had to tell myself, if in 50 years I’m still thinking about Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyers from 2020, then my life will sure have been a pretty boring, empty ride.

One of the things that’s hard to grasp is that who you are right now is not who you will be, and again—like with urbanism and struggles over development—part of getting this to work is finding an intellectual way to override your current feelings, to convince yourself that your future self won’t care a whit about any of this. To bring your own future self into the present to tell you it’s okay. Whether it’s tossing an old magazine, or making your peace with a new apartment building.

I suppose there are people who get rid of things or make peace with change in the built environment not because they’re constantly arguing with themselves in their head and constantly resisting their natural inclinations. There are people who are just fine with things and don’t have to think about them at all. But most of us don’t like change, and have to get ourselves to accept it.