One of Gretchen Rubin’s favorite activities in the Happiness Project is purging the house of clutter. She, like me, fit in that dubious category of people who enjoy organizing purely for its own sake. Clutter-clearing is her own addition to her Happiness Project; apparently, none of the sages of old (or even modern happiness researchers) has devoted time to the subject of getting rid of the stuff that weighs us down. Getting rid of clutter as a means to boosting happiness, is basically saying that our physical surroundings matter to our internal state. I think her words are that outer order leads to inner calm, or something along those lines. (To digress, this is actually a very Anglican idea, that the physical world matters to the internal world, that you are affected by whether you wear jeans to church or your best clothes, your posture during prayer, etc.)
She talks about different categories of items that shouldn’t have a place in your life. One is aspirational clutter: things you have because you’d like to be the sort of person who uses them, even though you don’t actually use them. In my case this might be a shirt that is a bit too fashionably tight or low-cut… it looks nice, but I never actually feel comfortable wearing it. I forget her catchy names for the other types of clutter but they include nostalgic clutter (the shirt you used to really love), washed-up clutter (the shirt that has stains on it), and duplicative clutter (five pairs of black pants when you only ever wear two).
Basically, the idea is to have high standards and not surround ourselves with things that we a) don’t like, b) don’t use, c) aren’t nice, or d) are easily replaceable (if a future need might arise). Obviously this is not brain science, but it’s amazing how many things I took to the thrift store using this criteria. The wedding present that was nice but I never used, which felt like a burden because I should have used it (because it was nice). The empty binders hanging out in my desk drawer even though I haven’t needed a binder in years and don’t currently have a need for a binder. The dog brush we never use because we got one that works better. It really is amazing and strangely liberating to let those things move on to their second life.
