What Professional Organizers Know About Our Lives
December 18, 2024 at 12:05AMCluttered houses bursting at the seams with non-essential stuff may have started with the Victorians, but they’ve reached their apotheosis in late capitalism—and with them, the professional organizer. How’d we get to a point where a third of us have garages we can’t use because they’re so full of things that are not cars and we need to hire people to help us cope with our own possessions? Jennifer Wilson guides us through the history of clutter and its management empathetically, but not uncritically.
People hire organizers for all sorts of reasons, Lane notes. One organizer told Lane about a woman who summoned her to deal with the “paperwork chaos” from her family business. “But the minute I picked up one Post-it and moved it to this side,” the organizer recalled, “she lost it and she went into the kitchen and closed the door.” In such cases, the organizer said, she recommends that clients seek out a mental-health professional.
Lane is more interested in those clients for whom the hiring of an organizer feels symptomatic of larger social ills. She has found people across the class strata who are overworked, and underwhelmed with what they have to show for it. They are not just too busy to organize their things; they are too busy to live their lives. Instead of writing a novel, they buy a Moleskine. Instead of travelling, they accrue travel points. They acquire books on decluttering that collect dust—somewhere. (They’ll hire a professional organizer to find them.) In the early years of the profession, some organizers called themselves clutter therapists. Lane argues that professional organizers could be better described as “therapists of capitalism.” They provide, she writes, “a particular kind of therapeutic relationship suited to people trying to manage their copious belongings while also working through their feelings around their stuff and the labor it demands of them.”
And note, Kondo-ites; you may be undermining yourselves:
Lay everything out and decide from afar what to discard; the idea is that, once you touch something, you’re more likely to keep it. This is what has been described as “tactile sympathy.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/12/17/what-professional-organizers-know-about-our-lives/
via IFTTT
Watch