Tidying up

We all cling to Things beyond their usefulness. We waste untrivial amounts of our time, effort, and personal storage space so as to not Waste the material goods around us.
Sometimes this is simple sunk cost dissonance. We expended resources to acquire this thing, therefore it must have Value.
Some justify this clinging as a kind of anti-consumerism, rejecting the material waste of our single-use disposable economies.
But these ideas are just as materialistic and self defeating as the notions that they oppose. They implicitly assert that Things have intrinsic value beyond their utility, and that they must not only be acquired, but kept, even at great cost.
We are conditioned by the dominant capitalist ideology to treat price and value as interchangeable measures. That if something is expensive, it must be good. That all resources exist to be exploited. And that if something exists, it must be worth having. Outside of this frame is the heretical idea that some things, even shiny, new, expensive things, have no Value to us.
Not everything we possess must spark joy, there are other reasons to have things. But often we keep things in our lives not because they have any utility, or because we have an emotional connection to the them, but only because of a vague, unexamined notion that it would be Wrong to dispose of them.
Working in warehouses for half of my life has taught me that keeping things always comes at a cost. And that keeping more things makes that cost rise exponentially, not linearly.
Living through poverty taught me how little in life is actually essential, how much of this I could lose and still be happy. How, indeed, having less of some things might make me more happy.
We shouldn’t be irresponsible about how we dispose of things, sure. Recycle, donate, tap into circular economies in our community. But recognise that doing these things also has a cost. And sometimes we only hold on to things because we don’t have the personal resources to get rid of them optimally. It’s ok to take the easy route sometimes. We are never fully responsible for our material circumstances and a cluttered house does not have to be one of our penances for living under the almighty dollar. We have enough of those already.
Perhaps the best practice is to reduce our acquisition of things with limited usefulness. When we choose to acquire something, we can think about not just the monetary cost, but the other more subtle costs of Having a Thing. Where and how will we store it? How much space will it take up? How much will we need to move it around? How long will we keep it? How hard will it be to get rid of? Is it really worth it?
We won’t need to tidy it up if it’s not there.