On Clutter

And why I'll never have a clutter-free existence.

I’ve been thinking about the many ways that clutter can creep into our lives. When we think of clutter, we usually imagine a house that’s filled to the brim with stuff. Not exactly hoarder territory, just a house that lacks space, emptiness. Clutter is what comes from our obsession with filling things—rooms, pockets, coffee mugs, silences. It’s a kind of noise.

Oddly, I started thinking about and decided to write this piece on clutter while reading William Zinsser’s On Writing Well (the 25th anniversary edition). Chapter 3 is all about, you guessed it, clutter. Zinsser claims that clutter is clarity’s #1 enemy. “Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds,” he writes. “The writer is always slightly behind. New varieties sprout overnight, and by noon they are part of American speech.” The reason Zinsser gives for why our writing—specifically American writing—is cluttered says a lot about the human condition: We’re trying to be someone we’re not.

Whether we’re writing an email to send colleagues, a school essay, or a personal blog post, we want to sound smarter than we think we are. It’s funny that our solution is to say more to make up for something we think we lack. Only cluttered writing doesn’t say anything. We’re saying more, but no one really knows what we mean. We’re all just pretending: to be someone else, and to understand what that someone else is saying.

As a woman who works for a tech company, I have noticed that I cloud my emails and Slack messages and presentations with words that Zinsser would call “fillers” or “ultimate clutterers.” These are words that take up space and nothing more. But I don’t do this because I want to sound like I know what I’m talking about; I want to soften the fact that I do know what I’m talking about. I want to knock the confidence in my writing down a few notches, I want to get my point across in a friendly and “non-threatening” way. With the audience I write for at work—usually men above my pay grade—I feel like I can’t come right out and make a point. I use words that say nothing to hide what I want to say.

Every writer knows there are always words, sentences, whole pages that can be cut from a piece—even when you think you’ve whittled it down to what feels like nothing. But it’s hard. Every word on the page starts to feel like it’s meant to be there (we forget that this isn’t so). It’s the same with stuff. Even if we never use something we own, even if we forget its origin story, we have a hard time letting go. I sometimes have a hard time rearranging my apartment because my possessions come to inhabit a space so well.

Capitalism has trained us to believe that we are our stuff, our clutter. Like Pavlov’s dogs we salivate for more stuff when we’re triggered to feel that we don’t have enough, that we’re not enough. We sign up for gym memberships at the start of the year because we believe it’s time to become better versions of ourselves. We impulse shop or binge eat when we’re stressed, and what’s been more stressful than this past year? UPS, FedEx, and Amazon have all been delivering to my apartment building nonstop, because we’re all coping with the stress of lockdown by shopping for things to redecorate the apartments we sit in all day.

We call this uncontrolled spending that’s tied to emotions we don’t want to deal with and instead buy a new couch “emotional shopping.” We tack emotional to the front of other things we do uncontrollably, too, like eating. While I hate the connotation that describing these elements of consumption as emotional has (we tend to think of women as being emotional and doing irrational things as the result of those emotions), I can only describe what I’ve been doing lately as “emotional browsing.”

I’ve been in this “I-have-to-get-this” mood. It’s a mood of coveting things that I know I don’t need and will probably never end up getting. It’s a mood of wishlisting, of wishful consumption. All I can say is that these dynamic ads I encounter online have gotten very good at reading me, at using who I am and what I like against me. Yes, against me.

While my fear of credit card debt and overspending keeps me from buying everything I want, I still save these items in a list with every intention of buying them. I’ve amassed wishlists of everything, from kitchen gadgets to books to ceramic planters. I know that actually buying these things won’t be as satisfying as my shopping impulse would have me believe, and that it’s better to keep my money and just save items to a wishlist. Maybe I’ll forget about them, is my thought process. But I almost never do. Instead, these lists become records of unfulfilled desires. Not to mention that the more lists I have, the more cluttered I feel (let’s add “emotional clutter” to our collective vocabulary).

“Lists are lusts itemized,” writes Cynthia Gralla in her essay for Electric Literature about how women have been using lists to record their desires for centuries. Gralla talks specifically about literary lists, which she sees as female authors’ attempt to claim agency. “A list yearns with each entry, honoring its disparate items,” she writes, “their catalogs desire to transform both author and readers through that longing.” With wishlists, it’s capitalism that creates this longing, but the list itself keeps me form participating…at least for a little while. But it doesn’t change the fact that these wishlists are created because of and within the capitalist system.

Even secondhand shopping, which is more sustainable and how I get most of my stuff these days, is a feature of “the system.” As a thrifter, I know it can feel like secondhand shopping somehow operates outside of capitalism, that we, as consumers, have found a way to “stick it to the man.” But that’s just another way capitalism deceives us, that we deceive ourselves. Shopping “ethically” or “sustainably” are now status symbols we give ourselves to feel superior or better about continuing to oil the machine of excessive production. Creating categories for ethical and non-ethical consumption is just another way of saying us vs. them. There are ways for us to be more responsible consumers, but let’s be real: it’s consumption all the same.

Consumption leads to clutter that leads to decluttering (which some people pay experts to help them do) that leads back to consumption. It’s a cycle that brings us further and further away from ourselves. We continuously express ourselves through what we consume, through what becomes our clutter, never really knowing what we want or desire. The clutter either becomes that thing we really want or blocks us from discovering it.

Here’s my representation of this.

My clutter are all the things I can’t part with, the tabs in my browser I can’t close, the wishlists and to-do lists I can’t forget, the words in my writing I can’t delete. To cut through the clutter, Zinsser says you have to develop an “eye” for economy. A clear head leads to uncluttered thoughts and uncluttered writing. Zinsser writes that you must ask yourself, “Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it’s beautiful?”

Here’s why my relationship with clutter (with myself) will always be complicated: My answer is yes. And I see nothing wrong with this.