Untidying up: Making the case for why clutter is good for you

WASHINGTON: What we often dismiss as “clutter” — all those non-essential, often oddball objects that a third-party observer might write off as needless junk — can actually be good for us. The villainization of clutter has perhaps been most insistently pushed by the “tidying up” guru Marie Kondo. Its latest iteration pairs a yearning to neaten up pandemic cocoons — crowded with stuff thanks to a couple of years of online shopping as a monotony-fighting tactic — with a trendy take on minimalism that equates the blank-space aesthetic with mindful sophistication. But the underlying vibe is a suspiciously familiar one. Yet again, minimalist scolds insist that we should repent of our materialist ways: Things, they are forever lecturing, just aren’t that important.

It seems hard to disagree. Yet it’s also hard to square that pronouncement with, to pick a recent example, the frenzy of attention around the auction of Joan Didion’s personal effects — which in addition to books and artworks included a box of loose buttons, a bunch of seashells and pebbles, a “miscellaneous group of eyewear,” and other items that one observer bluntly described as “junk,” and that even the auction house called “ephemera.” The highbrow musing around this focused almost exclusively on the high prices fetched ($10,000 for the collection of specs, $27,000 for a single pair of Celine sunglasses) or the possible motives of those who paid them. But what we might reflect on instead is the fact that she kept this stuff in the first place. Nobody demanded to know why Didion didn’t declutter — whether, say, all those paperweights (there were at least five) truly “sparked joy.”

There is, it turns out, a counter to the decluttering imperative — inevitably given the unattractive label “cluttercore” — that frankly celebrates the human relationship to stuff. Search YouTube and you’ll find video tours of (mostly young) people’s extensive and colorful collections of stuffed toys, figurines, gewgaws and knickknacks. TikTok clips tagged #cluttercore, sharing what the home-design site Apartment Therapy described as “organized, nostalgic chaos,” have more than 80 million views.

As one cluttercore advocate argued to Architectural Digest, social media has fostered aesthetics that tend toward the neutral, the acceptable, the blandly, conformingly tasteful: an endless series of unobjectionable tidy backdrops “devoid of personal style.” Cluttercore, in contrast, wholly depends on idiosyncratic personality and rarefied interests, and thus “celebrates radical individuality.” In an era when imitation is everywhere, Architectural Digest asserted, so-called clutter represents something that “can’t be duplicated.”

Admittedly, some iterations of cluttercore verge on a candy-coloured version of straight-up hoarding, and obviously I am not defending mindless accumulation any more than a craft cocktail aficionado would defend binge drinking. But the point about individuality not only rings true; it hints at the reasons the instinct to appreciate clutter is correct, natural and frequently underrated.

These personal links between meaning and objects certainly challenge the familiar critique that material attachment is a function of hollow status signaling. Describing cluttercore as something for “those who have loads of items that each hold their own story,” Apartment Therapy added the crucial point that this means “things they love, no matter how wacky, minuscule, or unimportant it may seem to someone on the outside.”