CCIO Table of Contents > Universal Laws of Clutter (excerpt)

Myth #1:
Having clutter proves that I’m a slob and a failure.
There must be something wrong with me to have such a messy home.

Universal Law #1:
CLUTTER IS NATURAL
Nature loves clutter! Just think of all the stuff that drops from trees, washes in on the tide, or is blown by the wind into your backyard. Birds molt, animals shed, snakes slither out of their skin, and they all just leave it lying there to rot into the earth. Follow any toddler around for a day and you’ll see that we’re not much better.

We are not born knowing how to clean up. And that’s just half the problem.

Living in clutter does not mean that you are a slob or an undisciplined failure. It means that you are human, and your origins are showing. Way, way back in the farthest branches of your family tree, your ancient ancestors lived a somewhat more hand-to-mouth existence than we do. Stocking up was a wise thing to do when the antelope might not roam your way again for a while, and whether or not you survived a cold winter depended on how big a stash of firewood and dried berries you had in the back of the cave.

The urge to acquire, to get it while the getting’s good, is instinctive and completely normal. But the kinds of circumstances that could lead primitive man to use up the provisions he’d stashed away are no longer much of a threat to us. I am a big fan of Costco, eBay, and 24-hour convenience stores, but we don’t really need them, and the effect on our closets and garages (not to mention our waistlines!) has been catastrophic.

There seems to be an agreement in our culture that life was “simpler” back whenever—our grandparents’ day, perhaps. Yearning for simplicity makes us believe that our clutter is against the way things should be. What was different in the past was they didn’t have credit cards, mail order catalogs, and the Internet back then. Most people only bought what they truly needed and could afford.

When was the last time any of us did that?

In the span of just a few generations the cost of goods has gone down dramatically due to mass production. Take a moment to think about how much a basic T-shirt would cost if it were knitted and stitched by hand. How many would you own then? What if you had to make it yourself? Would you be so ready to think you need another one in a slightly different cut, or maybe with a little Lycra in it?

A common lament about contemporary social norms bemoans the scattering of the nuclear family, the lack of a sense of community, and the loss of spirituality in daily life. We feel disconnected, stressed, and empty, and we have been trained by mass media since early childhood that having more things will make us feel better. At some point someone told us “you can’t buy happiness,” but we didn’t listen, because everyone likes to get new toys and because buying things makes us feel secure, which is almost as good as feeling happy.

So we shop and shop and shop and buy more things for our homes (and our cars, and our cell phones) until we’re drowning in stuff. And then we shop for things to help us manage the other things and get them organized and neatly stored. Usually all that results from this is an over-abundance of misused, unused, or wrong-sized storage containers that metastasize into their own variety of clutter.

Combine a new preapproved credit card offer in the mailbox every week, buy-in-bulk warehouse stores, easy internet shopping, and cable shopping networks beaming bargains into your television set 24 hours a day with the delusion that giving in to these temptations is a good idea, and our once life-preserving impulse to stock up goes into overdrive.

The problem isn’t that we are completely lacking in judgment or self-discipline. The problem is that the primal part of our brains, where the compulsion to stock up while it’s available resides, is not wired for a world in which more than we could ever possibly need will still be there tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that.

Once we recognize this situation, it becomes possible to acknowledge the instinctive urge to acquire and to use the more rational parts of our brains to remember that although we live in the midst of the greatest availability of consumer goods ever known in the history of mankind, lucky us: we don’t need to buy it all today.

Remember: If you don’t use it or love it, it’s clutter, no matter how valuable it may be!

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