If it were not 2023, I would invite you to think of your home as your own shopping mall. But it is 2023, and while malls still exist, the mall as metaphor conveys something very different from what I mean.
If it were not 2023, I would invite you to think of your kitchen as your own supermarket. But it is 2023, and while supermarkets still exist, the supermarket as metaphor conveys something very different from what I mean.
Asking for a definition from google of “store”, I think I have found what I am looking forward, at least here in the United States.
A store can be: a retail establishment selling items to the public. An example is given of a “health food store”. A store can also be: a quantity or supply of something kept for use as needed. The example given? “The squirrel has a store of food.”
When the supermarket was an appropriate metaphor for what I am groping for here and now in 2023, rationed food and victory gardens were in recent living memory. When the mall was an appropriate metaphor for what I am groping for here and now in 2023, clothing had in recent living memory transitioned from often home-made to almost always store-bought. Both the supermarket in its time, and the mall in its time, represented plenty, affordability, aspiration and ease. The comparators were shortages, high cost, depression and difficulty.
Now, shopping online is a potential metaphor. This time, online shopping and home delivery replace initially time spent in the crush of rush hour traffic and cramming too many family activities into the short hours between school, work, and sleep, and finally the horrifying fears of the pandemic. But rather than grope for the current evolution of acquisition — which would be fruitful and generate amazing insights, so please go do that and share! — I will instead generalize back to the store.
Minimalism was and is a Thing, in large part for the same reason that dieting took off in step with abundance of food. When few people have more than the clothes on their back and a shared bed to sleep on, and one pot to cook and eat out of, everyone is a minimalist and it’s not at all cool. It is the water fish swim in and the air we breathe. Minimalism is a Thing because unless we work at it pretty hard, most of us have an awful lot of stuff. We have a store: a quantity or supply of something kept for use as needed.
Except it maybe is not kept for use as needed. Maybe it is kept because we don’t quite know how to get rid of it, and feel guilt about just “throwing it away”. I mean, we were keeping it to use as needed and now it is just going … into a landfill? Or it is kept for use as needed but that day of use never comes, because it is only for special occasions and then when the occasion arises, for some reason it isn’t used at all, either because we have enough for far more occasions than we actually have, or because it doesn’t fit any more or isn’t the right style or we forgot we had it until after we bought a new one. Or whatever.
I’ve read a lot of books and articles about time management, personal organization, decluttering, you name it. All the extremely off-putting topics that are primarily interesting because they enable your life to go more smoothly after you get good at them, but which you are unlikely to ever be recognized for being good at. Except when people decide you should make their life go smoothly, too, since you are so good at that and it’s so easy for you, right? Or when people straight up attack you for being good at the things that they are only cognizant of when they trip over them. Literally. It’s not like my life is a disaster (it most definitely is not). It’s not like I failed to learn the lessons from these books (I absolutely did learn the lessons from these books). It’s not like my life is so complicated, I need to get super amazing at it just to survive at all (that was when my two special needs kids were both not speaking yet and had all kinds of other delays related to autism).
I like reading about this stuff. I find it soothing. Also, each book has tips and tricks that I had not previously absorbed, and can become part of my extensive repertoire to use in my own life and share with others if the moment to do so arises. OK, some of these books are legitimately awful and contain nothing but offensive nonsense and a lot of bad ideas and victim-blaming. I’ve gotten very good at liveblogging them until it’s clear that they’re not going to be helpful even by accident and then I warn people away, while also trying to find humor or at least a good story out of the situation.
Two of the most recent themes that have emerged from this reading history are “shop your closet” or “eat your pantry” and “keep what fits”. The ideas are simple and powerful. The first idea is to notice that you have a lot of useful things. If you arrange them as if they were in a shop, you can behave with respect to the things you already own, the way you would treat items in a shop. This can dramatically and relatively painlessly reduce going to an actual shop and acquiring more things. You don’t own _everything_ you might need. But if the things you own are arranged appealingly, and you change your mindset to shopping your store before going to another, that’ll at least slow the influx. Also, if you are shopping your store and run across something that you would _never_ buy, that’s a pretty clear sign that it’s time to move it along out of your store. The second idea — keep what fits — is part of that, and also a recognition that even long-tail online shops don’t literally have _everything_ in them, but the really fun, curated boutiques tend to contain _only_ those things which spark happiness and desire. Your store could be like a really fun, curated boutique
But how do you do that? How do you take what you already have, and turn it into something you want?
The Marie Kondo answer is to take everything you have (one kind at a time) and sort through it and only keep the things that spark joy. This is a great — albeit limited — answer. (You probably need to have something that even diligent shopping cannot find a version of that sparks joy, or maybe you cannot afford the toilet brush that sparks joy or whatever.) But it is a really great answer!
Other decluttering type books focus on a bin approach: into one bin go the things that are in the wrong place, into another bin go things to deaccession, into another go things in need of repair. The repair option is a tricky one, because it is very easy to have a lot of broken things lying around awaiting repair. The extra time spent at home by many during 2020 meant that there was a great deal of time at home so one became painfully aware of the broken things. If the tools, parts and knowhow were all present, some things did get repaired, and at least for us, that habit of repair had a game quality that created some joy as well. On the other hand, there are lots of things that could be repaired, but when you go to do it, it costs far more than the item is worth and a lot more even than a replacement. Even those things that are economically worth repairing can cost so much time than the lost time is unaffordable.
To recap: we all live in a store, and if it were well-curated, we’d love using what is in our store. But the process of curation of our store is time-consuming and costly in other ways as well. More — and worse — I think we all own a lot of things that we like well enough, and that are in good enough shape to wear, but which somehow do not get used.
Why?
A recent Speaking of Psychology Podcast about clutter, with Joseph Ferrari (episode 227, dated 22 February 2023), “Why Clutter Stresses Us Out” covered many of these ideas (nothing I’ve said so far is new to me), and he spent some time saying Kondo’s approach is wrong, because as soon as you touch an item you own, you’re going to want to keep it because of the emotions it triggers (even if they are not positive ones); you’re better off having someone else sort it. He’s not worth the time to listen to, but I realized, listening to him, that we’ve got hold of this thing from the wrong end.
As I was reading through samples of books I had not quite committed to buy on my kindle, I read through several samples of books about food waste. One in particular really stuck in my mind, because it was so pro-detailed meal planning and shopping from a list, two things that people really struggle with. This is _exactly_ how victim-blaming gets going: the advice is to do a thing that almost no one who isn’t already doing it will ever figure out how to do, and then blame those people when they very predictably … don’t. The word “just” and the phrase, “it’s not that hard really” get thrown around a lot. The author did acknowledge the difficulty, and then further added that she only plans for 3 meals a week because of her crazy schedule. And she doesn’t really do scratch cooking. I’m like, you’d be better off going to all-meals-ordered in/takeout, honestly.
And then I thought, looking over her recommendations for making use of the inevitably bits left over because you can never buy precisely what you need for your planned meals, honestly, the no-recipe cooking cookbooks do a much better job of this.
And then I thought, that last time I decluttered my daughter’s room with her, she fit everything into the existing storage so attractively at the end and then for weeks made new outfits every day with jewelry, hair items, layers. The outfits are so good, I asked an artist friend whether there’s any job opportunities related to that skill, because I didn’t want to point her at RISD or any kind of fashion industry job. My friend said, “windows”. People get paid really good money to dress windows, if they are really good at it. And I was like, aha. But I didn’t know if my daughter would be able to follow trends, and my friend was like, the people who do windows _set_ the trends.
My daughter is far more likely to get a job writing code than merchandising shop windows, but it really got me thinking. How _do_ you write or describe or depict or teach or advise people to do this magic trick of taking the things one already has and turn them into what one wants? I can do it in the kitchen, because I’ve spent so many years cooking for my own, my husbands’, my friends’ dietary constraints. I was able to — after years of failed efforts — run down the pantry and the chest freezer and the freakishly large number of bottles of alcohol in the house by telling my husband not to automatically replace things that ran out (that was a disheartening problem until I did), and then tell myself that the new rule was “You can’t go get anything from the store for meals”. I mean, obviously, one needs to replace some things after a certain point. But decoupling meal production from shopping was fucking brilliant. Shopping is now, make sure the breakfast things are stocked (local grocery store), and all the rest of the food comes in the form of farm deliveries. Reduction of packaging waste and cooking seasonally, and supporting local growers, organic, etc. — all come along for free with this system. Once I _did_ that, and it worked so well, the meal plan / make a list system of _resisting_ temptation in an environment designed to make you buy impulsively became Extra Special Strange.
The power of constraints to spark creativity is extremely well understood. HBR uses a number of extremely exciting, modern technology examples in this article:
https://hbr.org/2019/11/why-constraints-are-good-for-innovationThose of us who remember having little, who remember being poor, can remember how crushing the constraints of having little and unable to acquire more could be. I am not talking about getting people with only a bottle of ketchup and some stale bread to joyfully adopt constraints in the kitchen, nor am I talking about encouraging people whose clothes have been worn so many times they have softened and are threadbare to embrace creating new outfits out of fabric that is about to lose integrity entirely.
A lot of no-recipe approaches rely upon restaurant-popular form factors (handhelds, flatbreads, stir-fries, noodles, salad, soup) as a way to identify a dish to aim for without supplying a recipe. Embedded in this strategy is the insight that if you go out to a restaurant, you are going to be ordering from a menu and those are the basic categories on the menu. If you can find something to eat on a menu, then you can make something you want at home, if you can turn it into something roughly within the form factor of those menu categories.
My daughter’s outfits are different every day, but she has a drawer full of t-shirts, a drawer full of shorts / skorts / skirts, a drawer full of leggings, and a drawer with socks and underwear. On top of the dresser are hair accessories and there is also jewelry storage around the room. Every outfit involves a couple scrunchies, one or more hair clips, one or more pins, one or more necklaces, possibly a bracelet, a t-shirt, skirt or shorts, leggings, jacket, and possibly her vest. She assembles the outfit the afternoon of the day before, when she does not want to work on homework yet, but overwhelming decision fatigue has not yet set in.
My suggestion to you, Dear Reader (which includes Future Me!) is simple to say, and infinite in its possible implementations.
Decompose what you want into its component pieces.
Collect (mentally or literally) the available pieces for each component that you already own (making a list is a possibility, for example, and I’m sure someone out there is using spreadsheets for this)
Apply current preferences (aesthetic or cravings or otherwise) to reduce surplus.
Arbitrarily choose (dice roll, coin flip) among the remaining options (TikTok’s Roll for Sandwich has a really organized way of doing this)
That’s it. That’s my current strategy — and what I see my daughter doing — for Shopping My Closet / Eating My Pantry, for Taking What I Already Own and Making It Something I want.
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