Howard Mansfield writes about clutter.
The storage shed is a symptom of our cluttered lives. Clutter is the cholesterol of the home; it's clogging the hearth. The "Clean Sweep" team from the television show of that name usually hauls away about half a ton of trash from each house that it rescues from clutter. (Which may explain why 23% of Americans admit to paying bills late because they can't find them, and why 25% of people with two-car garages have to park their cars outside.)"We have too much. We're over-housed, over-clothed, overfed and over-entertained," said Don Aslett, getting right to the point. Aslett would know; he's been poking around houses for 50 years. In college, Aslett started what has become one of the country's largest cleaning companies, and his books on clutter helped to establish the genre. People call Aslett, saying, "We don't know how all this stuff got here." Think of it as a whodunit. He solves the mystery and gently interrogates the guilty. Ask yourself: "Does this item enhance your life?" If not, get rid of it.
Television sprawls out to 120 or 240 channels or more. There are more TV sets than people in the average home. Adults are looking at screens — televisions, computers, cellphones, even GPS devices — about 8.5 hours a day, according to a study by the Council for Research Excellence. TV ads claim about an hour of each day. And the time spent watching television — 72 days out of each year — continues to increase, alongside the rapid rise of watching online videos.
Somewhere in there, between the physical and virtual clutter, we are losing the ordinary qualities of home — the solitude to recollect, the time for families to talk. (Yet another study has clocked only 14.5 minutes a day of actual conversation between parents and children.) We are losing the "nothing much" that is home. The room for tumult and quiet, for passing the time with friends, for the ordinary pleasures of a day well lived.
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