Roy Tang

Programmer, engineer, scientist, critic, gamer, dreamer, and kid-at-heart.

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Decluttering

I traditionally try to save some time on the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day to do some cleaning up and decluttering of my stuff. One would assume that having more time meant I would be better able to organize my stuff and all that, but one would be wrong. My room still has stacks of books, toys, Magic cards and other stuff in random places.

Or maybe I just have too much OCD that I want everything to be neat and organized, but I’m not industrious enough to make it happen. I’m sure there are people a lot more cluttered than me.

Towards the start of the year, I told myself I should throw out/get rid of/dispose of at least one thing a day. It’s one of those relatively easy things to do I haven’t been able to maintain.

Why do we keep around all this old stuff we don’t need?

Part of it may be from a mentality of scarcity – we don’t want to throw away stuff for fear of finding out that we may need it later. But reasonably, if you haven’t used a thing in years, maybe you’ll never use it and even if you had need of one, how difficult would it be to find one again? Some kind of pack rat mentality. I know a few of my friends who would be very familiar with this.

Other things we keep around for some sort of nostalgia or as keepsakes of other people and faraway places. That’s fine I suppose, but maybe one shouldn’t put too much value in things that don’t actually have them. Case in point: I have a bunch of rocks here from different countries I visited in Europe, haha. Pictures, letters, and other personal keepsakes one might consider digitizing and storing in the cloud.

Having a cluttered space has a cost, one that’s difficult to ascertain or quantify. Not only do things look messy, but things are harder to find when you need them most. There’s also a strange satisfaction that comes from achieving a fine, organized space (before it all falls back into chaos of course.)

 

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