My latest read is A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder–How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place. I’m about halfway through it. The writing is not exemplary, which is too bad, since it does make some good arguments against our society’s illogical bias towards over-organization. I’m still not fond of my crammed drawers or messy desks, both at home and at work, but I’m pretty sure spending more time alphabetizing, labeling, and container-izing is not going to solve anything. If anything has helped it’s Scaling Down: Living Large in a Smaller Space, which I’d read last year. I came away from that book convinced that less really is more, and I’ve been slowly but surely making headway against my packrat tendencies.

The best weapon I’ve found so far is to avoid shopping and bringing more things into the house. Whenever I do go shopping, I tend to buy too many things, whether it’s the jumbo bag of onions or yet another V-neck T that I do not need, just because it’s on sale. When I give a shopping list to Kevin and ask him to go to the store, on the other hand, he tends to come home with only what was on the list. Judging by our credit card bills, this strategy has already kept a few hundred dollars worth of stuff out of our house this year, so I think it’s one worth continuing. Since I do not actually like shopping, it won’t even feel like I’m depriving myself of anything.

Categories: reading, shopping
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