'The Clutter Cure's Illusory Joy'

Some interesting nuggets in this op-ed in today's NYT, though I don't necessarily care about the main premise, something about how we still won't fill that void even after we finally tidy up our houses.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/opinion/the-clutter-cures-illusory-joy.html

The nuggets:

• A few years ago - she dates it as 25 years ago - shit got really cheap, and the amount of shit that each of us owns skyrocketed. I agree with this.
• There's a bit of a pushback to this now, where people are proud not to buy things. I agree with this, too. Remember CDs? Remember DVDs? Remember books? Remember fucking calculators?
• Robberies have declined because it's not worth it any more when you can just buy a nice TV for $150. This is interesting, too. My wife is always worried about home break-ins. We live in a reasonably nice house in a reasonably nice neighborhood. I ask her: "What the hell would they steal?" Seriously. I don't know what we have that is valuable enough to go through the effort to haul out of there. A bunch of toys, I guess.
• I also think this is a perceptive passage: But the more stuff I shed, the more I realize that we de-clutterers feel besieged by more than just our possessions. We’re also overwhelmed by the intangible detritus of 21st-century life: unreturned emails; unprinted family photos; the ceaseless ticker of other people’s lives on Facebook; the heightened demands of parenting; and the suspicion that we’ll be checking our phones every 15 minutes, forever.

It does feel like that. I wonder if it's starting to get tiresome. Just two nights ago, I said to my wife, "Can you believe that just five years ago, I used to go full weekends where I couldn't access work email even if I wanted to?

Anyway, clutter. It sucks, especially when you have little kids.

 

To that last point, the sense that I'm not keeping up with SOMETHING IMPORTANT is a nagging feeling that hounds me every day. I don't remember it being like that five years ago, and I've always been a worrier.

 

And I am about as non-materialistic as anyone you've never met.

 

At least there is less to keep up with on SJ nowadays. That's progress.

 

Will need to read the piece but on the break-ins.

My house was broken into one night about 10 years ago. I had been out covering a game, then went to the office and rolled in a little after 1.

When I got home, I walked in and down the hall I went until I saw that the back door, that was in the living room, was open. At first I thought that I had left the door open by mistake, then I realized that the door frame was busted because the door had been kicked in.

They hadn't taken anything of real value. A beer mug full of change was gone but they had gone through the house. They also took my Palm Pilot because I was a dipshit then and spent money on such a worthless thing.

Cops came and made a production of dusting for fingerprints, etc. Anyway, they told me then that the robbers were likely looking for jewelry, guns and cash. They also take spare sets of keys to gain access to your house or car.

But didn't in my case.

So you may think you have nothing of value, besides toys, but you do. And, maybe more importantly, getting robbed takes away your sense of security. I slept on my couch with a baseball bat besides me and it sped up my departure plan as I had been looking for another job in another state but instead of being gone in a few months, I was out of there in six weeks.

 

At first quick glance of thread title I thought that it was a Bear fan's lament

"The Cutler Cure's Illusory Joy"

 

I'm not saying it never happens, Jay. But it apparently happens less than it used to. People not carrying cash has also been posited as one reason that violent crime is down in big cities. Just no incentive to robbing the Waynes after a Broadway show any more.

I don't have guns. We don't have any jewelry worth much that we don't wear on our fingers at all times. And there's unlikely to be more than $10 in cash in the house at any given moment.

 

Haha. That's what I thought too!

The actual article sounds interesting.

 

We have a nice house in a nice neighborhood and live next door to a cop in a city where there is virtually no crime and we have a security system that would suggest we live in Suburban Detroit or Anacostia or East Palo Alto.

 

In my town, and I suppose elsewhere, home break-ins are very much a seasonal crime.

Cold weather, nope. Warm weather, happen with great frequency as gangs of bored teenagers take to the streets. Most popular method of getting into the home is to take the smallest or recruit a much younger person who also happens to be small. Push the window AC unit into the house, throw the child in, have him or her unlock the door, then the rest go in, eat some food, drink some drink and take what they can grab. Almost always cash or video games.

Then they get beat up if they broke into the home of the grandma or auntie of a gangbanger or real criminal.

 

Any time you can work 'detritus' into a piece, call it a day and have a drink.

My town has a steady flow of break-ins, mostly because of a huge influx of Asian homebuyers who apparently keep a lot of cash in their sock drawers.

 

In our leafy suburb, the crime of choice is car break-ins. Also theft from lockers at the nearby health club is so endemic the police put up a sign at the entrance.