lAST SUMMER, a friend came from Australia. We planned to meet at my house at noon, and then he showed up thirty minutes earlier than scheduled. “You're early. I need to clean up.” it's a mess“, I lamented, like a 1950s refrigerator magnet lady come to life. It wasn't like that. Dirty, that is. I just didn't have time to polish off my spit in front of company. And now here was my dear friend, standing in my kitchen, twirling over coffee rings. While we hugged, I looked at the dishes in the sink over his shoulder, the high chair splattered with something eggy, bowl on the meat counter. overflowing with the garbage and detritus of everyday existence, I was not embarrassed. It was more like an internal discomfort, as if the reunion I had been waiting for was somehow diminished by the imperfect background.
My friend was unperturbed: “You live here, don’t you?” He said with a shrug that suggested that perhaps he hadn't been flying nearly twenty-four hours to spend time with quartz countertops. To him it was a trivial comment. My daughter burst in—a tornado of snot, sand, and uncovered magic markers—and we continued with our day.
But for me, his words were a truth bomb, a much-needed reminder that the pursuit of the ideal picture in the family sphere is absurd. It's like going to a barnyard and being disappointed by the smells. Do you live here– that is, this is a house, not Architectural Digest photo shoot or homemade porn on social networks. Do you live here— for example, meeting the needs of three people who eat, sleep, do laundry, and leave toothpaste on the bathroom vanity every day is a messy business. Do you live here– that is, life is precious, short and rare, and no man has ever said on his deathbed: “I wish I had spent more time with my Swiffer.”
So why can't I stop stress cleansing?
This is a serious question, if not one I ever thought I would ask myself. I'm not a naturally tidy person. My brain is prone to chaos, and so is my T-shirt drawer. On vacation, I'm the friend whose suitcase exploded above the family room. But more and more often I clean up my house to relax. I don't have a therapist. I have a Shark Rocket Pro Cordless, my emotional support vacuum, whose sweet whoosh induces a Pavlovian sense of calm. I may not be able to meet a deadline, get my princess-obsessed daughter to put on pants, sign up for a driving test, or watch the news without crying. But I can spend five minutes in a suction-induced fugue state, and it's like I'm letting the air out of an emotional headache.
I'm not alone here. A friend dealing with relationship issues recently mentioned her post-midnight rage cleanse; a friend of a friend admitted to locking herself in the closet to watch a TikTok video about cleaning the sink—a way to get a high without even picking up a brush, and a good example of how clutter has come to occupy symbolic space in the modern psyche.
THIS BROOM WAS NOT AVAILABLE I always rate it this high. Go back a few decades or so and you'll see that many people in film and television lived in beautiful but flawed spaces. Monica Geller from Friends was obsessed with cleanliness, but still her kitchen showed some defects from regular use, and the production designer Home alone described the intentional placement of everyday trash to create authenticity. Today's aspiring households are clutter-free and clutter-free, the same sterile, Scandinavian design-inspired spaces that are all over your Instagram feed. #CleanTok is an entire subculture of social networks that has turned cleaning into a fashionable activity.
Not only the spaces, but the cleaning products themselves are gorgeous: sleek stackable containers, geometric prints on Swedish dishrags, that viral pink crap that isn't actually related to Gwyneth Paltrow but evokes the same deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. #Fridgescaping is a recent trend that claims your refrigerator is a functional appliance designed to keep food cold, but couldn't it also be a place for fresh-cut flowers? Vintage photo in a frame? Fairy lights??!!! Of course, these images are meaningful, and the algorithm prefers the insane. Still, it's hard not to view refrigerator decorating as an absurd manifestation of a more insidious norm.
In 2010, Marie Kondo The Life-Changing Magic of Cleaning was published in Japan. In subsequent years, it became a worldwide bestseller, urging the world to clean up its act by getting rid of excess crap (after appreciating its ability to spark joy). Kondo's war on clutter played a key role in the rise of the minimalist aesthetic, but fifteen years later, its most enduring legacy is the idea that all of our spaces—our living rooms, but also our clothing drawers and our laundry nooks—should be not just uncluttered, but beautiful. More recent trends like #cluttercore or the “messy girl aesthetic” are often positioned as a form of resistance to Kondo's war on clutter, but in reality these carefully calibrated expressions of maximalism are yet another blow in the aesthetic arms race: now even clutter should be beautiful.
“A big part of what I do is remind my audience to be real,” says Melissa Maker, a Toronto-based cleaning expert who founded her business in 2006 (pre-Kondo). This book, along with Martha Stewart and the endless stream of before-and-after content on social media, pushes us further and further away from achievable goals: “We challenge ourselves by taking part in a kind of tidying Olympics where we have to ask ourselves: What does “clean enough” look like so that we can clean up, move on, and enjoy the rest of our lives? She notes that in our daily lives there are no static “after” shots. Someone will step on those perfect vacuum lines, or someone will have to cook dinner in this kitchen without crumbs. “Getting organized is a Sisyphean task,” says Maker. “You can either lighten your boulder or be crushed by it.”
Maker has come up with an approach to cleaning “MIAs,” or “most important areas”—the two or three places in your home that you expect to look good on a regular basis. “For me, I like to have an organized, clutter-free entryway because it makes me feel calm when I walk in the door,” Maker says. Someone else might choose the toilet because that's where they relax and take a bath every night. I chose the kitchen (because it's the room I go into first thing every morning, and when it's a mess, I feel like my day doesn't start off right) and the front room with the TV (because that's where we hang out in the evenings).
I didn't have much hope that the method would have an effect, but after a few days I realized something: for several months, every time I walked past an overflowing laundry basket, I felt a twinge of anxiety, but now this did not happen. The way my dining room table becomes a gathering place for random things that haven't been put away didn't annoy me either. This, Maker explained, was the secret sauce of her MIA method: “When we identify areas of focus, we redefine what success looks like and give ourselves permission to not check every box.”
Another antidote to perfection-oriented pressure is to set a timer and clean until it goes off. This hack resists all-or-nothing thinking and is instead about commitment to the process. “Often we put off tasks because we think we don’t have time to achieve a certain end goal,” she says. But if the goal is time spent cleaning, then you're moving away from fantastical ideals, and “success” is simply working in short, regular steps. Kind of like going to the gym. “It's about committing to a daily routine. Nobody thinks they can get a six-pack in one workout,” says Maker. She tells me that when I feel overwhelmed and don't know where to start, I should do everything I can in a few minutes and then let it go. It's partly about the cumulative impact of managed efforts over time, but also about pushing back against goals that don't serve us—one five-minute, Beyoncé-endorsed micro-fixture at a time.
IHER GUIDE 2016 The joy of leaving your shit everywhereBrooklyn writer Jennifer McCartney makes the case for disorder. Her book is a parody of Kondo's bestseller, but it is also a powerful rebuke to the tyranny of order. McCartney argues that most people are not very tidy. It's just that the haphazard majority aren't inclined to create content or throw dinner parties, and so we feel ashamed that we can't measure up, without even considering that maybe the metrics are wrong.
The KonMari method was an important milestone in strengthening the relationship between disorder and moral failure. But among housewives (mostly women), the tendency to measure self-worth with a feather duster has much deeper origins.
Long before the war on clutter, there were housewives competing to see who could produce the whitest whites, and while various technological advances were supposed to bring us back to our old lives, it may also seem like they've upped the ante. This was before the advent of social media, where you could spend hours trying to figure out which cleaning hack would work best for you, as if the perfect hack would solve everything. “We don't need to clean more, we need to care less,” says McCartney. This is great advice, if someone could just warn my reptilian brain.
A 2010 study from the University of California, Los Angeles found that men and women experience different emotions regarding clutter. The subjects recorded video tours of their homes, then analyzed the language they used to talk about those spaces. For women, living in a cluttered environment was associated with chronic stress. This was not the case for men. It turns out that for some men, a collection of shoes scattered outside the door is just shoes, while women are more likely to perceive this kind of household clutter as a physical manifestation of personal shortcomings. This explains my unpleasant reaction to a couple of coffee rings, and also why decluttering has become such a popular tonic. “Cleaning up is the easy way out,” says McCartney. We want to tell ourselves that we would be happier, more successful, have a better sex life, if only we could clean up our mess. But it doesn't work that way.
Instead of setting a timer for cleaning, I tried setting it to solve other problems. Within ten minutes I had signed up for my driving test, sent a few long overdue emails and booked an appointment at the bank to start a registered education savings plan. And when the bell rang, I felt the same sense of calm that comes with tidying up. Instead of another suck, I sat down and completed this very article, still not entirely sure if there was a better way to declutter, but armed with a mantra to remind me of what's important.
We live here“, I say to myself, walking past a pile of Halloween decorations (now there are a few days left until November) and sitting down with my daughter to read a book amidst the confusion.
Julieta Caballero is an illustrator at The Walrus.
