Our urge to purge

May 26, 2018, Good Weekend 

My fridge started crying for help on one of the hottest March days recorded in Sydney. A fridge’s scream is deep, gruff but penetrating, and impossible to ignore. The freezer freezes up. Chunks of ice appear. 

I had inadvertently been trying to murder it for months, I discovered, with a pile-up of light, silvery bags that had gradually blocked the vents at the back of the freezer.

I had saved the bags after buying chocolates for gifts from a pricey nearby chocolatier which never lets you leave the store without a chiller envelope. And I had always said to myself: well, these are nice and neat, these look useful, I should keep these. They could come in handy. 

And so, my clutter habits had almost killed my fridge. 

The maybe trap

Oh, come on. I bet you too have kept things that “will come in useful”. Or you have drawerfuls of used wrapping paper you’ve kept “just in case”, especially if you had parents who went through straitened times or the Depression. What about china you never use because it’s mismatched – but maybe one day, 60 people will arrive for dinner. 

Men have a special weakness: keeping broken appliances that they tell themselves they will fix one day. Some day. 

And who – of either sex – wears all their wardrobe? From 2000 to 2014, the number of garments bought annually by the average shopper around the world went up by a staggering 60 per cent, McKinsey & Company reports. 

YouGov Omnibus research shows twenty percent of those polled in Australia estimated they owned more than 100 garments, not including underwear or accessories. 

Sometimes it feels as if clutter just breeds. Photograph: Ashim D’Silva, on Unsplash

But when floods, winds and fires ripped through thousands of American homes in late 2017, reporters found some homeowners saw a silver lining. One victim of Hurricane Irma, who had only had time to gather jewellery, documents, photos and her kids’ kiteboards before escaping, told the Washington Postof her breakthrough: “I was weighed down by too much stuff… I was prepared to start over with what I had with me. I could live simpler.”

This urge to purge – as the Washington Post put it – seems universal. This is a story where everyone I meet could be an interviewee: business columnist, antiques expert, retiree, political journalist, wine writer, café owner, house painter, removalist … all of them, like me, are either tackling their stuff, or fretting that they should. 

The editor of this magazine confesses she is rethinking plans to add a storey to her home. “I kept thinking, are we just doing this to store Hugh’s 4000 CDs?”

We are humans. Ergo, we hunt. We gather. These days, with decades of globalisation making goods cheaper than ever while prosperity has increased, we gather more than ever. And, given that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, we also now declutter more than ever. 

Purge. Cleanse. Lighten … Unnervingly, decluttering attracts the same evangelising vocabulary that the colonic irrigation fad once did. A friend rages, “I just have to get rid of all this crap in my house!”

If there was ever a dilemma that summed up the angst of the 21stcentury, with its tsunamis of excess, desire and disposability crashing into the equally powerful tides of environmentalism, sustainability, and the reality of shrinking homes, it is this one. 

Decluttering turns out to be a tour of the faultlines of the 21stcentury – and of the psyche. 

Fourteen camisoles …

I’m no stranger to decluttering. Over the years, I have sorted through my wardrobe, occasionally so ruthlessly I still have wounds. How I lament the loss of two Kenzo jersey wrap skirts that ended up by mistake in the op shop bag. 

There can be peril in a decluttered work space. Photograph: Norbert Levajsics, on Unsplash

In 2014, I also cleaned out and re-ordered my home office so efficiently and with such logic  - I thought - that I’ve hardly been able to find anything in it since. 

But still, I am someone who has far too much stuff including, I discover, 14 black camisoles, 11 luggage locks and six black cardigans. 

Fortunately, I already had some patches of order. A few years ago, I read decluttering queen Marie Kondo’s advice on lingerie drawers – how your underwear should be folded into a rectangle, then a smaller rectangle, and then rolled into a cylinder to take its place alongside all the other neat cylinders. At the time, work was stressful and I couldn’t help noting how happily my brain applied this information. Psychology 101. If I couldn’t control my working environment, then I would certainly master my underpants.

Ever since, my knickers have been perfectly furled in the KonMari method, the calling card of this thirty-something year old Japanese powerhouse author, now a multi-millionaire because so few of us know how to tame our belongings. 

Her first book, published in English in 2014, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up has sold over five million copies. There was a greedy take-up of her 2017 sequel, Spark Joy, a title that captures the essence of her advice: every item we own must somehow spark joy in our hearts. Yes, even knickers. Otherwise, out they go (though not without a mental thank-you ceremony that Kondo created to help us get over our sadness or guilt at saying goodbye). 

And Kondo is just one face in a crowded field that hardly existed 20 years ago but which has since become boom city for bestselling books and services. 

Members of Australia’s Institute of Professional Organisers –101 members after just one year - run businesses with names like Mise en Place, My Organised Home and Reclaim Your Space and their numbers are growing fast as the time-poor, the plain overwhelmed and – a new and growing phenomenon - the younger ones who’ve never properly learned housekeeping from their working parents, plea and pay for help.

Death cleaning

As for my stack of guides, I’m entranced by a newcomer, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margareta Magnusson which tells us how not to leave tons of stuff for our nearest and dearest to deal with. The Swedes even have a word for it – döstädning.

If many of the decluttering books barked orders at me – “Avoid ‘temporary’ storage – decide now!” (The Art of Discarding by Nagisa Tatsumi) or “When you catch yourself being indecisive, it’s a warning sign” (Lighten Up! By Michelle Passoff), “Discard anything that creates visual noise” (Goodbye, Things by Fumio Sasaki), or “Wash, dry and put it away, Goddammit” (Unf*ck Your Habitat by Rachel Hoffman) - Magnusson’s tone was warmer, chattier, full of family tales and the effect of small changes like installing a hook for keys. She even lets you keep stuffed toys. 

So I was primed for action. But in retrospect, I don’t know why I didn’t just say to friends, I’m going to get a really large drill, apply it to my forehead, and leave it there for three months.

I had imagined myself drifting through spotless, peaceful rooms with bookshelves with empty spaces. I had forgotten to factor in the bit that would get me there. I now know that decluttering takes focus, persistence, muscles, sweat, good judgement, and, worst of all, an alarming tolerance for hours and hours of tedium and decision-making.

An unpleasant little voice in your head never lets up: you bought those? You kept Amex statements from 2003? You’re donating those hardly worn boots that cost that much?

It’s sod’s law too that the moment you chuck something out, after keeping it unused and/or unappreciated for years, you realise you need it. The experts are sanguine. It happens, they say. It’s part of the decluttering process and there are far more compensations than downsie. They are right. Mostly. 

Don’t turn around!

In 2014, in Saigon as Susanne Thiebe tried to dodge the hundreds of scooters shooting up and down the thoroughfares, she had an epiphany. Thiebe, who runs LessMess in Sydney, realised there was a set of rules that, if followed with no deviation, would safely get her from one side of the street to the other. And these, she realised, are exactly the same rules, she tells one of her packed organising workshops one evening, that will get anyone through decluttering.

Decluttering is exhausting and brain-challenging. An encounter with a Saigon street gave Susanne Thiebe of LessMess a valuable set of insights.

“Have an idea where you want to go. 

“Check the current situation.

“Start.

“Focus on your path.

“Don’t stop.

“Keep your pace.

“Don’t turn around.

“You will reach the other side unharmed.”

A former interior architect, Thiebe, who migrated from Germany with her husband 22 years ago in 1995, has been in the decluttering business for 12 years. She now divides her time equally between clients, and doing her “sustainable living” workshops. So widespread is our problem with stuff that councils pay her to teach constituents. The one I attended, at Waverley Library in Sydney’s well-heeled east, had a wait list of 34, with one gatecrasher getting shirty at being turned away.

Thiebe manages to be both frightening and engagingly human at the same time. When we meet earlier at the Sydney Rowing Club, perched over the harbour in Abbotsford, Thiebe stresses that we are at our sustainable best – something to remember now recycling is proving to have its problems - not when we chuck with care but when we don’t buy things in the first place. “I declutter new things that are still in their bags all the time,” she says. 

She comments that when people are ready, the process can be very enjoyable. “But some think they’re ready when they’re not. I have to think how far can I push them. They don’t hire me” – at $92 an hour – “to be soft on them. 

“Decluttering,” she continues, “does give you joy. There are heart breaking stories. You get tears. What we do is life-changing. Suddenly, the kids are in time for school. The kitchen bench is accessible.”

But, she later warns her workshop attendees as they take notes, “You will lose the will to live somewhere along the line.”

Here’s why you persevere. “Everytime you see something in your home that is of no use to you, it’s a burden,” counsels Margot Krekeler-Obertopp of Peace of Mind Organising Services as we drink coffee in Bondi and tut over our stuff habits. Even she has had her revelations, once discovering she owned 50 pairs of black socks. “If someone had said that to me, I’d have said ‘you’re crazy! I have just enough.’”

Now she owns ten pairs. 

“If you start to make decisions, over time, about what should go, you get better at it, more decisive,” she says. “You also start to buy less.” 

But first, she says of her task, “you have to sit together with the client and ask: why do you want to change?”

Set the timer, pass the gin

By then, I have already embarked on my own decluttering. I know why I want to change. My excess stuff is overbearing, even as it broods in its neat storage. I’m about to work from home again and I want to be the one in charge. I’m also aware of the need for some döstädning of my own; freak accidents and surprise maladies are claiming people younger than me. 

Armed with my guides, time and a modicum of commonsense, I start with the easy stuff. Laundry and pantry cupboards. Clothing drawers. Bits of my wardrobe. As Thiebe counsels: just start with the second drawer in the kitchen. (A woman after one of her evening workshops began with her socks drawer. She texted Thiebe at 11pm, “I’ve found my mother-in-law’s jewellery!”)

As for time taken, the experts have different methods but no-one ever says that decluttering happens quickly. A wardrobe, Thiebe explains, will take four hours. Bedside tables will take an hour each; a chest of drawers two hours. 

“If you keep everything, nothing is important,” argues LessMess founder Susanne Thiebe.

I become fond after all of Hoffman who, between bossiness in Unf*ck Your Habitat, explains the system she calls 20/10 whereby you spend 20 minutes cleaning up and clearing away and then you take a ten minute break. 

Hoffman also kindly takes into account the depressed or miserable person and advises them, as they lie on their bed or couch, unable to move, to simply look at the closest surface, the nightstand or coffee table. “Set a timer for five minutes. Clear off as much of that surface as you can before the timer goes off. You can go right back to bed when you’re done.”

I love this scenario; I imagine even the nihilistic, ash-splattering Bernard Black fromBlack Booksbestirring himself. It also reminds me five minutes is enough to start on something ghastly, like the piled newspapers on the kitchen table. Just five minutes. Then go and recover somewhere nice. With gin. 

Within a few days, and with no gin at all, I power through the simple bits. I chuck, chuck, chuck, as I decide what is still useful and necessary, what to discard, what to donate and what I love, the four basic questions behind all decluttering. 

I delight in expiry dates; no need to think, just chuck. I discover – oh happy day – that even shampoo bottles now come with expiry dates. 

Soon, a quarter of my living room floor is taken up with duplicate kitchen utensils, unused platters, old china, redundant glasses, unworn clothes including an expensive top that made me look like a worm, cushions, baskets and books. A Vinnies truck will pick up most of it; the rest is waiting for a council pick-up. 

My utility cupboards and drawers, stripped of useless cleaners, faded spices, name cook books, and irritating gadgets, are gorgeously bare, miracles of efficiency. I have stuck to the mantra: everything has its proper place. There is now room for my food writer anthologies. 

But when I re-read my guides, I realise I have piked. My Uniqlo black camisole stash still sits at nine. I have 21 tea towels. I can already hear Tatsumi’s accented tones: “Decide how much of something you are likely to use … don’t allow your stock to exceed that.”

I have also broken one of the golden declutterer rules which is that you choose your area or category and you stick to it until done. Instead, daunted by my many stuffed bookshelves, I have been sneaking off in breaks to weed through them. It seemed easier. 

But I haven’t even done that correctly because I cannot bear to do what the organisers tell me I must, which is pull out every single book and put them on the floor. Only then are you allowed to decide, and put the survivors back on the shelves. 

Kondo says sternly, “You cannot judge whether or not a book really grabs you when it’s still on the shelf…. The criterion is, of course, whether or not it gives you a thrill of pleasure when you touch it.”

I know they are right but I have done that once – when my biggest bookshelves were being repainted – and I swore I would never, ever, ever do that horrible thing again. (Later, a lightbulb goes off in my dimness: I work out I can pull out the books a row at a time. Duh.) 

Meanwhile, I run my eye over my five shelves of biographies, from Milton to Jackie Kennedy. Will I ever read them to the end? How much have I read so far? Oh, that much, says a newly scornful voice inside my head, well then, off they go to Vinnies (one of the charities that still takes books).

My optimistic self rebels. I ponder the association between our stuff and our dreams. I probably won’t ever read every word in the biographies but I like the future fantasy that one day, some day, I will. This time, Kondo’s admonition that “some day will never come” goes through to the ‘keeper. 

As I wrestle with my hoarder self, seeing where it surfaces and where it doesn’t, and as I continue to read about decluttering, and go online to watch videos about discarding and folding and re-organising, I realise what a profoundly difficult, passionate, stressful relationship is the average human being’s love affair with stuff. 

Our paper habits

Guess what we most hate throwing out? Sorry, you’ll never guess. It’s old Telstra bills and the like. Despite most things now being recorded electronically somewhere, we keep those bits of paper – just in case. Anyhow, we worry, if chucked in the bin, what if they fell into the wrong, fraudulent hands? No, best to keep … and so the paper mountain grows. 

Carol Posener of Get Organized: “There’s just a lot more stuff to deal with now.”

Decades ago – when no-one had heard of identity theft - my father used to run our five person family from one drawer in the kitchen. I have four file drawers. 

When Carol Posener, who has a background in banking, started her business Get Organized in 1993, most of us didn’t even have mobile phones. “There’s just a lot more stuff to deal with now,” she explains.

Carol Martyn, Melbourne’s Dr DeClutter, suggests that many of us keep our old bills because our parents did and we don’t question our habits. Unless you need something for tax, her rule is keep your current bill, get rid of its predecessor. (For security, invest in a personal shredder and professional shredding services can do the big stuff.)

All which brings me to the climax of decluttering, the home office. It is to organising what Everest was to Sir Edmund Hillary. Terrifying but surmountable.

Mine is especially bad despite its winsome neatness. It is all sham and expensive cabinetry. The desk and surrounding shelves for a start are piled so high with storage containers, boxes, pen holders and books, I have started taking my laptop downstairs to the kitchen table. This is truly nuts. It’s time for Thiebe’s four buckets method. 

The first bucket is for things you want to keep in the area; the second, rubbish; third, things you could donate or give away; and finally things you want to keep, but somewhere-else. 

The buckets are vital says Thiebe. “They keep you physically and mentally in that room. You don’t go into another room. You don’t interrupt your train of thought.”

Astonishingly, it works. Thiebe, who insists people clear first, then organise where to put things – “they are two completely different kinds of concentration” -  has three more rules, for the “keep” buckets: keep only what you need, what is useful, and what you love. 

Two wooden ducks stop me cold. Obviously they’re neither useful nor necessary. Do I love them? My brain seizes.

They’re not particularly good versions of the antique decoy ducks you might see on a coffee table photographed for the cover of Architectural Digest. But I feel sorry for them. They have watched over me in times of crisis. Very reluctantly – I fear for their future – I place them in the donation bucket. (You can raid it later, I tell myself, which is exactly what I do six hours later, unable to abandon them.)

I have the same urge-to-keep when I chuck 95 per cent of the business cards I’ve accumulated and am left with six little emptied plastic containers and a pleasingly large silver cardboard box. Even before I can start squirrelling, I remember my Tatsumi: “You can say things like ‘I may use it sometime’...” No, she says firmly. “Boxes … simply accumulate, taking up space at the top of a cupboard.”

Be brave – get rid of things, she urges. 

It takes just one afternoon to fix my desk. 

Why symmetry appeals

In 2008, author Maggie Alderson was ahead of the curve with her fifth bestselling novel How To Break Your Own Heart. Its plotline revolves around the heroine discovering she has a natural bent for clutter-clearing when she takes on a wealthy friend’s disgustingly disordered home in London’s posh Holland Park. 

Author Maggie Alderson created a romantic plot around the art of decluttering.

“I’d found sorting out Kiki’s chaos strangely rewarding,” muses Amelia who then skilfully sorts out a series of overwhelming clutter problems caused by fear, lack of time and compulsive buying by extraordinarily rich people. It’s absurdly uplifting to read as Alderson channels our inner wannabe declutterer. 

As hoarding expert, Professor Mike Kyrios, Vice President & Executive Dean of the College of Education, Psychology & Social Work at South Australia’s Flinders University, later tells me when we talk about hoarding: “Order and control are important dimensions for all of us.”

Digging around, I discover some intriguing facts about the human desire for order. American research, reported in 2016 in Psychology Today, found that “people with clean houses are healthier than people with messy houses”. Women who complained of cluttered homes were more likely to complain of depression and fatigue and expressed higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. 

(Australian super declutterer Peter Walsh, now based in Los Angeles, was so intrigued by a change he noticed in some clients he wrote Lose The Clutter, Lose The Weight. He believes mess causes stress and then over-eating. Once de-messed, you also have enough time for good eating and exercising habits.)

That same Psychology Todayarticle, by Dr Ralph Ryback, argued our bodies are made of tens of thousands of highly organized systems. Why wouldn’t we crave the same things outside us that mirror the symmetry inside us and which prevent chaos?

Check before you chuck

This 21st century world poses a few problems for declutterers; some treasured dictums of Kondo and Co no longer hold. Take clothes. If you have clothes from two or more decades ago, or even one, don’t leap to chuck. 

A month ago, wondering what to wear with a white shirt and white jeans, I pulled out a naval-style blazer with gold trim, hidden between black jackets (seven, sorry, keep reading) and it was perfect. 

I had last worn it 25 years before. I promise you that’s true. It doesn’t even have those monster shoulders – and it has since gone to the dry cleaners to be my favourite new piece. 

When I inspected it, I realised how difficult it would be to find the quality of its cloth and manufacture today. The line that it’s okay to chuck because you can just buy something again if you need it, has not kept up with the inroads of the profit motive and fast fashion. Quality goes down, every year, even at the pricey end. As Dana Thomas warned in her 2007 exposéDeluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Lustre, describing the flimsiness of her new cotton pants from Prada: “In the name of profit – or to put it more bluntly, greed – luxury brands began to compromise their integrity”.

If anyone is producing a jacket today that is as well-made and beautiful as my admiral’s one, it’ll be a design house with a European name and customers far richer than I. 

Algorithms have also had their effect. Try buying a book that was published ten years ago in an Australian bookshop. Good luck. Increasingly, our retailers only stock what sells in big numbers. Try buying an address book with plenty of pages for each letter. It’s almost impossible now most people use digital organisers. 

All of which encourages the hoarder in me. I remember my widowered comfortably-off father who, as he grew older, couldn’t help stockpiling tinned groceries. A Depression-era child, it was instinctive. Perhaps I am doing the same thing. When I am poor, cold and 80 – almost guaranteed if I live that long given energy prices and the way the political parties seem intent on plundering our superannuation – I will still have my six good black cardigans. 

I have already heard from Melbourne psychologist Catherine Madigan that some hoarders keep plastic bags “just in case” because they’re being phased out. And Madigan has also commented to me on people who have so many books there will never be enough hours to read them and yet they still buy more books! (Ahem.) 

The hoarder in all of us

How close am I to tipping point?

Hoarding afflicts two to five per cent of Australians and is now a recognised mental disorder. Professor Kyrios speaks movingly of the hoarder’s plight. There are huge individual differences but insecurity often figures. “If your possessions make you feel safe and secure, wouldn’t you want to keep them?” he asks. “Each of their possessions has some symbolic meaning. Something might remind them of a time when they felt secure. Or [with newspapers], they might want the information it had. Having that sense of control is very important.”

If some of this sounds close to home, he is reassuring, saying there’s a little bit of the hoarder in all of us. The difference between a hoarder and the norm though is that with the latter, the possessions aren’t producing dangerous and unhygienic living conditions, aren’t stopping personal relationships, aren’t causing shame and embarrassment. 

The aim is not a home with no less, just less mess. Otherwise, we’re talking about a “symptom” says one psychologist. Photograph: Mikael Cho, on Unsplash

I get more comfort from a 2015 piece in the Atlantic,The Opposite of Hoarding, in which psychologist, Vivien Diller, asked “Do we just assume that decluttering is a good thing …. Being organised and throwing things out and being efficient is applauded in our society because it is productive. But you take somebody who cannot tolerate mess or cannot sit still without cleaning or throwing things out, and we’re talking about a symptom.”

Even Thiebe says her aim is not a home with no mess, just less mess. 

Still, I know I have one major category ahead of me – memorabilia, those things we keep and which most reveal our vulnerabilities. Kondo sweetly writes that if we are having trouble letting go of something, even when it doesn’t “spark joy”, it means we are either attached to the past or fear the future. 

I am lucky enough to have hundreds of letters from my writer mother – but do I need to keep her pressed handkerchiefs? Dad’s alarm clock? 

It also impossible to go through a home and not be reminded of, and moved by, the many items people have bought you. What makes the cut there? 

I don’t have children so at least I don’t have the Sophie’s choice of deciding what drawings to keep, a process one parent tells me was the worst, heart-tearing part of a recent downsizing.

Krekeler-Obertopp took a weekend to deal with her box of sentimental objects: letters, movie tickets, printed out emails. She took each thing in her hand to see how it made her feel. Some made her cry. She kept a cap belonging to her father and a letter he wrote to her when she left home at 20, but with the many other things she decided not to keep, it was enough to have relived the memories as she held them. “So then I could let them go. I felt so light.”

Be the curator of your life

Lisa Oshlack of Moving On advises clients that “you’re not bringing the person back by keeping their items”.

Thiebe is thoughtful: “I say it’s like being a curator in a museum, and an Australian museum, not one of those overstuffed Italian ones. Think about what makes sense to have. If you keep everything, nothing is important.”

Magnusson, who says she’s “between 80 and 100”, keeps a “Throw Away Box”: love letters, personal things, that are of no value to anyone else but of enormous value for her while she’s alive. “Once I am gone, the box” – no bigger than a shoebox - “can be destroyed.”

I am less trusting of people’s future snoopiness so I craftily come up with the “Die-with-me Envelope”. I will seal it and date it, and every time I re-open it to look at something I cherish, I will reseal it so that, at my death, it will be closed tight – unless I have suffered a heart attack while reading an old love letter – and the envelope can go at the same time as me. 

A new start in life, but let’s keep something of the old. Photograph: Joanna Kosinska, on Unsplash

Magnusson has downsized cleanly to a two room apartment in Stockholm but still has an enormous koala bear given to her by her late husband. When he brought it back from Australia, it needed its own airplane seat. Now it sits in her living room. 

In her bedroom is another stuffed toy, The Old Bear. She writes of the animals, “They had probably offered more joy and comfort than many human relatives.” Of course they had to be kept. 

Decluttering, says a friend who is rebuilding his life, “is a metaphor for your life. Every item, every book, every object you keep is a decision about what you want in your new life.” 

That is, what starts off as decluttering turns out to be far more profound. 

The Minimalists, two hip young Americans, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, who expound constantly on the subject in books, podcasts, tours and on their website, argue that shedding excess stuff delivers real freedom. 

Or as Kondo says, “When you put your house in order, you put your affairs and your past in order too ... You’ll have a new start in life.” 

This article was originally published in Good Weekend on May 26, 2018.