Your clutter is holding you back

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0:56so I've always been someone who loves loves loves loves junk I wish someone would come in and just rob me blind of my stuff so I don't have to do it my wife has a garage full of stuff and I have a garage full of nothing

1:18Jonquilyn Hill:I don't know if you've noticed this but it seems like every couple is made up of this exact combination. Someone who throws stuff away. This is like one of the boxes that I would love to get rid of. And someone who holds on to it for dear life. Like if I want to ship something, you know, I can ship it back in this box. Prenoy Roy and Haley Brocek have found a way to manage their differences because of love, but also because you really don't have a choice when you live in a 600 square foot apartment in New York City. We have a very small balcony that we are feuding with pigeons over right now so um yeah sometimes it'll be i'm just on this kick where i'm getting rid of everything and he has to say like wait you might actually use this like this is something that you wear a lot like and i'm like oh yeah i didn't even like think about that i'm just in the mindset of like get rid of get rid of my goal is to like hold on to things so I can give it to somebody in the future.

2:21If we have children, if our relatives, our friends, something that kind of pass on to that also gives them the joy, then I can hold on to it. Kind of thinking outside of yourself helps, you know, holding on to things.

2:36Jonquilyn Hill:We have so much stuff. In fact, 71 % of Americans say they buy things they already have because they can't find the original in all their clutter. At the same time, the minimalist aesthetic is extremely popular, even if, for most of us, all those clean lines and clear surfaces are way out of reach. I'm John Gwlin Hill, and this week on Explain It To Me From Vox, it's spring cleaning. My name is Emily Stewart, and I'm a senior correspondent at Business Insider. Emily used to work here at Vox, and over the years, She's written a ton about our growing mountain of stuff and why we're so eager to get rid of it.

3:18A lot of baby boomers, right, are aging and they are downsizing. Some of them are passing away. And they are notoriously a generation that really liked stuff. I mean, in the 80s, there was this thing that was like, Whoever dies with the most toys wins.

3:37But I think a lot of people, a lot of families are looking around and saying, oh my gosh, like, we're looking at mom and dad's house. They have all of this stuff that they've collected over the years, and they don't just have their stuff. They have their parents' stuff that they held on to. And for a lot of Gen Xers, Gen Zs, Millennials, we have also left stuff at their houses and have kind of treated them. Drag me. Yes. And so we kind of have treated our parents as storage. You know, the easy answer is just get rid of it. But that's actually like pretty complicated for a lot of reasons. I mean, you know, there's generations of like older women who they all have China, right?

4:15It was a big thing to get wedding China. And now like you cannot get rid of it. Nobody wants it. Their kids don't want it. And it's also just like, I mean, it can be logistically difficult to get rid of things. You know, in reporting on this, one thing I learned was that sometimes even, like, a goodwill won't take furniture. And that can be really hard. And so you look around and it's like, you know, I go to my mom's house and she has all of these big, like, brown wooden hutches and they're, like, beautiful. But, like, I don't want that. I live in New York City. It doesn't fit here. And even if she were to want to get rid of it, like, that's going to be an endeavor for her to undertake or someday, like, my problem.

4:52them.

4:55Jonquilyn Hill:When did we become a culture that buys, buys, buys and never gets rid of stuff? So I did an interview about this actually when I was still at Vox with an academic and she kind of pinned this back to like the 1920s really, because that doesn't just like mass consumption. It really is about like mass production starts to hit. And so it's not just that like you're not just buying like a dress at the dressmaker down the street. Like these are being made in like a mass scale. And so, of course, like the Great Depression hits, that kind of goes on pause a little bit. And then in the 1950s, it really ramps up, right?

5:29It's people are buying their houses, they're buying their washing machines. Boiling action. That's the secret of really clean clothes. And there's a lot of things available. And you have, you know, the Sears catalog that comes to your house in the mail. That's a very new Sears catalog. It's the Mad Men era of advertising. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. And so people are seeing a lot of ads. And there is something, I think, like, social to this as well. Like, we compare ourselves to other people. And whether or not we, like, necessarily realize it, one of the ways we compare ourselves is, like, the things that we have, the things that we buy.

6:10Again, maybe in the 50s, it was, like, your neighbors, right? Like, which washing machine did they have? What car do they have? Well, then all of a sudden, you have, like, the television. And it's like, okay, well, what do the people on Friends? have? Like, what fashion do they have? New haircut? Necklace? Dress? Boots? Boots! Now, they're a little more than I usually spend on boots, um, or rent. Now we have the internet. If you think about these, like, micro trends that kind of sweep through, right? Like, was it last year that those mini Trader Joe's bags were all of a sudden trendy? Trader Joe's came out with new Easter tote bags that everyone's going crazy for.

6:49Every single paycheck I get goes to these bags. And like, not to be rude to the bags, but truly who cares? Are you kidding me? These little micro totes?

7:01Jonquilyn Hill:OK, on the other end of the spectrum, when I think about the kind of luxury home aesthetic we're all supposed to be aspiring to, it's all about minimalism. You know, I think of Kim Kardashian's home tour and it's all beige and open spaces. We're in my family kitchen and everything in my house is really minimal. I find that there's so much chaos out in the world that when I come home, I want it to be just really quiet and I want everything to feel calming. I mean, I feel like that is kind of very millennial coded to some extent, right? Like the millennial gray of everybody has this gray house and everything's from Ikea.

7:41I mean, I'm sitting on. Oh, my. Right now. As I sit at my Ikea desk. So I think, you know, but minimalism, I mean, it's one of those things where it's like understandable, right? And this is not a new thing invented now. Like, I think a lot of people have a sense that like we live in this very consumerist society and feel kind of a desire and need to like push back against that. This feeling that we are inundated with a lot of stuff. Maybe it would be nice to have not so much stuff. Now, I do sort of think that minimalism can be a thing that we lie to ourselves about. A lot of us fancy ourselves minimalists and then are quite guilty of having an Amazon package on the doorstep once a week.

8:22And so I do think it's one where it's become sort of this like virtue signal thing of like, I'm a minimalist. How many of us are actually that is an open question. Lots of people who are in buy nothing groups buy plenty of stuff.

8:40but I do think like the trends change and generations change like your millennials were very like the millennial gray your house is like has nothing in it and now like you might walk into a gen z's apartment they have like a lot more stuff sitting around in a way that maybe like your baby boomer mother would like a lot of this stuff just kind of comes back around but I I do think, you know, overall, we kind of like to see ourselves as somewhat resisting the capitalist machine, even if that's a lot easier said than done.

9:18Jonquilyn Hill:Why is it so much easier said than done? Up next, this is your brain on spring cleaning.

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11:11Jonquilyn Hill:I'm J.Q. This is Explain It To Me. So how do we go from collecting stuff to tossing it out? One of the things that I think is most interesting and most important about how our brains are organized is how we motivate ourselves to do things that we do. Randall O 'Reilly is a psychology professor at UC Davis, and he uses computers to track how our brains respond to certain tasks. There's this kind of surprising thing that parts of our brain that actually do this are really ancient kind of from an evolutionary perspective. And they're tied up with things like dopamine, which everybody knows about now.

11:53And, you know, this gives us a kind of understanding of, you know, what drives our decisions. And it's not kind of like what you think you might want to do. It's actually much more kind of basic and survival-driven kind of parts of the brain that are actually in charge. Anytime you have to make a hard decision, your brain, this motivational part of your brain, actually knows that that decision is going to be hard. And there's a lot of studies that show, like, anytime you have uncertainty, like, should I keep it? Should I toss it? What should I do? How many things should I have? You know, all these kinds of decisions really weigh down your brain.

12:35And you can just feel it, right? You just feel tired.

12:38Jonquilyn Hill:Oh, yeah. I don't want to have to make that decision. So, you know, and again, this part of your brain is really kind of like pragmatic. And so if there's anything else you could do, your brain is going to say, let's let's postpone that decision and just go have something delicious to eat or do some other even maybe not such a great thing. That's at least easier than making these hard choices. Right. What about our emotional attachment to our things? Why do we form those in the first place? You know, there's this part of your brain called the hippocampus, which is where these memories live. And that's plugged directly into these core emotional parts of your brain.

13:18And so that's such an important part of what, you know, what a person is, you know. I have like an emotional connection to every T-shirt I own, even if it's like really gross or like have holes in it. Those movie ticket stubs, concert tickets, just like small trinkets from memories and travel. They've come from apartment to apartment for years. Old records, we literally never use them, but we just cannot get rid of them with the sentimentality of it all. When you see some knickknack, you know, and you're like, I remember this. This was important. This was meaningful to me. how can I throw out this memory that's so important and central to me?

14:06It really is like cutting off part of yourself. I mean, you don't want to do that.

14:10Jonquilyn Hill:Yeah, and like, I don't know, it just activates something. All the things just flood back to you.

14:20I think that the solution to getting what you theoretically want, you know, rationally, is to sort of work with your system, right? You can't fight the system. them. So you just got to figure out ways around it. And so one thing I do personally is just like take pictures, right? If I take pictures of a knickknack, and so I do see the pictures, they come up on my screensaver and stuff. It activates those memories and I feel good, right? So I think, you know, as long as you have some kind of cue there, some way to get back to those memories, it's still good. And obviously a picture is a lot less space than the actual things itself.

14:56Jonquilyn Hill:There's another category of stuff, like the books I'm holding on to because I'll supposedly read them one day or the clothes that I tell myself I'll fit into again. I have very expensive jeans that I used to fit in back in my 20s. I'm 42 now and I just still have the hope. My style is probably outdated and I still hold on to things because I think, you know what, I might use this one day. We have an ideal future self, right? I mean, you can picture it. But the thing that you don't want to experience is that situation where you're like, oh, now I really want to have this thing and I got rid of it.

15:31Right. That feeling, that negative feeling is weighted much more strongly than the little cost of like just keeping it around. And that's, you know, a lot of scientific literature showing that we are much more sensitive to negative outcomes, losses and any kind of negative feeling than we are to sort of positive things.

15:51Jonquilyn Hill:Why do our brain do we is there a hypothesis on why the negative is so much more powerful? Survival, right? Negative is something bad happens to you, right? Physical pain, some predator, something scary, you know, all these things. And so there's just a much richer kind of map in your brain of all the negative things. And it's just it just gets more attention. You know, I envy minimalists in that they're able to shed things without having a lot of hangups. Why is it easier for some people than for others? Yeah, I think it has a lot to do with that decision making process. So if you're somebody who's generally indecisive, and you know that like, I don't know, should I keep it?

16:34No, and you really go back and forth, and you have a hard time making that decision. Again, your brain knows that you're going to have a hard time making that decision. And so it's going to be really hard to just confront that. But if you're somebody like me, who's more impulsive and not troubled by making decisions, you know, I don't have that much difficulty. I'm like, whatever, I'm just going to toss it. Some people, again, like my wife, for example, is very, very, she has a very, very difficult time making decisions. And guess what? She tends to be someone who holds on to things, right? And so it really, I think it is very strongly correlated.

17:09Yeah. And there's the really tricky question, right? You're never going to like take somebody who is sort of, you know, has harder time making decisions, likes to hold on to things, has that strong sentimental reaction to things and like turn them into this like overnight minimalist. I don't think that's a realistic kind of expectation. But, you know, on the other hand, if you're really, you know, if you really want to accomplish something like that, you know, there, I think there are ways to trick yourself into getting the job done. so one idea is to instead of making uh the the decision kind of all in one step you can make a first pass decision that you know is not the final decision but it's like a it's a quick first pass decision and so you just go through everything and you just say really quickly i'm just going to sort stuff into piles right and then once you started that now you look at it and you're like okay well here's how much stuff is in like the the really must keep pile and here's all this other stuff.

18:06And, and it's so much easier to edit something than to write it from, you know, from scratch. So it's really that same principle, right? The other one that's, that's classic is to break things down into smaller steps, right? So instead of thinking about, you know, I'm going to organize my entire closet, you know, just say, I'm just going to work on the socks, you know, and sort of, okay, well, socks, I can do socks, right? And the trick is that once you get started, there's a process in your brain where it's kind of tracking the progress that you're making towards your goal. And this is a key part of the computer models that I make of the brain.

18:42And whenever you make a move towards your goal, you get a little bit of dopamine. And so there's this kind of positive feedback loop and you feel it, right? And it's sort of, this is also what video games kind of tap into. And then these kind of mechanisms usually will take over and keep you going.

18:58Jonquilyn Hill:So I should treat my spring cleaning like a video game? Yes, absolutely. Give yourself points, break it down into levels, and then you'll be like, huh, well, that wasn't actually as hard as I thought it was going to be. And once you have that feeling, then it kind of keeps that momentum going.

19:18Jonquilyn Hill:Is there a plus side to keeping stuff? Like, what does that do for us? Yeah, and in general, there's a lot of benefit to having, you know, more memories, more access to your memories. And so if you have more cues around, you can kind of remind yourself, like, you know, if you're feeling depressed or something, and you can go look at your shelf and see this knickknack from some trip you took, and it can kind of remind you of this prior experience that you had. And that kind of gives you a different perspective relative to what you're feeling right now, that's kind of what memory also does for us, right?

19:56In general, is gives us a perspective of how things were at different points in our past. And having better access to those memories is absolutely, you know, very important. And that works for me because I'm actually have a terrible memory. And I don't spend very much time organizing my memory. I'm too impulsive, too much, you know, whatever, living in the present, et cetera. And so, again, my wife is my memory. Aw!