My Dear Spouse and I have different preferences on how clean our offspring should keep their bedrooms. His preference would be a reasonable level of tidiness. Mine too, for that matter, but my position on room cleaning is that they need to learn to navigate their own relationship with their stuff. So clean rooms is not a hill I want to climb.

My Dear Spouse and I are by nature pretty tidy people, and thankfully so is The Boy, though that has only become apparent in the last two years or so. The Twins, not so much—at least so far. (I haven’t given up hope!) Twin B has repeatedly voiced how much she likes our bedroom, however, which is open, light, and tidy. This is a contrast to her room, which is busy with stuffed animals, books, trinkets, clothes, artwork (on the walls and also in a box on the floor), and so on. Things you’d expect in the bedroom of an eleven-year-old girl.

The meaning(s) of things

Clutter is mostly a matter of psychology, but years ago I had the occasion to stop and think about what’s really going on here?—as I do—and discovered a philosophical dimension to the phenomenon. Eventually I wrote a paper on the nature of clutter and why it’s a problem when it is. (It isn’t always.) The main claim was that a mistake that gets made with respect to our relationship with stuff is not one of value, but what value calls for: hanging onto things isn’t the only way to honor the value they have.

Culturally, tidiness is lauded and messiness is looked down on.1 I learned not to moralize about people’s clutter, however, when I did background research on the psychology of clutter and people’s relationships to their stuff. There’s objective and subjective clutter. Objective clutter is what you’d think of: a room with things in piles, especially in piles on surfaces meant for other functions (such as sitting, sleeping, eating, or working). No apparent order.

But not all objectively cluttered rooms are necessarily subjectively cluttered. This has to do with the meaning(s) of things. To some people—for instance, at least one of my sisters—clutter can represent ongoing projects, creativity, things going on. Or, in my sister’s case, she’s more comfortable in a visually stimulating environment and wants to be able to see her stuff. She even took the doors off her cabinets because she doesn’t want a barrier between her and her things. (I personally am all about visual simplicity and love cabinet doors.) A space could thus be objectively but not subjectively cluttered.

Clutter becomes a problem only when it inhibits smooth functioning—when it starts to feel like a burden. I learned that the feeling can take a number of forms. There’s the loss of a sense of control over your possessions (or even that your things are controlling you). Sometimes it’s a matter of the cost of storage. Or shame2 at the amount of stuff you have, such that you stop inviting people over or start spending less time at home. Clutter can also be distracting, because our brains are always seeking to make sense of the environment, which can be harder without order. (I’ve begun to wonder whether this is happening to Twin B.) This is the psychology.

Enter philosophy. Why do we have stuff? Because it has some value to us. There are lots of different kinds of value: practical, aesthetic, sentimental, entertainment, pleasure, symbolic, and so on. When we sense value, it feels like it exerts a kind of pull on us, as though we ought to respond. Given different kinds of value, lots of different responses are appropriate depending on the circumstances: use, preservation, admiration, enjoyment, display, etc. When clutter becomes a problem, I suggest that’s because there’s a paralyzing question about what response is appropriate, or a mismatch between objects’ value and our responses.

That is, clutter problems stem at least as much from the reasons we have things as it does from the physical state of order or lack thereof.

Meaning, personal value, and identity

This gets deeper because our stuff often has personal value or meaning beyond its impersonal value. That means our connections to our stuff get entangled with our identities, and that’s part of what makes dealing with clutter difficult (when it is). This is almost certainly Twin B’s relationship to the contents of her room. To her, every object represents a memory or relationship that’s important to her. She never wants to let anything go. It’s all useful, pretty, or symbolic. She perceives her stuff to have value whose source is outside herself, and she feels compelled to keep it as a way of honoring that value. (Or so I surmise.)

I suggest, then, that what’s going on when we’re feeling a clutter problem is that we’re feeling compelled by our perception of things’ value to respond in some appreciative way. By default we think that way has to be keeping them. But keeping them is in tension with some other value: the need to organize or clear out a space to restore function. Feeling the force of one value makes us feel guilty about not adequately responding to the other.

This suggests that the solution is to find other appropriate responses to the perceived value of the objects in question. Maybe we can honor that value by telling stories, giving things away in meaningful ways, preserving their meaning in words or pictures that take up less space, or simply trusting ourselves to remember what’s most important to us—what really makes us who we are.

Any of these alternative responses requires that we recognize the real, sometimes quite tight, attachment we have to our possessions. It stems from the real value they have. This is what I think Twin B feels. There’s strong cultural pressure not to be attached to material possessions,3 however, even in the midst of the unceasing barrage of pressure to buy more and more things. (No one ever claimed cultural pressures were consistent with one another.) As I wrote in 2013:

But being attached to possessions isn’t necessarily being materialistic; having things because they are integrally related to the projects and relationships that make us who we are is not shallow. Physical beings need physical things as part of the business of existence. To be a pianist, you need a piano. To build a comfortable home, you need reminders of who you are. But the need for these things stems from the value of the projects in which they figure—projects that make up our lives.

So, as I said above, the mistake that gets made with respect to our relationship with stuff is not one of its value, but what that value calls for. Hanging onto things isn’t the only way to honor the value they have to us. I think it’s natural to experience the world as full of value, calling for responses from us. But because our relationships to our possessions are a lot richer than we tend to think, it’s worth understanding both the multiplicity of value and the multiplicity of appropriate responses to it.

It’s not as simple as thinking that too much stuff is bad; there are good reasons to have things—reasons that have to do with identity. The key is to recognize that the cultivation of our relationships to our things is a kind of self-cultivation because of the ways we value them and the resulting roles they play in the projects that shape who we are. If clutter distracts us from functioning well, it can also distract us from our sense of ourselves. …Thus, we might refine the definition of clutter along the following lines: an accumulation of things…that inhibits optimal functioning or distracts from a person’s self-defining values.4

At eleven years old, Twin B is still figuring out her relationship to her stuff and the role it plays in expressing and curating who she is. But it will come. She’ll figure out ways to respond to the personal and impersonal value she sees in her possessions in ways that honor its connection to her identity. Despite her parents’ wishes, that may or may not involve cleaning her room.

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