Category Archives: General Interest

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.

January is the month where all sorts of storage containers abound in stores. With Christmas over and the new year, most of us want a fresh start. I didn’t need new containers or some fancy new organizational system when I embarked on decluttering my house a few weeks ago- I needed a new mindset.

Moving around the Army forced me to declutter on a regular basis, but over 30 years in this house and way too much stuff has taken up permanent residence here.

The youngest of my four kids is in her late 30s and two of my grandkids are adults. My closets and garage are cluttered up with stuff . The garage, has always been my family’s home for everyone’s extra stuff.  In 30 years, our garage has never been the home of our car.

Two weeks ago, as I was sorting through a box of other people’s stuff that was still in the garage, I came across some plastic coffee mugs with lids, that judging from the designs on them, I believe they belonged to my two adult sons. As indecision hit and I was debating getting rid of them or should I message my sons and ask if they still want them, a moment of clarity hit me. I was wasting more time on a decision about plastic coffee mugs, which I will never use and both of my sons use much fancier metal coffee mugs now.  My sons have probably never spent a moment thinking about these left behind, plastic coffee mugs. Tossing them felt good.  Another discard was a Karate Kid thermos from a lunch box and a California Raisins lunch box with the original thermos in it. Those went in a box for Goodwill, that actually made it to Goodwill, instead of the usual, sitting around for weeks (or longer).

Before the thought crosses your mind about, oh what if that lunchbox is a collectible, during my organizational idea browsing I came across an explanation of sunk cost fallacy, where we hold on to items even when the items are no longer useful to us and in many cases cause us considerable distress, in the form of clutter that ends up being moved and shuffled about. We assess a value to these items based on the amount of money we spent buying them. Most people greatly overestimate the resale value of items and don’t consider the the time incurred reselling or setting up a yard sale takes. We also never consider the time we spend relocating unused items around our home and even moving them from home to home. Sunk cost means accepting the money was spent and is irretrievable – and the item has no real value if it’s just sitting here taking up space. An item has no value to your life if it’s just creating more clutter in your home.

In 2020, the pandemic and civil unrest prodded me to become more of a prepper than I had always been. I have always had plenty of extra food and my kids would quip about there was enough food in our house to last a year. While that’s an exaggeration, we always had a lot of food. While I still believe it’s good to have food and emergency supplies, I want to rethink the amount and strike a reasonable middle ground between Doomsday prepper level prepared and not prepared at all. Most of the online prepper stuff is fear-based and while there are real and serious potential threats of all sorts from weather events to hostile foreign threats to our critical infrastructure, having too much stuff piled up might impede in a crisis rather than help.

Once I stopped thinking about the value of all this stuff, all the imaginary uses, and worrying about being wasteful and throwing “good stuff” in the trash, it has become easier and easier to make decisions and get rid of things. I don’t want my garage looking like a junk yard anymore.

My neighbor helped me sort some items and she guided me to better decisions. Her husband told her to tell me he’d be happy to take any of my late husband’s guns off my hands. She related this as I had just picked up an old broken BB gun in the garage. These neighbors didn’t know my late husband. My husband owned one handgun and wasn’t into guns. He considered them his work gear and he wasn’t a hunter. He liked doing home repair and fix-it projects and had a lot of saws and tools. One of my sons took the handgun and most of the tools before my husband even passed away, because my husband told him he should take them. However, I do have a lot of old paint cans that I need to dispose of and fortunately, my county has a quarterly drop off for those kind of items coming up in a couple weeks.

Bringing up guns, is a little off the topic of this post, but I told my neighbor who was helping me declutter about a young man in our neighborhood, who has had a lot of problems with the law, coming to my door one day last year. He told me someone tried to break into their house in broad daylight and he asked me if I can protect myself. It was a bizarre question. I asked him what he did when this person supposedly tried to break in and he said he pulled out his gun. I admit, I lied and told him I have a gun and can defend myself and am fine. He persisted and questioned me if I know how to use it and he said you have to train and wanted to know if I go to the range to practice. I told him I was in the Army and do know how to use it. I haven’t handled a firearm since I got out of the Army in 1981, except when I worked at Walmart and handled some sales of firearms. I was in a management position and we were required to hand carry the purchased firearm to the door and then hand it to the customer. I have never liked handling firearms.

With that neighbor, he has had numerous run ins with the law, so while I wasn’t scared of him, since I’ve known him since he was a kid, I was just perplexed at his persistent questions. I do possess an arsenal of water pistols that I use regularly on two very bad cats, who climb on everything and won’t listen.

Getting back on topic, that broken BB gun went in the trash too and open space being reclaimed, inch by inch, feels liberating. So far, I haven’t regretted or missed a single thing. Before claiming victory over my packrat habits, I haven’t gotten to decluttering my craft and sewing room, where I really do find uses for many items that have been here decades and I am not getting rid of my books. Since I was a kid I dreamed of having my own home library. I’ve worked hard to acquire that. I don’t have space for a massive home library, but mine can still grow a little bit and I would feel like a part of me was ripped away without my books.

This is the earliest book I received for Christmas in 1964 when I was 4 years old. My mother wrote my name and the date inside the cover. Several years ago, I stitched the signature back together and retaped the cover back on. A signature is a group of pages stitched together in books. If you look at a book where the pages meet the spine, you will see groups of pages sewn together, which are then attached to the cover – those groupings of pages are called signatures. I wish I had done a better job on the taping, but it replaced the white bandage tape I had used as a kid to tape it back together.

My books are staying.