Decluttering will not solve our problems

It’s half junk and half treasure. But I’ve gotten so used to the mix that I haven’t thrown anything out in years — and I’ve found that I prefer it that way.

Through years of excitable media coverage, we’ve convinced ourselves that decluttering can solve all kinds of problems, from bad sleep to poor mental health to relationship conflict. Recently, however, there’s been a backlash from environmentalists, feminists, design maximalists and book lovers. It’s understandable we would cling to decluttering, a practice with deep spiritual and historic roots. But there may be other ways to interact with our belongings that would spark a more lasting joy, and be better for the planet and the humans around us as well.

Our recent burst of decluttering enthusiasm began in 2014, with the U.S. release of Marie Kondo’s book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” and ramped up after her Netflix show came out in 2019. Kondo’s marriage of Shinto philosophy and Japanese design proved irresistible to Western audiences, overwhelming thrift stores nationwide as people rushed to shed things that didn’t “spark joy.” Early in the pandemic, people stuck at home and trying to create space to work and educate their kids launched a new wave of decluttering efforts and a surge of work for junk-haulers and charity donation sites.

Decluttering’s appeal can feel very modern, a timely response to late capitalism’s mass production of objects not destined for a long life. But decluttering, as a concept and a ritual, is much older. In a 2021 essay in the International Journal of Practical Theology, Christiane Lang Hearlson, a religion professor at Villanova University, argued that decluttering is in line with spiritual practices dating back millennia, like repentance, detachment from worldly things and purgation. “The idea with purging is to send out of yourself or your life the things that are preventing you from living in a whole way, in a good way,” Hearlson told me. Noting modern-day language around “purging” or “detoxing” from clutter, she went on, “It’s the same idea: … there’s something toxic in my life and I need to send it away.”

This resonance with deep spiritual tradition must explain some part of why decluttering can be so satisfying: An orderly home feels like an orderly soul. But the concept of “purging” has some very dark undertones — bulimia, shame-based purity cultures, genocide — and those undertones echo today as well. As is true for purity culture and eating disorders, decluttering relies primarily on female labor and female shame: Women do the bulk of decluttering, and are most harshly judged for an inadequate effort.

“Generally, women are still viewed as the household manager,” said Jill Yavorsky, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who studies gender and housework. “And so ultimately, unfortunately, we still see that women bear the responsibility of making sure their house is very clean and organized.” In fact, she pointed out, if men carried an equal housework load in heterosexual marriages, decluttering might not even be necessary because not as much stuff would build up: “The reason that clutter builds up is because there is more work than one person can handle.”

The cycle of bingeing and purging that often defines our relationship with stuff can be destructive on an environmental level as well. Donating to charity can feel like the more ethical, sustainable approach to decluttering, vs. just chucking everything away. But thrift stores, stretched thin by our decluttering obsession, are unable to process items that come to them indiscriminately, and many donations end up in landfills anyway. In 2021, Goodwill issued a public plea for people to stop dumping trash items (broken furniture, batteries, stained or torn clothing) that were getting swept up in pandemic decluttering efforts and dropped off at their locations. The pressure to eliminate stuff from our lives distracts us from thinking about where it actually goes when we’re done with it, or making a more responsible plan for its future.

Although the decluttering movement can sometimes pathologize a close relationship with objects, our connection with our belongings is not to be dismissed. It’s no coincidence that decluttering feels like emotional as well as physical labor, unlike purely physical chores such as vacuuming or emptying the dishwasher: We imbue our stuff with memories and meaning. Research into the human connection with the inanimate reveals an intense and complex bond. People who are uncertain about their human attachments can form extra strong attachments with comforting objects, sometimes anthropomorphizing them in the process. And people don’t just humanize their things; they view them as an extension of themselves. In a 2012 neuroscience study, the brain region that activates when people are processing things related to the self was shown to also be activated by things belonging to the self.

Sometimes this bond with our stuff can feel toxic — our dependence on personal technology, our addiction to buying cheap, environmentally destructive clothing and plastic items. But it’s not the connection that’s toxic; it’s just that our desire for connection is being constantly exploited. The connection itself can verge on the spiritual. Hearlson recalled religious sacraments, noting that for all of them, regardless of tradition, “it’s a human practice, but they’re also material objects. The bread, the wine, the water. And each of them, it’s like you’re supposed to interact with it in a way that reminds you both that it’s revealing something about God to you and … that everything else in the world bears that divine presence.” My desktop collection of obsolescent chargers may not obviously connect me with the divine. But I do, even as an atheist, feel a thrumming of life around my messy desk, a large part of why (or at least my new excuse for why) I rarely tidy it.

Decluttering is, fundamentally, an individual response to systemic problems: mass production of poorly constructed items, a culture that is both acquisitive and then intensely judgmental about other people’s acquisitions, gender-based inequalities in the division of labor. Being more thoughtful about the objects we choose to bring into our homes, then considering their long-term future instead of disposing of them irresponsibly — in other words, treating them as having emotional, even divine presence — is not going to solve these problems. (Among other things, it’s still likely to be primarily women making the effort to be thoughtful. Annie Hirschhorn of Life in Place organizing, a D.C.-area company that specializes in environmentally friendly methods for divesting people of their unwanted items, tells me that 95 percent of her clients are women.)

But at the very least, that attention, care and forgiveness — toward our belongings, toward ourselves — could put us in a gentler place, better equipped to meet the challenges of a crowded house and a crowded planet.