It’s time I confronted my clutter. It turns out chicks don’t dig clutter, not even the hot ones. But it took an “Oh. My. GOD!” from a usually quite reserved young lady to put things into perspective. So here are a few rationalisations of the situation.

1) You hold on to junk for emotional security, like a kid with its blankie.

This is true. When I try to imagine completely de-junking and living in a minimalist designer hutch, I am struck to the core with fear. Part of this I think comes from the way I left home. I think there’s a sense of “my home is where my junk is”. Since I still live in rented accommodation I lack the grounding that a place of my own may bring. Shame I couldn’t have used a hat instead of 7 old computers, a half-done robot project, a bunch of stuff for fixing cars that should live in a garage, assorted percussion items, every 13amp plug I’ve ever owned, etc. etc. etc.

2) It might come in useful one day.

This is a multi-faceted one: I often find a requirement for something in my junk heap, like a 4-way plug or an audio lead. But if the junk heap gets too out of hand (like recently) you lose that benefit because you can’t find the thing you want anyway. There’s a bizarre phenomenon where you can hold on to an item for years, then throw it away then two weeks later you have a purpose for it. That only serves to reinforce the ‘hold on to it!’ feeling.

3) It’s not eco-friendly to chuck stuff away.

This is the main reason for still having much of my computer junk. I find it really appalling the amount of hardware that is trashed in the name of the newer hardware being more eco-friendly. Intelligently applied, a lot of old hardware is good for genuinely useful business tasks, but will never be applied for such :-(

4) Junk is free

This is not true. If I divide my rent by the cubic volume of my house, and then multiply that by the volume of junk, I would find out the ongoing cost of owning that stuff. However, part of the reason for having space is for putting junk in, so unless you have a better use for the space its storage really is free.

Another resource that junk uses up is “mindshare” in the modern buzzwordological parlance. If you have to think about your junk, even so much as to step over it once in a while, then it’s costing you in terms of your focus. While there aren’t more important things to be thinking about, that’s also fine.

I have a golden rule, which is that the junk doesn’t encroach on the living room, bedroom, bathroom or kitchen. I broke that when I needed to jiggle stuff around in the junk room, and haven’t yet recovered. I’m at the stage where I can’t put things away because the place to put them in is full or inaccessible.

Looks like I need to focus!