Pearls: Decluttering in the future
EDITORIAL MUG: Matt Pearl
There’s a market out there for a certain type of holiday gadget, if someone smarter than I am would get around to inventing it.
I call it the Stuff Reducer 3000, and here’s how it works. It charges all day at a power station, just like those little robotic vacuum cleaners—but at night, it roams around your home and collect items that you haven’t used in a while.
Not too many of them—just one or two a night. The Stuff Reducer 3000 places the collected items in a bin, and the gadget includes a subscription service, where a truck comes by once a month and hauls it all away to be given to the needy—or incinerated, as the case might often be.
You get this handy helper for Christmas, and by March you begin to believe that you’re improving your housekeeping. By July, you realize you have room for an end table. Thanksgiving rolls around and it’s time for guest, and Wow!—you don’t have nearly so much clutter control that you need to perform.
By Christmas, it breaks down and beg Santa Claus for another one.
Sadly, this incredible gadget has yet to hit the market for Cyber Monday. And when it does, you might have to pay a sizeable fee to own your model and pay for that truck to come pick up your discarded items. But there might be a fix for the problem.
Just temporarily, you could go through your house and pick out two or three things you haven’t used in years, put them in the trunk of your car (or the bed of your pickup), and then repeat the process tomorrow. Once a week, you hit the goodwill with some of it, and the trash pile with the rest.
There are a few disadvantages to this plan. The robotic collector does not have emotional ties to your possessions, and you probably do. You will have to make decisions and have honest conversations with yourself about whether you really need to keep that wheelbarrow that’s missing a wheel, or that Santa figurine that needs its head glued back to its body every Christmas. Only you can make those calls.
And to really keep the process working and set yourself ahead of your clutter, there’s really another step involved. If you go to a department store and come home with 15 items, you really need to go around the house and find 15 things to discard—all in addition to your two or three items you picked to throw out for the day.
Warning: I have been advised that in the process of systematic decluttering, you might find yourself developing the tendency to detach from your stuff. While I have never conducted a fully comprehensive, wall-to-wall declutter of my own home, I have noticed that when I go to straighten up my desk or make room for something I just bought that once I start getting rid of a few things, it gets easier and easier to part with extra belongings.
If you don’t watch yourself, you might end up with room in drawers and cabinets. You might begin to think things like, ‘There’s room for a coatrack there,’ or ‘I can put that new pair of shoes inside the actual closet.’ Shelves will begin to have open spots for items to display—but you’ll be reluctant to put some junky knickknack up there to fill space. You’ve learned too much from your decluttering journey, and you will never make that mistake again.
Well, I will do my best to keep you updated on the Stuff Reducer 3000, but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that one to show up in your Facebook advertisements just yet. You better err on the safe side and start getting rid of two or three things a day—that way when the robo-decluttering revolution begins, you’ll already be on the frontier of home organizing.
Matt Pearl owns and operates The Tri-County Ledger.
