The objects one keeps close at hand “create permanence in the intimate life of a person,” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who became known for the concept of “flow,” and the sociologist Eugene Rochberg-Halton wrote years ago in “The Meaning of Things,” an early, seminal dive into the psychology of materialism, “and therefore that are most involved in making up his or her identity.”
Their conclusions were based on surveying 82 families about a total of 1,694 meaningful domestic objects. “We found that things are cherished not because of the material comfort they provide,” they wrote, “but for the information they convey about the owner and his or her ties to others.” Moreover: “We began to notice that people who denied meanings to objects also lacked any close network of human relationships.”
That is not, of course, to suggest that minimalists are inhuman or that true connection depends on material totems. But these personal links between meaning and objects certainly challenge the familiar critique that material attachment is a function of hollow status-signaling. Describing cluttercore as something for “those who have loads of items that each hold their own story,” Apartment Therapy added the crucial point that this means “things they love, no matter how whacky, minuscule, or unimportant it may seem to someone on the outside.” We might imagine an audience, however intimate, for the stories our clutter tells. But really these are stories we’re telling ourselves.
And that’s fine — or more than fine. Because the objects you already own are much more likely to be interwoven with the people and experiences that give life meaning. That’s why your weird old clutter is probably more important than whatever It-object innovation you might acquire next. (Often, I suspect, the “decluttering” minimalist directive is actually a stealthy terminal-materialist argument that you need to clear out yesterday’s trendy, influencer-hyped joy-flops … so you can make room for tomorrow’s.)
More to the point, as I argued to my mother, nobody else will ever enjoy your clutter quite the way you do. For nearly a decade, I’ve taught an annual workshop on writing about objects for the Design Research department of New York’s School of Visual Arts. Scores of participants from around the world have invariably chosen subject-objects that most of us might dismiss as clutter — a coffee mug, a lighter, a poodle-shaped stick pin — and yet the tales they tell about them are deeply meaningful and serve as a helpful way for the students to introduce themselves.
More recently, I worked with the author and editor Joshua Glenn to explore his interest in a material culture category that doesn’t get much attention but that offers a different take on decluttering: the meaning of objects we used to own. Specifically, we asked various writers and artists to tell us about the things they had lost — misplaced, broken, had stolen, thrown out, given away. A few even described willfully getting rid of stuff — a pair of walking shoes, a piece of macramé art, a Dodge Dart — only to long to see it again, or at least to lament the loss of the time it represented. In almost every scenario, nothing clarifies the instrumental value of an object more thoroughly than its definitive disappearance.
I’m sure you can think of a personal example: an object that’s gone missing from your life that you’d love to have back, or at least see again. But I wonder — would you have known, when this thing went AWOL, that you’d miss it? If my mother had shipped her bird figure collection off to me, would she have glanced wistfully at the empty spots on the shelves where they were displayed?