Downsizing, Rethinking, Letting Go

"Automat" - Edward Hopper 1927
My favorite thoughtful painting.

About a month ago, we downsized, again. The first big downsizing effort was sixteen years ago when we moved from a large house to a fairly large townhouse. The most recent move was to a much smaller apartment. It's one of the best decisions we've ever made.

We left behind: many, many stairs (bane of my existence!); fifty-year old plumbing that was undoubtedly destined to be replaced at substantial expense; the vagaries of the housing market which, fortunately, was still nicely on our side, even though we didn't sell during the insane peak of several years ago.

We also left behind a lot of unnecessary stuff and things, although that's an ongoing process. We rented storage space but, no, it will not be the black hole that storage space often seems to be for many people. Our plan is to continue to toss/donate/sell much of what's in there, but we also will use it as an active adjunct to our apartment -- in fact, we've been doing that already, and it's helped keep our living space uncluttered. Example: we don't need suitcases, holiday decorations, or all of my artwork close at hand, but we do need to keep them. We have a filing cabinet that's not active enough to take up room in the apartment, but is very handy in the storage space. There are souvenirs of the past that are fun to have, but that we don't need to display at home; it's enough to know we can go take a peek whenever we want. The storage space is in a large, secure, climate-controlled building, so we feel fine about having our possessions there. And the cost per square foot is far less than the cost of more living space, so it makes sense financially, too.

We loved our new apartment when we first saw it, but we're even happier than we had expected to be, now that we're living in it. It has been absolutely liberating. However, the most surprising thing that's happened is that so many people we know, most who haven't seen it yet, have been wistfully envious of our decision. The concept of having less stuff, less responsibility, and a smaller, more efficient, yet still comfortable, place to live is incredibly appealing. I won't be surprised if our move prompts one or two moves by friends who also realize that they could be happy, probably happier, if they downsize, too.

Letting go of excess possessions, as we have been doing, often causes people to reflect on other aspects of life that need to be changed. When I teach my occasional uncluttering workshops, one of the things I tell my students is that you can't do a good job uncluttering until you know who you are right now. How can you judge what's important to keep if you can't figure out if you're the same person today that you were when you acquired something? How can you clear away the past and make room for the now -- and the future -- if you can't see what's changed in you? And everything, everyone changes in some ways. You may still think of yourself as a free-spirited flower child, but it's unlikely that you're still wearing bell-bottom jeans, fringed leather vests, and love beads -- at least, I hope not! You may have once been very interested in a hobby that, when you think about it, now leaves you cold. Why keep the craft supplies if you haven't used them in ages? You may have always wanted to learn to play the piano, but felt you never had time. Why wait?

In my reflections about who I am now, I realized that it's time to let go of The Thoughtful Consumer blog. I took a brief hiatus a few years ago and returned refreshed. This time, I haven't posted for months and I return aware that it's okay to move on.

When I started the blog, it was a way to continue sharing thoughts that had arisen during the first downsizing effort, an effort that continued for several years after we had moved to the townhouse. It was at that time that I let go of almost all of my family antiques -- furniture, dishes, glassware, all lovely and all full of fond memories for me. The experience prompted the writing of Sorting It Out: One Disorganized Woman Solves the Problem of Too Much Stuff, originally published in 2006. I started writing it in 2004, ten years ago. Back then, there was a limited number of books available about uncluttering, and there was certainly a lack of much material written from the point of view of someone who had dealt personally with the situation. Today, the market is glutted with books as well as websites, blogs, and Facebook Pages on uncluttering and organizing. The career of Professional Organizer has taken off. Television series about uncluttering have come and gone. Awareness about consumer issues has become more common, too, as have books, websites, blogs, and Facebook Pages devoted to that topic.

Meanwhile, during the past decade, my attention consistently has been pulled in the direction of making my art and working on other projects, including writing the daily blog for EngAGE, a non-profit devoted to creative aging; and being a producer and host on the Experience Talks public radio show and podcast. My passion about uncluttering has not dimmed -- as anyone who's taken my workshop can attest! -- nor has my deep concern about consumer issues, but it's time to let others continue, quite capably, to carry the public torch.

And yet, I couldn't just disappear without letting you know that I am so grateful to all of you for showing your support for this blog and for my writing. Thank you. The blog will remain online, of course, because it is full of material that is, in most cases, just as relevant today as it was when it was posted.

If you'd like to follow what I'm doing now, I hope you'll find me online:

Art by Cynthia Website 
Art by Cynthia Blog
and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/cynthia.friedlob

EngAGE Blog
and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/EngAGEDaging

Experience Talks Radio Show Website
and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ExperienceTalks

Wishing you the best of everything in the future,

Cynthia

Peace [and Quiet] on Earth

"Communion" © 1992 Cynthia Friedlob [hand-colored photograph]

I've been thinking a lot about how my need for uncluttered, open space includes the need for quiet space. Emptiness allows room for reflection, but the reflection won't come easily unless there's also quiet. Kaid Benfield wrote an article for The Atlantic in which this idea is pondered on a larger scale, that of a city:

"I have a theory that, the busier and livelier a city is, the more it needs places of retreat, places where one can get away and be quiet and still."

Parks, gardens, libraries, museums, and places of worship can offer quiet relief from the pressures and fast pace of city life, but what do you do when you're home? Where do you go for relief from your busy and lively day? If you're surrounded by clutter, there's nowhere to go, and that's very unfortunate for both your mental and physical well-being.

During the holiday season, it's common to hear expressions of hope for peace on Earth. For those of us who are fortunate enough to have our basic needs well met, in fact, to have much more than we need, it might be time to acknowledge that uncluttering is not just an aesthetic issue, or even a basic stress-reducer; it's also an important part of finding a deeper, personal peace. And there's no chance for peace on Earth until we can find peace within ourselves.

Best wishes to you for peace, now and in the coming New Year.

Chris Jordan's Three-Second Visual Meditation for Shoppers

"Three Second Meditation" is artwork from Chris Jordan that offers a reminder about how our consumer society has run amok. Click here, then click on the artwork to zoom in and see the details of the composition: 9,960 mail order catalogs, equal to the average number of pieces of junk mail that are printed, shipped, delivered, and disposed of in the U.S. every three seconds.

Perspective: Clutter vs. Collecting and What's Really Important to You?

Did you think I'd disappeared? I took a hiatus that lasted longer than expected. Thanks for waiting for "The Thoughtful Consumer" to return. I've saved a long list of links about some favorite topics that I hope you'll find interesting. Let's start with these:

Clutter vs. Collecting: A New Kind of More:  '"More-ing' is what it sounds like; it's for people who want more, but the giddy surprise is what More-ists want more of. Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, famously filled her closets with shoes, but good More-ists are sly, cleverer than Imelda. They crave more subtly, choosing to hoard what nobody normal has thought to hoard ... for example, bicycle locks ..." Story on NPR's Krulwich Wonders.

What's really important to you? "If your house suddenly caught on fire, what would you grab as you fled out the door? That’s precisely the question Foster Huntington asked himself, so he gathered the belongings he himself would take and photographed them, then asked a few friends to do the same. Then, on May 10 of 2011, he launched The Burning House with 10 such photographs." The project subsequently expanded: "The results — rich, surprising, refreshingly human, from people separated by 80 years and spanning six continents — are now gathered in The Burning House: What Would You Take? (public library)." Read more and see photos on Brain Pickings.

The Principals of Minimalism: One doesn't have to be a minimalist to live an uncluttered life, but some of the principals in Grant Snider's drawing are useful for everyone. Go to Incidental Comics, where you can learn the source of the artwork used in each panel and order a poster.


Clutter and Your Workspace: A study at the University of Minnesota concluded: "Working in a neat or untidy office might affect the way you function, according to the findings of experiments conducted by University of Minnesota researchers. They showed that people working at a neat organized office tended to be more conventional, generous, and inclined towards healthy foods. A messy office, on the other hand, appears to stimulate creativity and a willingness to try new things." Hmm. What do you think?



The World's Largest Record Collection: What happens when you try to sell the world's largest record collection? Timing is everything. Fortunately, Paul Mawhinney's gigantic collection didn't meet a tragic fate. In fact, the end of his story has a bit of a twist. Click here to go to MessyNessyChic to read more and watch a 7:36 documentary by Sean Dunne.

Selling a Hoarder's Home: "The one-bedroom condo on Park Avenue was described by the broker, Jeffrey Tanenbaum of Halstead Property, as a 'hoarder’s paradise, with seven cats, one dog and 12 armoires packed to the brim.'. . . For brokers, showing and marketing a true hoarder property can require considerable creativity." Read a fascinating article in the New York Times.



A Video Portrait of American Life: Cluttered

This blog recently marked its seventh anniversary, so I wanted something special to post. I found a short video (12:17) from SoCal Connected, a KCET-TV magazine, that could be exactly what you need to break through whatever barriers are preventing you from tackling your clutter.

Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors, a photo-laden book published in 2012, was the result of a ten-year UCLA study that used "archaeological approaches to human material culture." The families, who were anonymous and considered "typical," gave full access (including video) to the researchers who gathered data that showed how many of us live: with far more stuff than we need.

This segment from the KCET show examines the book and, significantly, two families who decided to go public now, years after they had been subjects in the study. The differences are fascinating, as is the information discovered by the research. Take a look!

George Carlin Talks about Stuff

Awareness of the absurdity of how much stuff most of us accumulate permeated the mainstream quite awhile ago, but it's always heartening to see George Carlin's classic stuff routine trotted out as a reminder. This time, a stuff-struggling writer for the Huffington Post acknowledged the issue and marked George Carlin's passing on this date in 2008. If only we could remember that our homes are just our "stuff with a cover on it!" Click here to read the article and see the famous routine. (In case anyone is sensitive about this: it does contain profanity.)

The Psychology of Shopping

I've written in the past about the power of advertising and the psychology of store design and product placement that convinces us to buy things, often things we don't need (scroll down and search for "Advertising" in "Categories" on the sidebar of this blog to read previous posts). The psychology of shopping is endlessly fascinating to me, and I've compiled a few more posts that address aspects of it.

1.  In "Psychology Today," Kit Yarrow, Ph.D, presents five ways that sales make you vulnerable. In her article, "Why Clearance Sales are Psychologically Irresistible," fear of missing out is in first position on her list.

In her research she found that "sale shoppers ultimately spend more money than non-sale shoppers. They often purchase things that aren’t truly satisfying; and because they aren’t satisfied they continue to shop. Additionally, the rush they get from snagging a bargain has an addictive quality - the products they purchase are in some ways secondary." She offers some suggestions about how to counter this vulnerability, including using cash rather than a credit card because cash is "real" and credit isn't.

2.  Here's a rather surprising observation, discussed in a New York Times opinion piece by Oliver Burkeman entitled, "Suffer. Spend. Repeat," about shopping during the holiday season:

"[I]t may strike you that retailers have gone out of their way to make holiday shopping as unpleasant an experience as possible. The odd truth is that they probably have. And there’s a reason for that: evidence suggests that the less comfortable you are during the seasonal shopping spree, the more money you’ll spend."

And once you start spending, chances are you'll continue because, "according to the theory of 'shopping momentum,' as explained by researchers from Stanford, Yale and Duke Universities, we fret far more about whether to buy the first item we purchase during a trip than we do subsequent ones."

3. Martin Lindstrom "has learned a few things about advertising and marketing. He's advised major corporations such as Disney and Proctor & Gamble, and recently wrote a book called Brandwashed, which chronicles the many ways corporations get us to consume their products."

Brandwashing starts very young (Lindstrom says the average American 3-year-old can recognize 100 brands) and it saturates our lives. Example: Those small cardboard boxes in the produce department of Whole Foods that say "Patty's Farm" aren't exactly what they seem to be. The box "[has] actually been designed by a graphic design company in New York City to make us feel this is nostalgia at its peak."

Learn more in an "All Things Considered" NPR interview called, "Products R Us: Are We Brandwashed?" (8 min 26 sec)


Obviously, the solution to functioning in a society that's saturated with marketing ploys is to try to outwit the advertisers by being constantly aware of their efforts and prepared to meet the onslaught that greets us whenever we go shopping. But vigilance can be fatiguing and even the most knowledgeable and sophisticated shopper can be vulnerable to just the right combination of sales techniques.

I find that avoiding "window shopping" and its equivalent, browsing online, help keep my focus on what's needed. But there have been times when that hypnotic "Oh, look! It's sparkly!" moment has taken over my brain and claimed my sanity just long enough to open my wallet and pull out a credit card. Do you have any special tricks your rely on when you're shopping? Please share because we all need as much help as we can get!

(Image credit: Robert Linder on stock.xchng)

What Are Your Most Important Possessions?

When talking about uncluttering or simple living, it's quite possible to be misinterpreted as a spoilsport, a killjoy who doesn't want anyone to have anything beyond a scrap of threadbare clothing, a dented coffee mug, and a tent to sleep in. Those who dare to have more than that are supposed to feel guilty or at least ashamed of being so decadent.

Of course, that's not really what uncluttering and simple living are about. But it can be a fine line that separates gratitude from guilt when we think about our own possessions. The never-ending questions we face are, "How much is enough? How much is too much?"

The images you'll see in the projects linked below are thought provoking, perhaps even shocking. They're not meant to engender guilt or shame; they're meant to offer perspective, which can be helpful when we're trying to answer those difficult questions.

________________________________

Photojournalist Brian Sokol created a project entitled The Most Important Thing. It features portraits of incomprehensibly impoverished refugees who have crossed the border between Sudan's Blue Nile state and South Sudan's Upper Nile state, with their most important personal possession.

________________________________

Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti’s project entitled Toy Stories presents photos of children from around the world with their most important possessions: their toys. Galimberti explores the universality of childhood and concludes, “At their age, they are all pretty much the same; they just want to play.” But he discovered significant cultural differences, too. In wealthy countries, the children were inclined to be possessive; in poor countries, even when they had only a toy or two, the children were inclined to share.

________________________________

JeongMee Yoon's Pink and Blue project "explores the trends in cultural preferences and the differences in the tastes of children (and their parents) from diverse cultures [and] ethnic groups, as well as gender socialization and identity." The project began as a result of her five-year-old daughter's insistence on wearing only pink and playing only with pink toys.

I've posted about this project in the past, but it seems appropriate to reference it here again, not because it demonstrates the power of marketing, but because of the comparatively large quantity of toys that are displayed. Could a child with this many playthings identify only one most important possession? Does that matter? Do these pictures represent joyful abundance or thoughtless acquisition? How can we know? Are the gender issues more important than the issue of quantity?

________________________________

How much is enough? How much is too much? ~ It's easier to know how much is too little.

Musing About Minimalism

One of the misconceptions about minimalism is that it requires giving up "everything," suffering with only the most basic requirements for comfort met, and generally embracing a life of sacrifice. Not necessarily. I like the explanation offered by Ryan Nicodemus, co-author with Joshua Fields Millburn of the book Minimalism: Leading a Meaningful Life:

I had an interview this morning . . . where the guy asked what does a minimalist's life look like and I didn't know what to tell him because it's really not that different from anybody else's life. It's just more deliberate. If you were to walk into my home, you wouldn't think oh something's wrong with this guy. You'd just think he's tidy. . . . [Minimalism is] more about living deliberately and more about asking what adds value in your life and cutting out the superfluous stuff.

Defining "superfluous" is, of course, most challenging. Akiko Busch writes in "The Art of Shedding Possessions:"

There are many factors ruling our choices about what to surrender. A force equal and opposite to the impulse buy is the precipitous urge to give something up, which can spring from some combination of regret, disenchantment, a sense of failure, even fatigue.

But beyond such hasty and impetuous housecleaning are the simple facts that we outgrow things, our tastes change, and, maybe most of all, our desire for material belongings wanes. Parting with them may only be a matter of recognizing that we need to end certain relationships and understand how the physical objects around us have served as their emotional accomplices.

 

Sometimes simplified circumstances can be imposed on us by chance. John Stark wrote of discovering "The Zen of a Small Kitchen" when he moved to a new city:

For the first few weeks, I felt as if I were in one of those PBS reality shows where people are made to live in a house from a bygone era. . . . First, I had to acquire the right mindset. 'The original owners of the house had four children,' my landlord told me. If that kitchen was good enough for a family of six, surely I, one person with a Doberman, could make do.

 

And that, of course, is the answer to all uncluttering challenges: the right mindset. If one commits to simplifying, to mindfully letting go of unnecessary possessions and thoughtfully dealing with the mundane, life will begin to feel ordered, to flow instead of bump along.

 

Peter Lawrence, author of The Happy Minimalist, demonstrates the extreme minimalist point-of-view in this post from Treehugger. In the 14-minute video at that link, Peter explains that minimalism requires "constantly examining what resources are needed to achieve your objective."

 

Most of us will feel that we need more than Peter Lawrence does, but how much more? Well, that's always the question, isn't it?

 

 

Photo Credit: "Tranquility 4" by Ove Tøpfer, stock.xchng

Happy New Year!

Best wishes for 2013 and thank you for reading "The Thoughtful Consumer!"

Uncluttering: Stuff vs. Art

One of my new, small drawings: graphs created from
significant numbers in someone's life or numbers
derived from musical patterns in favorite songs.

Anyone who's attempted to unclutter understands that our relationship with our stuff is complicated. But too often uncluttering is misunderstood as a process that leaves one bereft of possessions, forced to live an uncomfortable, minimalist existence. Of course, that's not the case at all. Uncluttering just means letting go of things that no longer serve a purpose in your life. Defining what's necessary and unnecessary is a personal, often difficult, decision.

Sometimes having very little is the correct choice for some people. "Vagabond minimalist" Andrew Hyde has chosen the ultra-minimalist route. You may have heard about him last year when he was being publicized frequently as "the guy who owns only fifteen things." Most of us wouldn't be comfortable trying to live with so little and, in fact, I wonder if Andrew might have had a stash of at least a few items awaiting his return from the road. But he certainly seemed content living with his stripped-down-to-the-bone possessions.

But what if you have a huge collection of stuff? It's not just "stuff," and it's certainly not clutter, if it's really a collection, if you display it proudly, if you enjoy it and want to share that joy with others. Jacinta, true collector, has some 5,000 snowmen figures that she cheerfully displays every holiday season. In this video, we see that there's nothing cluttered about her home. Crowded, yes, but cluttered, no! She obviously adores her collection, so even though it may seem a bit much to most of us, if it's affordable for her family, why not continue to celebrate it?

Sometimes people redefine their relationship with "stuff" in a way that minimizes clutter. If you're fed up with our consumer culture, you think long and hard about what you need before you make a purchase. That alone would make accumulating clutter difficult. Katy Wolk-Stanley, who bills herself as The Non-Consumer Advocate, has particularly stringent requirements: she's vowed not to buy anything new. It began when she heard about The Compact, a social and environmental movement that started in 2006 in San Francisco when ten friends promised not to buy anything new for a year. Katy adopted the plan in 2007, but decided to continue -- indefinitely. It's been five years. Again, not everyone would be comfortable making this kind of commitment, but it works for Katy.

Now let's talk about clutter and art. Most artists I know (myself included) have an uneasy relationship with clutter. One major challenge is that almost everything we see has creative potential. Heaven help the poor artist who specializes in collage -- the most extreme example of someone who sees potential art everywhere, even in stuff that's been discarded, often for good reason!

You might think that the very fact that I make art, which is "stuff," is a contradiction: on one hand, I advocate getting rid of stuff and, on the other, I make it. But I never advocate getting rid of something that you find useful or beautiful (to borrow the classic explanation from William Morriss of how to choose what things to have in your home). I can't imagine living without art, so if you find it an important part of your life, I understand completely. That's why I continue to make art and that's also why I've decided once again to have a holiday sale of my original work. If you're interested, click here to go to my art blog for more information.

As we approach the end of the year and that time when we make New Year's resolutions, maybe this year we don't need to resolve (again) to unclutter. Maybe we need to resolve to work on understanding our relationship to our possessions and finally figuring out what we need and love. Then we can apply that understanding not only to what we have now but also to what we buy in the future. Let's start by asking ourselves, about everything that we own: Is it beautiful? Is it useful? If it is, let's be grateful that we have it; if it isn't, let's gratefully let it go.

Too Busy to Unclutter?

© awitikoski at stock.xchng 

I've been feeling a bit overwhelmed lately by all of the stuff I need to do and I want to change that. I've fallen behind on some things that are current, but what nags at me is the stuff that's been unresolved for ages -- the "postponed decisions" that organizer Peter Walsh says are at the root of clutter: little piles of notes with information on them that I perceive is worth keeping; artwork that needs to be stored rather than stacked; items that need to be donated, not left in a holding area. In an effort to get a grip on my situation and stop beating myself up over it, I reread two articles that I've saved because I think they're so insightful. (And, yes, I have some digital clutter that needs to go, too!)

John Tierney offers this observation in "Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue?":

"Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. . . . Once you’re mentally depleted, you become reluctant to make trade-offs, which involve a particularly advanced and taxing form of decision making. In the rest of the animal kingdom, there aren’t a lot of protracted negotiations between predators and prey. To compromise is a complex human ability and therefore one of the first to decline when willpower is depleted. You become what researchers call a cognitive miser, hoarding your energy."

While the article focuses on how how decision fatigue depletes your energy to make choices while shopping or trying to stay on a diet, I'm convinced that it also contributes to an inability to tackle clutter effectively. When you postpone decisions about your clutter, it's not simply because the decisions are difficult to make; there are also probably too many of them for you to handle comfortably and they probably fall into too many different categories -- papers, clothes, sentimental items, etc.-- each with their own unique excuses that trap you and prevent you from moving forward. Thus, you feel decision fatigue, and it becomes easier not to decide, and go do something else. Like write a blog post.

As the article points out, there is a biological price extracted -- it's not just "all in your head." So perhaps the best way to handle dealing with those postponed decisions (assuming you're not hiring a personal organizer to blast through the process with you) is to tackle them in very small quantities. Forgive yourself for having allowed the clutter to accumulate and tackle only a decision or two a day. Work on uncluttering when you're rested and well-fed, so you'll be less likely to succumb to feelings of pressure or despair that you'll ever complete the job. If you have an average clutter problem, not a clutter crisis, eventually you'll gain the upper hand.

There's another related issue that many people face and Tim Kreider calls it "The Busy Trap." From his article:

"If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: 'Busy!' 'So busy.' 'Crazy busy.' It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: 'That’s a good problem to have,' or 'Better than the opposite.' . . . The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it."

I've known plenty of "crazy busy" people and many of them don't seem to get much joy out of their busyness. Some don't seem to get much done, either, other than treading water. The things they say they want to do are always put on the back burner to enjoy sometime later, but also on the back burner are their problems, including dealing with their clutter. Being productive is the focus of their lives and uncluttering, while they might acknowledge as a useful task, is low on their list of priorities. The idea of doing nothing is incomprehensible to them.  Kreider says all this busyness is to avoid an existential problem: the feeling of the meaninglessness of everything we do. Maybe, but maybe it's not quite that bleak. Maybe it's just another way to avoid making decisions about things that make us uncomfortable.

I fall into the "being productive" trap sometimes and, when paired with decision fatigue, that can result in doing things that are faux productive. For me, that usually means reading and looking at interesting things online. It's engrossing and can feel like I'm doing something important when I'm learning something new, but I'm really just entertaining and distracting myself. I don't truly need to know all those obscure facts about esoteric subjects. (I'm delighted that you're reading this blog post, but if you have a clutter problem, please go do something about it as soon as you're done!)

It seems that if we want to take control of our excessive busyness, we need to make choices that allow us some genuine down time. Not paralyzed by decision fatigue time, not distraction time, but quiet time that allows us to regenerate our enthusiasm for life. As Kreider points out:

"Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done."

Tim Kreider thinks that life is too short to be busy. I'd add that life is too short to live it surrounded by clutter, whether it's in your living space or stowed away in closets, drawers, and storage units where it remains as clutter in your head. So, fortified with a decent night's sleep and a good meal, I'm off to make a decision or two about my supposedly important scraps of papers. Then, I'll allow myself a little quiet idleness. It should be a genuinely productive evening.

_____________________________________

"All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone."

~ Blaise Pascal

Stuff in Quantity

Letting go of unnecessary stuff is usually a process that evolves over time. Not many of us can slash our possessions to the minimum on the first try. Here's some motivation to continue to rethink how we relate to our stuff: Click here to read about Japanese artist Hiroshi Fuji's exhibition of 100,000 unwanted toys collected over the past thirteen years. The pictures are thought-provoking.

Click here to learn how one New York City Sanitation Department worker has turned a collection of trash into a gallery of sorts. “It doesn’t matter what it is. As long as it’s cool, I can hang it up and I’ve got a place for it,” says Nelson Molina, the collector.

Click here to see a list of the top five collectibles you may have bought in the '90s -- not necessarily the best investments if you were expecting to retire about now with the money you'd make from selling your Beanie Babies!



More on Marketing Manipulation

Photo Credit: Asif Akbar at stock.xchng

Consumers are easily manipulated. No matter how savvy we think we are, we fall for many of the tricks advertisers and marketers use to sell products to us. We don't believe those "Going Out of Business Sale" signs that are permanent fixtures in some store windows, but we will succumb to just the right color, the right descriptive word, or perhaps the right scent. Here are several articles that may make you rethink just how sophisticated your choices are when you make purchasing decisions.

"Does This Smell Clean to You? - Products Bring Aromatherapy To Household Chores; Don't Say 'Banana'"

"Forget lemon and pine. People are fumigating their homes with exotic essences of ginger and hibiscus while scrubbing floors and bathtubs. That's because packaged-goods makers, in their endless hunt for the new and improved, are ramping up the complexity of product fragrances. Adding an elaborate bouquet that consumers crave to a product line helps build loyalty, marketers say. . . .Mr. Clean has New Zealand Springs, promising 'ferns, forests and glacier-carved waterfalls.' No matter that consumers may not know what a glacier-carved waterfall actually smells like. 'They're fanciful. You want to evoke a feeling or emotion, like when you're out in a meadow,' says Deborah Betz, a senior fragrance development manager at International Flavors & Fragrances, an industry supplier. 'It doesn't have to smell like an actual meadow.'"

Read more here to learn how the colors you see on the fashion runways and foods that are currently popular also affect the scents in cleaning products. It's a safe bet that these same factors influence personal hygiene products and cosmetics, too -- even organic ones.

"7 Reasons Why Diamonds Are a Waste of Your Money"

"Ira Weissman is a diamond industry veteran with a decade of experience at one of the world's largest diamond polishers. He has traveled the world buying and selling diamonds and now dedicates his time to helping consumers make the most of their diamond buying decisions."

The focus of the article is on the diamond engagement ring: Long-standing tradition? No. Great investment. No. Good way to stall when avoiding a marriage commitment? Possibly. Read the list to see if you want to rethink how you feel about diamonds in general.

"Cheap Clothing Costs a Lot More Than You Think"

I've posted in the past about the complex dilemma of cheap products produced under horrific conditions in foreign countries and sometimes in the U.S. (here's one previous post).  Elizabeth Cline is the author of a new book entitled “Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion” (I have not read it yet) in which she explains that the high volume/cheap labor/cheap materials business model has resulted, as most of us already know, in human suffering and negative environmental impact. "Cline states that 'There are very few middle-market brands and retailers and everything has become very cheap or irrationally expensive on the other end.' Leaving little room for quality products that don’t cost a fortune, most of us fall victim to clothing items we know aren’t the best sourced, yet we buy them anyway."

The article promotes www.fashioningchange.com, a website offering free shopping links and information about "stylish, eco-friendly and ethical alternatives to top name brands." My personalized recommendations look good enough for me to investigate further and probably purchase a few items. Read more here.

*********

And one final note: The Thoughtful Consumer blog celebrated its 6th anniversary on August 3rd. Thanks to all of you who read and comment!

Cluttered Life in the 21st Century

Regular readers know that both The Thoughtful Consumer blog and my book, Sorting It Out, were inspired by my own uncluttering efforts several years ago. Like many people, I had been busy working and living and accumulating stuff until one day I had to acknowledge that my formerly simple, uncluttered home had become crowded and uncomfortable.

I'm a firm believer in a philosphy held by Blaise Pascal: "All of man's problems stem from his inability to sit quietly alone in an empty room." I wanted that quiet, empty space again -- or at least a room that was uncluttered enough to feel relaxing. That meant facing some "postponed decisions," as professional organizer Peter Walsh calls clutter.

The process of achieving a reasonably uncluttered state was challenging, and those challenges continue. I still hold on to some things that I honestly can't justify keeping. I still face temptation to buy things that I don't need. I still haven't conquered all of my organizing dilemmas. And, judging from the popularity of uncluttering books and workshops, and the burgeoning field of professional organizing, a lot of people have the same issues.

So, let's take a look at three recent, useful links to posts on that basic topic of clutter:

From the L.A. Times: "Clutter and Other Family Problems of the 21st Century"

"An interdisciplinary group of researchers — archaeologists, anthropologists, psychologists and other social scientists — found that mothers who described their houses as messy or cluttered experienced higher rates of a depressed mood in the evening. This correlation was one of many findings on human relationships and behavior with material possessions in the book Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century, which was published in early July...Among the many findings, researchers discovered that families are generally over-scheduled, with less time being spent outdoors or eating dinner together. The families paid a lot of money renovating and remodeling a house, only to spend much of their time in front of a TV...About 75% of the garages in the study held so much overflow from the main house that a car no longer fit."

From Yahoo Homes: "Why Clutter Matters and Decluttering is Difficult"

"Clutter matters, [pro organizer Jennifer] Hunter says. It matters because it takes up space — not just in your surroundings, but in your head. Of the two, the psychological effect of clutter is the most important. 'When we clear the clutter out of a space, people breathe a sigh of relief.' The mood changes instantly. People feel lighter, more serene, more focused."

From Parade Magazine: "Is Your Stuff Weighing You Down?" Adapted from Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake by Anna Quindlen. Published by Random House, a division of Random House Inc. © 2012 by Anna Quindlen.

"At some point desire and need became untethered in our lives, and shopping became a competitive sport...I fooled myself into thinking that House Beautiful should be subtitled Life Wonderful...Now that I’m nearing 60, I understand the truth about possessions, that they mean or prove or solve nothing. Stuff is not salvation."

In the uncluttering workshops that I teach occasionally, I always ask my students to identify what they would save if they had to leave the house immediately because of a disaster (in earthquake country, that's a particularly salient concern). They usually answer in the same general way that Anna Quindlen did in her article in Parade: grab some photos and the dogs and go. Protecting your family and the family pets is primary on everyone's mind in a crisis, so I have no doubt that even the photos would be abandoned, if necessary.

And yet we cling to so much more -- not just the necessities, not just a few important sentimental things, not just comfortable little luxuries we enjoy, but stuff that's useless, worn out, and weighing us down. "Possessions mean or prove or solve nothing." Will we ever understand that? When we do, and when we accept it wholeheartedly, we'll finally be able to stop postponing our decisions and act.
  

Potpourri: Big Homes, Advertising, Recycling

I have a backlog of interesting items on various topics that I'm condensing for this post.

Big homes: I was distressed to learn that, in spite of all the favorable press small homes have been receiving—especially the ultra-small "tiny houses,"—people are opting for larger new homes. From The Wall Street Journal:

"KB Home says the average square footage of houses currently under contract is 2,079, an increase of 13% from last year. And more KB buyers are picking models that exceed 3,500 square feet...The return to bigger houses—which has taken industry watchers by surprise—indicates that the housing downturn paused, but didn't kill, America's love affair with supersize abodes...A major driver behind the bigger-home trend is record-low interest rates, under 4% for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, which allow some buyers to move up without necessarily making larger mortgage payments."

Advertising: Soon there will be no escape from advertising. Here's the warning from the LA Times:

"A company called Novo Ad has developed technology that can turn a public bathroom mirror into an electronic display for video advertisements...The mirrors are actually LED screens that have an internal hard disk and "very sophisticated proprietary software," according to a spokesman for the company."

The technology hasn't arrived yet in the U.S., but efforts are being made to find partners and advertisers to get it here as quickly as possible.


Recycling: On a cheerier note, in the Netherlands, recycling has been elevated to a new level of cultural awareness and change. The New York Times reports from Amsterdam about the "Repair Cafe" phenomenon:

"Thirty groups have started Repair Cafes across the Netherlands, where neighbors pool their skills and labor for a few hours a month to mend holey clothing and revivify old coffee makers, broken lamps, vacuum cleaners and toasters, as well as at least one electric organ, a washing machine and an orange juice press...'The Repair Cafe is an effective way to raise awareness that discarded objects are indeed still of value,' Mr. Joop Atsma [the state secretary for infrastructure and the environment] wrote in an e-mail...Marjanne van der Rhee, a Repair Cafe volunteer who hands out data collection forms and keeps the volunteers fortified with coffee, said: 'Different people come in. With some, you think, maybe they come because they’re poor. Others look well-off, but they are aware of environmental concerns. Some seem a little bit crazy.'"

I like the Repair Cafe idea, but I may be a little bit crazy.

Co-opting Cultures for Consumer Goods



A post by Lisa Hix on Fresh Type, "Why the ‘Native’ Fashion Trend Is Pissing Off Real Native Americans," brings up some thought-provoking concerns about co-opting another culture to create art or design for general public consumers. The most recent example of  this was Urban Outfitters which headed into the 2011 holiday season with a "Navajo" line. The result was a lawsuit by the Navajo Nation. The basis of the suit has to do with trademark infringement. From NPR:

"What they did here was they went and sued them on the basis of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, which says it's illegal to produce a product that says it's Indian made when it's not Indian made. So the Navajo Nation is saying that the products that the company is producing makes it appear that Navajos had some part in the production of these products and therefore that's against the law."

From the Fresh Type article:

"The problem," says Jessica R. Metcalfe, a Turtle Mountain Chippewa and doctor of Native American studies who teaches at Arizona State University and blogs about Native American fashion designers at Beyond Buckskin, "is that they’re putting it out there as 'This is the native,' or 'This is native-inspired.' So now you have non-native people representing us in mainstream culture. That, of course, gets tiring, because this has been happening since the good old days of the Hollywood Western in the 1930s and '40s, where they hired non-native actors and dressed them up essentially in redface. The issue now is not only who gets to represent Native Americans," Metcalfe says, "but also who gets to profit."

But, as the article continues to explain, this is hardly the first time a culture has been used in products by designers who are not a part of it, for consumers who are also not a part of it.

"For example, the pattern we think of as 'paisley'—now most commonly seen on ties—was once a holy symbol of the Zoroastrians in Persia. And throughout fashion history, designers have been swiping motifs from other cultures—from China and Japan in Victorian times, Egypt in the 1920s, and West Africa and Latin America in the '60s."

I found the story about the long intertwining of the Pendleton company with Native Americans to be fascinating. Also interesting was learning how young Native American fashion designers are using the Pendleton blanket:

"It’s really cool to see how they reinterpret the blanket," Metcalfe says. "For Sho Sho, she’s using very vibrant colors and the bold graphics of the Pendleton blanket and giving it this hip-hop vibe, by making these hoodies for men and women. She's made the wearing blanket something cool for Native Americans to wear again."

Wait a minute. Hip-hop vibe? That's cultural appropriation, too.

Complex issue, isn't it?

Digital Clutter

Although I have no statistics to back me up, I suspect that digital clutter plagues as many people as physical clutter does. Crowding on our desktops or in our e-mail inboxes may not take up physical space, but it does take up space in the most important location we all deal with daily: our heads. We're inclined to notice the discomfort if we're lugging around an overstsuffed backpack, but too often we dismiss the nagging weight of too much burdensome stuff on our minds. Digital clutter at its worst is evident in hoarding behavior.

Wall Street Journal: Hoarding Goes Digital

"Digital clutter doesn't beget mice or interfere with walking around the house," says Kit Anderson, past president of the Institute for Challenging Disorganization, a nonprofit in St. Louis, that studies hoarding behaviors. "But it's more insidious because no one else is going to insist that you get help."

Hoarding behaviors in the digital world are likely to be as difficult to handle as in the physical world, but most of us can tackle our digital clutter in the same way we tackle our real world stuff. If you Google "digital clutter," you'll find many links devoted to solutions to the problem. Some of them require mastering software that's designed to help you get organized. But using this software is rather like buying more storage containers for the stuff that's cluttering your home: it doesn't deal with the problem itself. The real solution: let it go.

After you've tossed the excess, some of those organizing programs can help you sort what you've decided to keep and prevent digital clutter in the future. But, just as in real life, the real trick is to avoid accumulating more stuff that you don't need. And if you do slip, remember that the delete key is your friend.

Clutter and Collections

Most people define clutter as too much stuff, which is certainly accurate, as long as you can define what's "too much." Quantity is flexible; function is the more important issue. Is it physically in your way? Is it a constant annoyance in the back of your mind? I'd say that you have too much when your stuff gets in the way of living your life the way you want to live it.

Some people can amass a ton of stuff and be quite content: collectors. They enjoy what they own, they care for it, display it (as much of it as they can), and are eager to share it and their experiences collecting it with others. Here are two completely different examples of collectors: one is quite traditional, while the other collected cast-offs to create art.

Archaeologist Andrea Ludden’s collection of over 40,000 pairs of salt and pepper shakers is housed in two museums, one of them created by her and her family. Click here to read more and be sure to view the excellent slide show of examples from the collection.

High school teacher, writer and artist Victor Moore constructed his Junk Castle from salvaged items such as sheet metal, tin, washing machine parts, dryer doors, miscellaneous housings, bedsteads, and the door from a '52 Oldsmobile. Another interesting slide show is at this link.

Is your stuff as well cared for, as beautiful, or as useful as the items in these collections -- or is it just clutter?

Buying Locally in 2012

Perhaps the most interesting idea for thoughtful consumers to ponder for the new year is buying locally. Not only farmers markets, but small local businesses benefit from this. Consumers benefit by having access to special items that aren't available in every mall or supermarket across the country. The community benefits not only economically but also by forging links that bond neighbors together. Linton Weeks, who wrote an NPR post about the "new American localism," suggests that it may provide a new (revised from the 1960s) slogan for a bumper sticker: "Think Locally, Act Locally." Seems very thoughtful to me.

Happy New Year and thank you, readers, for your continued interest in and support of this blog!