Complex Numbers

Another Fine Mess

Finally, some vindication.

    What If You Just Didn’t Clean That Up?  

Good news: America has officially entered its messy-house era.

Like I needed to wait for permission.

Then, this past week, Marie Kondo herself admitted her house is a mess now that she has kids, a statement that was received like a divine pardon by mothers the world over.

I guess the mess finally sparked joy.

I’ve been waiting for this change for a long time, not because I love a mess, but because I have always had conflicted feelings about the moral supremacy of cleanliness.

I want to make a distinction here that the article kind of glosses over, at least at first: there's a difference between mess and clutter. Mess, to me, is not cleaning up your cat's puke, having pizza boxes lying around, or leaving dirty dishes in the sink. There are reasons to deal with messes that have nothing to do with morality, such as minimizing bug infestations. Clutter, on the other hand, is just stuff being organized in non-traditional ways.

The problem comes in when the clutter gets in the way of cleaning up the mess.

...mess is a sign of minds engaged in more important pursuits than tidying up.

And that used to be my excuse.

We need our ideas about cleanliness to catch up with reality, because they are stuck in the mid-20th century, when most women didn’t work outside the home.

We also need to stop using staged real-estate ads as an ideal.

Women were responsible for housekeeping for thousands of years, up until just a few decades ago.

[citation needed]

For two-income families who can’t afford a full-time housekeeper, maybe caring less is where the solution lies.

There is, indeed, a great deal of freedom when you finally stop giving a shit.

I know there are some readers who bristle at this because it smacks of lowering one’s standards to accommodate masculine laziness.

The messiest people I have ever known, not excluding myself, were my first wife, and a woman I dated for a while in the 90s. I freely admit that I'm lazy, but compared to them, I'm a cleanaholic.

Valid point!

No, it's not, you sexist sow. The neatest person I know was a guy who lived in my spare room for a couple of years.

Cleanliness has historically been about well-being, peace, and, to a lesser extent, health. But “clean” and “dirty” are also categories dreamed up by social groups.

I'll also point out that there's an element of privilege involved.

My parents came of age during the Great Depression. That period, at least in the US, left scars on the people who lived through it. They hated to throw anything away, on the grounds that it might come in handy one day. It's a scarcity mindset. If you keep throwing your stuff out, then you have to keep buying more stuff to replace it later on. This only helps merchants, and I'm pretty sure that's why they keep promoting minimalism: it's basically a marketing ploy.

Best to not buy all that shit in the first place, but obviously, the marketers don't go in that direction.

Meanwhile, product marketing has convinced us that we have to clean obsessively for our health. I can report from extensive first-hand experience that things can get quite filthy before people are actually getting sick.

And that's the other marketing push: buy these cleaning products to improve your life!

In conclusion, while I have some issues with the way the article is presented (not just the stereotyped gender roles, but way too many mentions of DikDok), I appreciate that someone else understands the value of not living in a perfectly curated space. It's one less thing to be neurotic about in a society that tries to make us neurotic about everything.