I'll Declutter If I Want To
In which I give way to bitter sarcasm about a piece in the Washington Post.
We all survived the first day of school pretty well, and, of course, I didn’t take a single picture. It is not cute or propitious to snap pics of teenagers in hoodies wrapped in blankets with papers and junk scattered abroad. Every brow is furrowed, every finger is silently scrolling over the mousepad, every ear is encased in a clunky headphone. I think it’s going to be a good year, though. Everyone seems to know what’s going on—a big W.
So anyway, I linked this yesterday, which I had only half read and sort of liked in my post-church stupor. This morning…no wait…afternoon, however, it is standing around on my last nerve. The piece is all about how it’s better not to declutter your house. It used to be really wicked before, as you all know, but now it is fine because we are in peak post post post decadence. Whatever that time of civilizational decline where ordinary people have time to justify whatever it is they happen to want to do at any moment, and then to sit down in an open-concept coffee situation and compose long-ish and deeply fatuous “think” pieces about whatever it is that doesn’t even matter. Let us dive straight into the shallow pool of self-affirming time-suck:
I’m writing this at a desk littered with objects: a small ceramic chicken a friend bought for me in Brazil, multiple expired gift cards and a framed photo of my partner and me in college, looking rudely young. There’s an old Christmas-tree-shaped Christmas ornament and an Easter-bunny-shaped Easter egg basket, a vintage postcard of the Flatiron Building (on the back, someone in 1908 wrote: “Hello! Ada! No doubt you have about forgotten me by this time; but I assure you that I still remember you”) and two boxes of picture hangers. It’s half junk and half treasure. But I’ve gotten so used to the mix that I haven’t thrown anything out in years — and I’ve found that I prefer it that way.
That’s nice, but is it enough to merit an entire amount of words in the Washington Post? Is it? Really? Can’t people just have as much stuff as they want? Do we have to still talk about this? I mean, I know that we do. I know that I myself will keep reading and writing about how much stuff I have, as if anyone could possibly care, but wouldn’t it be amazing if *we* could all do almost literally anything else? Still, once begun is half done.
Carrying on, flitting and sipping over whatever treasures we might find:
Decluttering’s appeal can feel very modern, a timely response to late capitalism’s mass production of objects not destined for a long life. But decluttering, as a concept and a ritual, is much older. In a 2021 essay in the International Journal of Practical Theology, Christiane Lang Hearlson, a religion professor at Villanova University, argued that decluttering is in line with spiritual practices dating back millennia, like repentance, detachment from worldly things and purgation. “The idea with purging is to send out of yourself or your life the things that are preventing you from living in a whole way, in a good way,” Hearlson told me. Noting modern-day language around “purging” or “detoxing” from clutter, she went on, “It’s the same idea: … there’s something toxic in my life and I need to send it away.”
Hmmm, ok. Wouldn’t it be awesome if WaPo would do a deep dive into the depths of what the word “repentance” even means and how to go about doing it for real? I know that is too much to ask, so I will pass on because the really good bit comes next and is worth the savoring:
This resonance with deep spiritual tradition must explain some part of why decluttering can be so satisfying: An orderly home feels like an orderly soul. But the concept of “purging” has some very dark undertones — bulimia, shame-based purity cultures, genocide — and those undertones echo today as well. As is true for purity culture and eating disorders, decluttering relies primarily on female labor and female shame: Women do the bulk of decluttering, and are most harshly judged for an inadequate effort. “Generally, women are still viewed as the household manager,” said Jill Yavorsky, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who studies gender and housework. “And so ultimately, unfortunately, we still see that women bear the responsibility of making sure their house is very clean and organized.” In fact, she pointed out, if men carried an equal housework load in heterosexual marriages, decluttering might not even be necessary because not as much stuff would build up: “The reason that clutter builds up is because there is more work than one person can handle.”
Oh for heaven’s sake. Let me pause and bang my head with my mouse for a hot minute. So many bêtises, so little time. Let’s start with “genocide.” Allow me to be the first to tell you that decluttering your house is not the slippery slope to genocide, or even total societal breakdown. We’re rushing headlong hopefully only into the latter, or at least it feels like it, but hopefully not for a few weeks or months. Of course, I use the term “we” advisedly. Clearing out the clutter I suppose might make you stop and wonder about whether you’re going to be developing an eating disorder or joining up to destroy a group of people but it isn’t doing that for me. I’m simply trying to be a normal person who does things that are worth doing without being sent into an existential crisis every time I turn around. To each their own, I guess. Also, what an incredibly dumb muddle.
My favorite line, though, and one that I must commit to memory, is “Generally, women are still viewed as the household manager.” Because it is 2023, it took investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a nice young person, transforming her into a sociologist at a place of higher “education” to bring this astonishing and, I guess, horrifying fact to the attention of the Washington Post writer. Hey guys, get this! “Women” are “still viewed” as the “household manager.” Poor things, what can we do about this unbearable problem? Oh, I know, let’s get the men to "carry an equal housework load in heterosexual marriages.” If that happened, explains this brilliant sociologist, “decluttering might not even be necessary because not as much stuff would build up.” Oh The Humanity. See, the only reason that “clutter” builds up is because “there is more work than one person can handle.”
Ok so, first of all, maybe this “sociologist” is a Russian bot. I can’t think of any explanation for reasoning this bad. Do these people even know any men? Like real ones, who marry women and stuff like that? Because I’m married to a man who, this moment, is cooking the lunch so I can sit here and try not to roll my eyes out of my head, and yet, for all he does—and it is an immense amount, probably at least half—the reason that we as a family battle clutter is because clutter creeps in, not because there is more work than one person can handle.
Also, just to say it again for all the intellectuals in the back who haven’t heard of stuff like the differences between men and women, most women aren’t just “viewed” as the “household manager,” they are said manager. If they don’t “manage” the work of the house it doesn’t get managed. Even if they work full-time in some other capacity they have to manage the household. And, most importantly, what is bad about this situation is not that they have to do it. What’s bad is that almost none of them have the time to do it to their own satisfaction.
I am always frustrated and angsty about the level of clutter in my house because I care about how my house looks. I want a beautiful, well-functioning home which, in a sane world, would be a full-time task aided by the help of a live-in maid and cook and driver. Instead, eight of us live here and we all, essentially, have full-time work that doesn’t include taking care of the place where we live. The care and keeping of our house is always pushed to the margins, aided by the persistent lie that all the technology we have will actually remove the work itself. “Doing laundry” isn’t a thing, see, because we have a washer and dryer. This is a hideous lie because the laundry always has to be done. And so the long day wears on.
If everything was the way it should be, I would have a different person—a woman because a man could not be trusted—who I paid to keep my house while I lay around writing deathless prose and drinking sherry. Or, I would be living in a hut somewhere contributing both financially and socially and spiritually to the fabric of my community through my necessary and valuable labor as a mother and wife. Instead, like all other women in this society, I have to financially contribute in this bad, down economy so that we don’t starve, and yet, those tasks that I might find peculiarly satisfying are of none or very little value to the larger world. Also, as I keep saying, I don’t own a dairy and can’t make my own cheese so there we are.
Anyway, let’s see, it gets worse:
Sometimes this bond with our stuff can feel toxic — our dependence on personal technology, our addiction to buying cheap, environmentally destructive clothing and plastic items. But it’s not the connection that’s toxic; it’s just that our desire for connection is being constantly exploited. The connection itself can verge on the spiritual. Hearlson recalled religious sacraments, noting that for all of them, regardless of tradition, “it’s a human practice, but they’re also material objects. The bread, the wine, the water. And each of them, it’s like you’re supposed to interact with it in a way that reminds you both that it’s revealing something about God to you and … that everything else in the world bears that divine presence.” My desktop collection of obsolescent chargers may not obviously connect me with the divine. But I do, even as an atheist, feel a thrumming of life around my messy desk, a large part of why (or at least my new excuse for why) I rarely tidy it.
That’s so cute. Getting an atheist to blithely pontificate about “The bread, the wine, the water.” Get this, guys, “it’s like you’re supposed to interact with it in a way that reminds you both that it’s revealing something about God to you and that everything else in the world bears that divine presence.” No big deal, just don’t bother to investigate anything from an entire world you know literaleigh nothing about. Decluttering is totes spiritual guys. People approaching the Eucharist is just like the heaps of dead power cords I have here on my desk. I know a lot of things and stuff.
You know what, I can’t go on. The rest is a short lecture about how to be nice to the planet. You’ve heard it all before and so won’t be amazed and transformed. Furthermore, my caro sposo says it’s time for luncheon. Therefore, I must stagger forth to restore my tissues and then hunt up a book as an act of intellectual and spiritual purgation, a way, if you will, of leaving behind the fatuous muck of our dumb and wicked age.
Have a nice day!
As I mentioned before, decluttering is just another Torah. And we can't but use the law to try and justify ourselves. The flesh or our old self wants to bring to completion our lives (Galatians 3:1-6), to put the finishing touches on a well lived life. Sadly, the foundations have crumbled, the building totters; all will come crashing down. Yet, Jesus lays a solid footing and the Holy Spirit builds us into a living temple for the Lord. Such a simple shift from automous self to beloved of God, all by faith in His Christ, our Lord Jesus.
Very nice "takedown", Anne! I wrote a piece very much like the Britt Peterson piece for my high school newspaper when I was 17. I showed it to my dad who (ever the critic) said: "You said absolutely nothing, but you said it rather well." Until today, I had always imagined I would like a job writing every day about nothing, just saying stuff without any research. But now I comprehend that it's not a victimless crime. Someone might actually waste time reading it.
Possibly, in God' economy, this writer was predestinated to be thus mostly in order to be a foil for you. It reminds me (as does almost everything) of a passage in Chesterton:
"One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures, concerned a comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of the Idea of God. I happened to remark that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen. And I remember that the editor objected to my remark on the ground that it was blasphemous; which naturally amused me not a little. For the joke of it was, of course, that it never occurred to him to notice the title of the book itself, which really was blasphemous; for it was, when translated into English, 'I will show you how this nonsensical notion that there is a God grew up among men.' My remark was strictly pious and proper; confessing the divine purpose even in its most seemingly dark or meaningless manifestations."