A Nice Word For Hoarding

After reading this article it made me think of the fact that I never considered myself a very organized person.  My most common thing to do with   clutter which I discovered bugs me more than I ever remember, I revert to trying to tidy it and put it a nice basket or box and off it goes till a look at it again in a couple of years. When you have a house and  only 2 people living in it, it`s easy to do this.   I now think I`m organized again.  But why am I putting  things in  an attractive container to say I`m an organized person, when I should really look at why I still have it around in my life. 

These guys have really made an impact over the last months on my relationship to stuff in my life and my buying habits.  Most importantly was the fact that I defined who I was by what I owned instead of what I did and my experiences. 


This essay was written by The Minimalist :

We need to start thinking of organizing as a dirty word. It is, in fact, a sneaky little profanity—a pernicious little booger—who keeps us from simplifying our lives.

Our televisions would have us believe that there’s a battle being fought on the consumption continuum, a battle between the organizers and the hoarders. And from our couches it’s hard to see who’s winning.

We’d like to posit to you, however, that these two sides are working together, colluding to achieve the same thing: the accumulation of more stuff. One side—the hoarders—does so overtly, leaving everything out in the open, making them easy targets to sneer at. But the other side—the sneaky organizers—are more covert, more systematic, more devious when it comes to the accumulation of stuff. Ultimately, though, organizing is nothing more than well-planned hoarding.

Sure, both sides go about their hoarding differently, but the end result is not appreciably different. Whether our homes are strewn with wall-to-wall material possessions or we have a complex ordinal item-dispersal system, color-coded and alphabetized, we’re still not dealing with the real problem.

No matter how organized we are, we must continue to care for the stuff we organize, cleaning and sorting our methodically structured belongings. When we get rid of the superfluous stuff, however, we can focus on life’s more important aspects. Said another way: We can spend the day focusing on our health, on our relationships, on pursuing what we’re passionate about. Or we could, of course, reorganize our basement again.

Once the excess stuff is out of the way, staying organized is much easier anyway.


Alice