Life’s Cluttered

“I know my wife’s clutter has gotten too much for me when I start investigating different models of incinerators.”

There are great articles all over the internet, and even quite a few books published, on how to manage the clutter in your life. But what we never stop to consider is the different types of clutter.

There’s the physical clutter of life’s detritus, things that arrive in our life that are foisted upon us by others, by companies, by products and services we only partially interact with.

There’s the physical clutter we actively pursue in the form of products we buy that we hope will make us happy.

There’s digital data clutter, binary bits that we download as files from the internet, bookmarks of websites we will never visit again, newsletters we sign up to, and emails that are sent to us, both solicited and unsolicited.

Then there’s the mental clutter of tracking popular people and events that have little direct bearing on the trajectory of our lives beyond a momentary happiness.

A lot of words have been penned on how to de-clutter your life because that’s the easy fix and also, I think, a primarily Western mindset of addressing the symptoms rather than the deep roots of the problem. Telling people how to fix the symptoms of a problem is always easier than fixing the actual cause.