Stop with the Clutter Guilt

Why the have-less-stuff conversations need to change

LEGO, LEGO everywhere, but not a storage bin in sight. Photo by Rick Mason on Unsplash

It sounds SO good in writing.

I want to have less clutter.

This year, I will buy less stuff.

Don’t buy storage items, have fewer things.

Ann Patchett wrote a famous NYT essay on how she spent a year not going shopping. Marie Kondo tells us to stop buying storage containers to organize your life, and just tidy up instead. Already this year, I have had four women - busy moms who do plenty with their lives and homes - tell me that they are on their way to The Container Store to get something to organize some aspect of holiday gifts, and that they feel guilty about it. They’ve internalized this no-clutter as something they should do, and there is shame in falling short. As if buying a storage system to hold something they cannot find the time and energy to sort is a form of failure.

But why?

Why are we telling people this?

When you look at the people who are buying, organizing, and putting away all the items - it’s the parents, usually the moms. This mental labor is the equivalent of balancing a large, heavy, leaky bucket atop our heads; it’s hard enough already and shaming people for needing an extra pair of scissors or Elfa shelving system in their house isn’t going to help anyway.

Hope you have some extra bedding somewhere. Photo by Allen Taylor on Unsplash

When I read Ann Patchett’s essay, years ago, my first thought was: she can say and do all of this because she doesn't have children (something Patchett herself is vocal about). But since then, I realized she can say and do all of this “no shopping” because she is a super high functioning person with plenty of disposable income who runs a popular bookstore and writes bestsellers while becoming something of a literary saint in the publishing world. (And it should be noted that her exception for buying things was books - and surely those books need some place to be stored.)

In other words, we are not all Ann Patchetts, nor should we be expected to be. My hunch is Ann Patchett still uses the same set of scissors since grad school and they are put back in the same drawer each time. I bet she does not lose her winter hat and gloves, and certainly does not leave them behind on a school bus, and whatever clothes she wears are washed and put back in a timely manner. I don’t know what sort of household help she has, but given her essays on sharing her spacious guest room with traveling writers and friends - it’s likely enough space and income to keep her life in the sort of order and state of cleanliness that she wants.

But who wouldn’t want that? All of us lazy, cluttered stuff-buyers who can’t seem to go without the extra items? Can’t we just do more laundry? Or just remember where we put things?

Can you find the scissors? Only if someone puts them back properly. Photo by Ashim D’Silva on Unsplash

In my house, we have many pairs of scissors, because my kids do not always put them away.

We also have many hats, because children do not always bring hats home from school.

We have ill-fitting clothing, old books, and other things that should be tossed or given away - not because we like such clutter, but because I only have so many hours in the day to go through them and determine where they should go and then get them there.

And if you ask the kids, they want to keep it all. They don’t see mess, they see prized possessions.

If a container that organizes winter gear, or a bin that holds LEGO pieces or crayons, or labels that say “scissors go here” could make life a little bit easier, why shame someone for wanting this?

I admire people whose children only need one hat per winter, or whose feet do not grow out of their snow boots, whose pants with holes at the knees are immediately sewn back together rather than stacked in a hall closet.

I envy people whose grocery lists are filled out with accuracy and precision and they don’t have to stock up on the weird things the kids want that are only sold at one special store before they randomly run out of it (hello, Trader Joe’s).

The speed at which junk accumulates minus the intensity of one’s decluttering focus equals the messiness level of your life. #NotRealMath Photo by Steve DiMatteo on Unsplash

But all of this living with other people, and caring for small humans means having only so much bandwidth means that at any given moment, the efficiency on organizing will fall short. It means you can make all the resolutions to do things like hand clothes down and join a Buy Nothing group and try and repair those knee-hole pants, but at the end of the day, time spent running a household may not keep pace with the way kids and adults go through stuff.

So here I am - standing up for the clutter. Or, more accurately, the time and mental energy that most of us don’t have to manage it.

I’d love to have the sort of perfect, organized household with kids that I’m sure exists out there. But these things take time and energy, and we know it’s usually the mothers spending time on this. The time and energy spent on the mental load of running a household is one of the key reasons women still make less money than men in this country. It’s not that we’re less capable, it’s that we’ve spent a chunk of our waking hours hunting for the dang scissors and yes, we finally threw in the towel and ordered another pair online from the retailer who claims to bring it to you in a matter of hours. Because so much of this mental load is managed by women - and because we live in a country where women are the stand-in for a social safety net, as

Jess Calarco

writes - the criticism lobbed at these clutter-filled lives is also, by extension, a backhanded slap at the women who are at The Container Store, doing the best they can.

If buying less is part of your ethos and it works, amazing. For some people, this sort of organization and discipline comes easily to them. If they are lucky, they may also produce offspring with some similar traits. (And people who produce offspring with very different skills - I see you too.) But if you are like the rest of us, who have multiple sets of bed sheets and mismatched socks and tupperware lids and are still hoping to go to The Container Store one day soon to create a system for putting away kitchen utensils - that is ok too. You can buy more or less stuff - you can do what your household needs - but please don’t allow anyone to make you feel guilty for doing so.

A few links worth reading:

Neha Ruch, Amy Joyce and me at the amazing new Bethesda independent bookstore - Wonderland Books

—> Loved interviewing Neha Ruch of Mother Untitled on her book THE POWER PAUSE this week. Highly recommended reading for anyone wondering about the blend of unpaid care and paid work. You can order a copy here or check out my Q+A with her on Substack here:

Yes, Caregiving Can Be Good for Your Resume

—> My colleague

Elliot Haspel

is on Substack and for anyone who wants to follow the ever-evolving conversation about child care, I recommend his writing. Sign up to read

The Family Frontier

here.

—> I’ve written about summer camp before, but

Katherine Goldstein

is giving us a totally new paradigm for thinking about those summer months - instead of leaning into American summer camp craziness, throw in the towel and get the heck outta here.