Falling for advertising again

I’ve written about our American culture of acquiring too much stuff before, in fact, in 2013 I wrote a blog post titled, Stuff, where I shared my thoughts working in a Walmart store through the annual Black Friday craziness. I wrote:

“As I watched the throng race to and fro, in mindless pursuit of stuff, well I thought about all the stuff I already have and decided I need to start paring down rather than acquiring more stuff,  which I don’t need and start worrying about the stuff  in my life that does matter.  I thought we would be so much better off if we put this kind of energy into the stuff in our lives that should matter, our relationships, helping others, trying to improve ourselves.”

There’s a silver lining to Americans being big consumers – we’re also big on supporting the “helping” industry, donating vast amounts of time and money to every cause under the sun. The “GoFundMe” culture wouldn’t thrive in many other parts of the world. It wasn’t the government that jumped into high gear to aid flood victims last year after Hurricane Helene; it was ordinary citizens. So, despite that we buy too much useless stuff, I think, Americans still have plenty of the right stuff in our hearts and that gives me hope for our country.

I’m still working on decluttering my house and I want to continue this process as a habit, rather than once and done thing. I know I’ll continue to accumulate more stuff, even though I’m trying to be more mindful about frivolous spending. There assuredly will always be some craft or needlework items or some books that catch my eye and I succumb to temptation.

Heck, with all these “algorithms” running our lives, I began this decluttering effort watching a few decluttering YouTube videos and a few episodes of the show, Hoarders. As algorithms work, my YouTube quickly filled up with decluttering, organization, minimalism and housecleaning videos.

I learned about Swedish death cleaning, a form of permanent organization, as people get older, where they pare down to the things they really need or want to keep, so their loved ones aren’t left with mountains of clutter to clean up when they die. This idea was popularized in a book, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How To Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter, by Margareta Magnusson. At first this sounds morbid, but living in a house with 30 years of accumulated stuff, where I didn’t zealously declutter – my closets are full and my garage is a storage place for homeless junk. I know I need to get rid of stuff and I’m making progress.

I also remember when my packrat grandmother died. I developed my love of five and dime stores shopping with her and being amazed at all the stuff she had. She had many lovely dishes and knickknack items, along with all the cheap junk, but one of my most vivid memories of family going through her house after she died was one of my uncles. He was so angry about the hundreds upon hundreds of plastic containers (many still in the package freezer containers) that he threw many boxes of them over the bank by her house and said he’d bring his backhoe and bury them.

At the time I didn’t understand why her hoard of plastic containers made him so angry, but I get it now. Being my grandmother’s daughter, my mother was overly zealous about decluttering, just like my youngest daughter, being my daughter, doesn’t want to hear about whether an item sparks joy, as the popular organizer, Marie Kondo, advises using to decide what items to keep. My daughter tossing stuff sounds like Suze Orman’s judgmental twin. Orman, a famous financial advisor, would tell callers they couldn’t afford things they were talking about buying, but my daughter is the follow-up act to tell you you wasted the money and now it’s time to just get rid of this junk you aren’t using. She doesn’t want to hear about all the “maybe someday” possibilities. She’s a hardline – toss it and her house is organized, very functional, and looks beautiful. The thing she talks about is how quickly she can clean it and she focuses on that in her decision-making.

The other thing about these “algorithms” is I, like most people, usually click on things that show up in my feed rather than do specific searches constantly. So, naturally, this being America, a lot of the decluttering videos are sponsored, so the content creator is pitching products and YouTube has ads. In this new YouTube genre of decluttering/organization viewing, I succumbed to buying, not only a Shark VACMOP, on sale for $49, I purchased some super-duper, reusable Swedish dishcloths for $12.45 on Amazon.

What could be more American… buying Swedish dishcloths to work on Swedish death cleaning to get rid of more junk you don’t need… In my defense, I watched several YouTube content creators go on and on about the horrors and waste of using so many paper towels and these Swedish dishcloths were hyped as an alternative to paper towels. I am using one as a dishcloth and like it actually, but…

The truth is I like disposable paper towels, just like I have no desire to ever go back to the olden days of using cloth hankies. As a kid, there were two chores I loved – hanging laundry on the clothesline outside and ironing. My mother always had a lot of stuff that “needed” to be ironed, including my father’s boxer underpants and cloth hankies he always carried. My mother had piles of pretty hankies that ladies carried in their purse too. I ironed plenty of hankies, but considering my allergies and the volume of tissues I go through, there’s no way I want a pile of soiled hankies sitting around… and these days, I have very few things I iron.

The moral of this sad tale is I realize I’m a sucker for advertising and vow to try to do better.