Should You Declutter Your Home?

By John McDonnell

I grew up in a family of eight, and we lived in a three bedroom house. These were not bedrooms as we think of them today, however. Three of my brothers shared a bedroom that was the size of a walk-in closet in a modern house. My sister actually did live in a closet -- her bedroom had been used as one by the previous owners.

Downstairs, there was a living room, dining room, a half-bathroom the size of a telephone booth, and a modest kitchen. After a few years we converted the garage into a TV room, but by today’s standards it was a tiny house for eight people.

And yet, it never seemed cluttered.

My mother liked things neat, and she trained the children to pick up after themselves. We had no multi-purpose furniture: e.g., the kitchen table had nothing on it except food. The flat surfaces in the house were always visible and uncluttered. There were no areas that looked like the back room in a junk shop.

Then why do I live in such a cluttered house?

My house has three times the space of the one I grew up in, and yet all that space is taken. There are stacks of mail on the dining room table. Sports equipment, lawn furniture, and power tools litter my garage. I haven’t seen the surface of my desk in years. And you don’t want to go down in my basement. That’s the place where old computers, toys, and furniture go to die.

How did this happen?

I like to tell myself that it’s because I’m a creative person and we creative types are not orderly or fussy about small details like having space on the kitchen table.

That could be true, but it’s also probably because my family has more of the detritus of modern life, more stuff than I had as a child.

How did I get all this stuff? I was raised in a family where my father grew up poor in the Depression, and he always acted as if he thought he was going to wake up one day and it would be 1933 again. He thought the world was crawling with people out to take his money, and by God he wasn’t going to let them have it. If my Dad spent money on something there had to be a dire need for it, and you were expected to use it till it wore out.

These days, when I’m looking for a book or a user’s manual or a gadget and I’m searching through all the clutter, I often find things that mystify me. “When did we buy this?” I ask. Or, “I didn’t know we had one of these,” or, “What is this thing?” Even, at times: “Did we actually spend money on this?”

I try not to be a sucker for every sales pitch that comes along, but my resistance breaks down more than I realize. You can’t get me to buy a pair of pants I don’t need, but for computers, gadgets, gardening tools or books I’m an easy touch. The rest of my family has different buying weaknesses, but what it all adds up to is that we play a vital part in the economic well-being of several Chinese villages. 

Combine that mentality with a reluctance to throw things out -- in my family, if we own something, it’s understood that we keep it till the sun burns itself into a cold, dark cinder and the universe implodes -- and you can see why there is so much clutter.

I know you’re saying there’s always eBay or a yard sale to get rid of the stuff, but that involves making multiple trips to the dark corners of the basement, organizing, collating, and actually looking at things like those Sesame Street sing-along videos we kept for 20 years since our kids outgrew them, and once that happens we get teary-eyed and decide we can’t part with them, so they go back in the box for another 20 years.

Maybe that’s what clutter is, the accumulation of sentiment. It’s the souvenirs we pick up along the way, and no matter how trivial they seem, they all have meaning. Even that electric bill I found in the back of my desk drawer, the one from the first apartment my wife and I lived in, is hard to throw away because it has meaning to me (“Honey, do you believe how little they charged per kilowatt hour back then?”). I can’t part with the stuff I’ve been dragging along, no matter how much it’s slowing me down.

Someday all this clutter will be thrown away, or it’s going to end up in the closets and desk drawers of my children, just like clutter has been passed down to me from my dead relatives. It goes on forever, does clutter.

Maybe that will be my ultimate legacy, my gift to future generations. My great-grandchildren will have things like restaurant receipts and old magazines and the model airplane I built in 4th grade to remember me by.

That will probably give them a more accurate picture of my life than anything else, because what is life all about anyway, if not clutter?

THE END