An American dilemma: Your clutter or your life
The United States has more storage facilities than McDonald's. Why? Because we have too much stuff.
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They
have become a defining characteristic of the roadside, wedged in
among the malls and fast-food franchises, barracks-like rows of
buildings with small garage doors, surrounded by a fence. A gated
enclave for excess stuff.
There
are 2.3 billion square feet of self-storage space in America, or more
than 7 square feet for every, man, woman and child in the country.
Texas, Florida and California lead the country with the most storage
space. It's now "physically possible that every American could
stand — all at the same time — under the total canopy of
self-storage roofing," boasts the Self Storage Assn. There are
about 51,000 storage facilities in the country — more than four
times the number of McDonald's.
The
storage shed is a symptom of our cluttered lives. Clutter is the
cholesterol of the home; it's clogging the hearth. The "Clean
Sweep" team from the television show of that name usually hauls
away about half a ton of trash from each house that it rescues from
clutter. (Which may explain why 23% of Americans admit to paying
bills late because they can't find them, and why 25% of people with
two-car garages have to park their cars outside.)
"We
have too much. We're over-housed, over-clothed, overfed and
over-entertained," said Don Aslett, getting right to the point.
Aslett would know; he's been poking around houses for 50 years. In
college, Aslett started what has become one of the country's largest
cleaning companies, and his books on clutter helped to establish the
genre. People call Aslett, saying, "We don't know how all this
stuff got here." Think of it as a whodunit. He solves the
mystery and gently interrogates the guilty. Ask yourself: "Does
this item enhance your life?" If not, get rid of it.
We're
crowding ourselves out of our houses. And it's not just stuff. Work
has come home. Home offices are like small, overwhelmed rail yards,
heaped with paper and tangled with cords for all the devices
associated with a computer (printers, backup hard drives, routers,
scanners, backup power, speakers). The computer or desk is often
tagged in a flurry of Post-it Notes in an attempt to remember obscure
computer prompts. The computer itself presents a virtual heap of
emails and text, sound, photo and video files.
Entertainment
has come home too. Television sprawls out to 120 or 240 channels or
more. There are more TV sets than people in the average home. Adults
are looking at screens — televisions, computers, cellphones, even
GPS devices — about 8.5 hours a day, according to a study by the
Council for Research Excellence. TV ads claim about an hour of each
day. And the time spent watching television — 72 days out of each
year — continues to increase, alongside the rapid rise of watching
online videos.
Somewhere
in there, between the physical and virtual clutter, we are losing the
ordinary qualities of home — the solitude to recollect, the time
for families to talk. (Yet another study has clocked only 14.5
minutes a day of actual conversation between parents and children.)
We are losing the "nothing much" that is home. The room for
tumult and quiet, for passing the time with friends, for the ordinary
pleasures of a day well lived.
A
happy home, said the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, frees us to
daydream. It allows us to "dream well," he said, and
enlarge our imagination.
Clutter
is choking our shelters. Is there any room left for us in our houses?
If
we believe the gospel according to decluttering gurus, an awakening
awaits those who clean house. Somewhere under all the junk is what we
think we've lost — ourselves, our home, our family, our sanity, our
soul.
But
the decluttering gurus can only provide a material solution to a
spiritual problem. They are confusing symptoms and causes. A
cluttered house with a never-used piano or family dinner table buried
under junk is a symptom of materialism run amok. It's not the cause.
Cleanliness is good, but is it really next to godliness? You may be
no more happy or wise in a cleaner house.
This
mess is us. Forget the lists of seven simple steps that morph into
hundreds of steps, forget the "in-home design consultation"
with the California Closets organizer. The lesson that the lists
seldom arrive at is this: Our lives are finite. That's the lesson we
never want to hear.
Ignore
the decluttering gurus who pile step upon step. Don't clutter your
life with preparation and endless lists. Take this advice from the
decluttering coach who calls herself "FlyLady": Grab 27
things and remove them. Repeat. What's keeping you from living? Throw
it all away, step over it, push it into a corner, into the garage,
barn, storage shed. Mice, rats, mold, mildew will have their way.
Just go live your life.
(courtesy: Los Angeles Times)
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