From The Atlantic:
The End of Minimalism
Keeping a cluttered house has long been considered a little tacky, a little weak. But now it’s looking very wise.
When I go home to visit my parents a few times a year, my mom and I have a little dance we do. She asks me to go through some of the stuff in my childhood bedroom and decide what I want to get rid of. I tell her I will, and then I do not. I wouldn’t know how to begin sifting through the drawers and storage containers brimming with high-school notebooks and old sweatpants, and my mom offers no guidance. Instead, we both gesture at a mutual effort to declutter, and that’s enough to tide us over until the next time I return to Atlanta.
And she warms to her subject:
Clutter isn’t an American concept—Victorians, for example, lived in spaces overflowing with objets d’art and many other kinds of objets—but modern Americans cultivate clutter’s presence in ways that set them apart. While previous generations had plenty of stuff, they “would accumulate those things over a lifetime and value that process,” says Susan Strasser, the author of Never Done: A History of American Housework. “Your grandmother would die, and you would welcome her furniture rather than thinking you’d rather have something that looked new from IKEA.”
A bit more:
Packing light for a lifetime has its perks, but it’s not a strategy that’s highly adaptable to sudden unemployment or overburdened supply chains. America’s economy asks its residents to cycle new things in and out of their home constantly, and for decades, the process has looked like a perpetual-motion machine to all but the poorest among us. When the pandemic hit, it became clear that the process was much closer to musical chairs. Tossing everything that isn’t just right in the moment is its own kind of privilege, which is why Kim Kardashian’s house looks like a mausoleum, and why the set for the anti-capitalist film Parasite is all sharp edges and sleek wood. The pursuit of domestic perfection should be done only by those who don’t have to worry about what unforeseen wants or needs might lie ahead. Among consumer culture’s most impressive sleights of hand is convincing far too many people that they’re in that group.
My clutter, animated by the catastrophe for which it had been waiting, is no longer a moral failing or character deficit. It is, in a thousand unexpected ways, a savior, and it feels bizarre that in the recent past, I regarded my extra jars of on-sale spaghetti sauce and the T-shirts I never parted with as slightly disgraceful. The whole world now lives in the future my family always planned for, where an abundance of spaghetti sauce and cozy old shirts is among the best-case scenarios available to people living regular lives. I fought it for some 30 years, but now I’m willing to admit it: My mom was right, and the slopdinis have a point.
I love the line: Tossing everything that isn’t just right in the moment is its own kind of privilege
Yes, I have too much stuff and need to downsize a bit BUT, I am not going to go below a certain level of comfort and practicality. To advance to the level of a Marie Kondo or The Minimalists is more a neurosis than a lifestyle. I am relaxed and productive in my space and that is what matters to me and to the people I spend time with and care for.
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