Alright, here are some thoughts revisiting Konmari this time around:
Clutter = scarcity mindset + abundant resources
I grew up in a messy, messy home. Like I’m pretty sure at least one of my close childhood friends has actually never been in my room because it was so.fucking.messy. I’ve probably never seen the whole floor.
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot though for quite a while is the fact that the things that are holding me back might be the same things that have held my parents back, that it’s not just that I’m becoming like them, but that they’re similar to me.
(Like there’s a lot about how neglected mental health is for the kids of immigrants, but what about the mental health issues that generation had that just never got names?)
ANYWAY, I realized that I always resented the messy messy house and as a response, sometimes went in the opposite direction of wanting to have nothing.
But obviously that’s a luxury. It’s a luxury of an upbringing where there was always enough, while my parents’ generation grew up needing to hold onto everything.
But then they had the opportunity to finally afford more things, and so that need to hold onto everything met the ability to *finally* buy everything and BOOM clutter.
So while I work through my stuff, both figurative and literal, I’m trying really, really hard to turn resentment into compassion.
Can efficiency be the enemy of resilience?
Sooo ruthless efficiency has fucked us over in so many ways and is taking so many creatures down with us.
For instance, here’s a story about how so many animals that have been raised for slaughter will now be dumped in landfills because there’s so little wiggle room in terms of how these facilities are set up.
These economic considerations also led us to have less wiggle room in human hospital capacity here in the United States as opposed to other nations (there’s another article that did a better job explaining it that I need to find, but here’s one with a little info on how we compare).
How can we use this in our real lives? Well I feel like a question that I see going into a lot of personal finance people is about whether to hold onto cash or invest. I was usually on the side of, well, isn’t it better to invest that money so it’s doing the most? But I’m coming to see that having that cash cushion is super important.
(It’d be great if the same shame that we apply to individuals in having enough for a rainy day applied to businesses though…)
But also it has me thinking more about how COVID could impact my own relationship with stuff moving forward. Like I used to like to have just what I needed without stocking up, but I feel like I’m going to end up learning towards keeping more things on hand now just in case.
I’ve also been feeling super lucky to have a bunch of stuff around that I probably should have let go of a long time ago, which I worry will reinforce the idea that I should keep things “just in case.”
I think I need to keep reminding myself that there’s a psychic cost to keeping stuff around, that the cost of replacing it might be less, but that’s also assuming a level of financial security that seems pretty uncertain right now.
Even asking myself “What’s the worst case scenario?” seems a bit iffy given how this time has shown that there’s so many shitty things possible that might have been difficult to imagine before.
For a while, I was training myself to be better about not eating past being full just because it was on my plate, and I did find it helpful to think about the fact that that food is wasted if it makes my belly too full. Maybe that’s the angle I’m going to need to go with letting go of stuff as well…
Limited space = limited stuff
It was so easy to have less stuff in a tiny apartment.
So many suburban homes are just too fucking big.
And we’re probably really tempted to just fill up all that space, just like we want to eat more if we’re eating off of bigger plates or just like meetings will expand to fill the time allotted to them.
I’m going to try to use that to ensure that my “containers” are smaller, that I don’t have unneeded storage thingies, that there are fewer tempting surfaces for things to pile up.