Something You Should Know
How to Happily Overcome Clutter & Why Pop Culture is so Valuable - SYSK Choice
Sat, 09 Nov 2024
When you shop for big ticket items like a house or car, it matters what day you choose to go – and probably for reasons you hadn’t thought of. This episode begins with the best and worst days to house hunt or car shop. https://www.weatherads.io/blog/how-weather-affects-consumer-behavior-and-purchase-decisions Clutter can really sneak up on you. First, it’s a drawer, then a spare closet, then the extra bedroom gets filled with all sorts of stuff. By then you have a house full of clutter that can be hard to manage. Joining me with some very simple and practical advice is Tracy McCubbin. Tracy is an organizing expert and author of the book Make Space for Happiness (https://amzn.to/3Um3Eny). Listen as she reveals the harm clutter can cause in your life and how to fix it. Who doesn’t like pop culture? And if you do, you should know there is a lot of it on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington D.C. Joining me to discuss why pop culture is so popular and important is Kenneth Cohen, a research associate at the museum and editor of a book called Entertainment Nation: How Music, Television, Film, Sports, and Theater Shaped the United States (https://amzn.to/3DuRPnZ). You are invited as Kenneth takes us on a tour of some of the items in the collection including Dorothy’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, TV Superman’s costume, Prince’s yellow cloud guitar, Jerry Seinfeld’s puffy shirt and more. Few of us are sticklers for proper etiquette most of the time, however, there is one etiquette rule that always has been and always will be true – and you should use it whenever you can. Listen as I reveal what it is. Source: Valerie Sokolosky, author of Do It Right (https://amzn.to/3zGHX9G). PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! INDEED: Get a $75 SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING Support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms & conditions apply. SHOPIFY: Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk . Go to SHOPIFY.com/sysk to grow your business – no matter what stage you’re in! MINT MOBILE: Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at https://MintMobile.com/something! $45 upfront payment required (equivalent to $15/mo.). New customers on first 3 month plan only. Additional taxes, fees, & restrictions apply. HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk DELL: Dell Technologies’ Early Holiday Savings event is live and if you’ve been waiting for an AI-ready PC, this is their biggest sale of the year! Tech enthusiasts love this sale because it’s all the newest hits plus all the greatest hits all on sale at once. Shop Now at https://Dell.com/deals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the best days to go house hunting or car shopping?
today on something you should know if you're going house hunting or car shopping there are certain days you should and should not go then how to get organized and clear out the clutter where do you start organize your junk drawer you've all got one every house has a junk drawer get rid of the broken rubber bands the dead batteries organize your junk drawer then see what it feels like when you need something you know exactly where to go for it
Then, one etiquette rule that's always right, never fails, and you should always follow. And a fascinating peek inside the Smithsonian's collection of American pop culture.
So, you know, it's interesting. When people see our pop culture materials, they often say, oh, you have the, as if there's only one. And of course, in many of these cases, with the ruby slippers, with Superman costumes, with all sorts of other things, especially costume items, there's often multiples.
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Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. You know, the weather. The weather influences so much of your life. When you stop to think about it, it influences what you wear, what you do, when you do it. But what you may not realize that it can also influence what you buy. If you're planning to buy something big like a car or a house, you really should check the weather first.
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Chapter 2: What is clutter and why is it a problem?
We've created these stories around our stuff and we become attached to them. So because of these stories, we don't let go and our homes start to fill up with too much stuff.
I've often wondered why people would have so much stuff that they have to rent a storage unit. Because if it's in a storage unit, you never see it because you'd have to drive down there and go look at it. Maybe that's an indication that you have too much stuff.
Exactly. Look, I have helped people declutter. I've been a professional declutter and organizer for 15 years now. I have decluttered so many storage units. And I can tell you that there is nothing, there is nothing in those storage units that's worth more than someone's paying to store it.
But because we've told ourselves this story that this is somehow important, then we're financially taxing ourselves. And I think that's the thing to understand. This is what I tell people all the time, that your home and your stuff is a tool. your home is a tool. It's where you rest. It's where you replenish. It's where you renew yourself, right?
Where you connect with your family over the dinner table or get a good night's sleep. But if it's so full of stuff that it can't function, it's detracting from you. Look, they've done the science. They've tested this. They've done so much research into how much Energy, our clutter sucks from us. If you live in a cluttered home, you have elevated cortisol. They've done it. They've proved it.
So this is always what I say to people. It's not about creating a perfect home so that you look good on Pinterest. It's about creating a home that works for you.
Don't you think, though, that there are some people, that it's a spectrum, that there's people on the different parts of the spectrum where they can tolerate more clutter than people on the other end and not get stressed out by it? Some people just are wired different.
100%. And I don't make some edict about you can only have 30 books and five shirts. It doesn't work that way. What's different? Everybody's different. And like you said, some people are collectors. Some people, like I just worked with a woman who loves roosters. She loves them. She has so many rooster things around her house. It makes her so happy. It would make me nuts. But But I respect that.
But what I'm talking about is when it stops working. If you start to feel like you don't own your stuff anymore, but your stuff owns you, that's when the clutter becomes a problem. So it's not a sort of, it has to be one way and everybody's the same. It's, has it stopped working for you? Do you have rooms in your house that you can't go into anymore?
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Chapter 3: How can I start decluttering my home?
The majority of people in the uncluttered kitchen took the carrot. And what they think that is about, and I'm not sure if you've discussed this with your listeners, but there's something that they've found called decision fatigue, which is where it's basically that sort of completely oversimplified.
But the part of your brain that makes decisions, the more decisions it makes in a day, the more tired it gets. And when that part of your brain gets tired, it defaults to making bad decisions. So it's why when you wake up in the morning, you feel fantastic. You're like committed to I'm just going to eat grilled chicken and steamed broccoli and I'll be great all day.
But then you've worked a 12 hour day and the kids are screaming and you find yourself eating a whole pepperoni pizza. You're making a bad decision because you've made so many decisions. So I like to say to people that clutter is a constant decision. You always have to make a decision about your clutter. Do I need this? Do I like it? Do I want it? Where should it live? Where should I put it away?
Clutter is a constant to-do list. So having a house that's really full of clutter puts you in a space where you're making decisions all the time. And you basically just put yourself into decision fatigue.
And so for everybody who's ever thought, you know, we really need to get rid of this stuff. The task seems so daunting. No one knows where to begin. So imagine they don't begin anywhere.
Exactly. And there's also something else that happens in the brain. And we've all experienced this in our lives. Like you have a pile of clutter on the dining room table and you walk past it every day, you kind of start to not see it anymore. Like your eyes literally zone it out. And then all of a sudden you're gonna have people over for dinner and you're like, oh, wow, I gotta clean that off.
So we really start to see it and people get stuck. People get stuck on knowing how to start, where to start, and are really just daunted by the task. So I always tell people a couple things when it comes to their decluttering journey. First of all, spend a week just living in your house and figuring out where your house doesn't work.
Are your kitchen counters so covered with stuff that you just don't even go in there anymore? You don't cook anymore. Are you parking your car outside because your garage is so full? Figure out where your house doesn't work. And then also, what would you gain by decluttering that space? What's the positive outcome?
So if you clean out your garage, does that mean this winter you're going to be able to park your car in there and not have to scrape off the ice every morning? What are you going to gain by decluttering?
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Chapter 4: What are the emotional impacts of clutter?
And so here's the thing that often happens. I mean, I'm not a real messy person, but I'm not real neat either. I mean, I'm somewhere in the middle. And I go through these phases where I'll want to declutter and I'll take something, a drawer, a closet, whatever, and I'll do it. But it doesn't take too long for the clutter to start coming back in.
Like, I can do it, but keeping it that way is a problem.
you need a regular decluttering practice. You know, it's like cleaning the house. You clean your house and it doesn't stay clean, right? It gets dirty and you have to stay on top of decluttering. The clutter builds up. The holidays are right around the corner. We're gonna get gifts we don't want. You know, you're gonna like clothes you don't wanna wear anymore.
You've gotta make decluttering a part of your regular process. And this is also really interesting for people to think about. Decluttering, organizing, and cleaning your house are three separate tasks, right? I think a lot of people smush them together, but they're very different. Cleaning your house is cleaning your house. Getting a sponge, you know, cleaner, cleaning your house.
Organizing is finding a home for everything, putting it away, knowing where it lives. And decluttering is getting rid of what you don't want, need, or use. So I think people get really log jammed when they try and do them all together. And they need to understand that there are three separate tasks.
There are people who have a messy environment, a messy office, a messy living room, whatever. And they'll say, I know where everything is. When you go into a house and you hear that, are there people that really can live in a mess and know where everything is? Or is that baloney?
It's baloney. Because what they're really saying is, I know where everything is. It's in that giant pile on my desk that it's going to take me 22 minutes to find it when I have to go through everything. You know, there's this idea, and a lot of people have said this, well, if I put it away, I'm not going to know where it is. And I'm like, that's not, you know, I need a visual reminder.
I feel like if you put something away and you make a conscious decision about
you know these are where my pens live my pens always live in this drawer i put them away i always know where to get them you won't need the visual reminder anymore so i think when people say that they haven't set the systems up right this is where my tax documents go this is where my x y or z goes so it's about setting up systems so that everybody in the house knows where to put things away because then you know where to find them
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Chapter 5: How does clutter affect decision-making?
I've been doing this for 15 years. I think I did the math recently. I have something like 40,000 hours of decluttering and organizing under my belt. I can count on three fingers how many times somebody has called me and said, oh, I want that thing back. Once it's gone, it's gone. And so it's about getting in the process of letting go. Is this thing going to help me? Is it worth it?
You know, piece of furniture that you may not use in your new house. Is it worth the X amount of dollars it's going to cost to move it across town, right? Like do the economic math of it. And it's the... And it's the sort of muck and mire of the decision making. And once you make the decision, you feel great. So it's exactly what you said.
You feel guilty or you feel like you're not being smart with your money. But if you can work through those decisions and let the thing go, you don't really ever think about it again.
You know, I think what often happens, certainly happened to me when I've had clutter, is clutter nags at you. When you see it, it just kind of nags at you that there's something wrong. And this conversation has explained why that happens, and I appreciate the advice on how to get rid of it. Tracy McCubbin has been my guest.
She is an expert on clutter and organization, and she's author of a book called Make Space for Happiness. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Tracy.
And this has been great, Mike. Thank you so much for having me on.
I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.
And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director. You might know me from The League, Veep, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.
We come together to host Unspooled, a podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits, fan favorites, must-sees, and in case you missed them. We're talking Parasite to Home Alone.
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Chapter 6: What are effective strategies for maintaining an organized space?
And so that exhibit, which had one of the surgery rooms and a bunch of the props, including the famous sign, hometown sign post that has all the characters' hometowns listed on it. This exhibit drew over a million people. It was the first time the American History Museum needed time ticket entry.
And it really told museum and Smithsonian leadership that popular culture was an important part of American culture and that it needed to be preserved and interpreted and that the American public really wanted to see and engage with it. And without that turning point, it's hard to imagine the robust collecting that sort of led up to now.
And certainly the interest in the MASH TV show has waned somewhat since the 1980s, but think about it. I mean, the way you described the exhibit, it wasn't a big, huge, complete catalog of things from the show. It was more select things from the show, not a big exhibit.
And yet you said that it was the first time, the very first time that the Smithsonian had to timestamp tickets, I guess, to spread the crowd out across the day.
imagine that people really wanted to see that that much that's right you know people really connected with that program a broad cross-section of america really connected with that program and the show had the ability to turn on a dime from humor to really powerful reflection on the human costs of armed conflict and you know that really resonated with americans that the last episode of mash was
you know, by percentages, the most watched TV show until the 2010s. So, you know, it really was a powerful program.
You have at the Smithsonian and in your book, you have the red pair of slippers that Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz. And it is such an interesting story about the pair you have because there was more than one. So tell the story of the ruby red slippers.
Well, they tell so many stories, right? There's the story in the movie and in the book that preceded the movie. You know, in the book, the slippers are silver and the path is gold.
And there's a lot of conjecture about what the original author was intending in an era when the monetization, the discussion of how American monetary policy was going to be tied to gold or silver values was a really important political debate at the time the book came out. But the slippers have real relevance today, too, in sort of a real world crime sense.
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Chapter 7: How do emotional attachments influence clutter?
the Superman costumes were stitched differently for different positions that Superman might be in so that the suit looked skin tight no matter what position he was in. So there was a quote unquote flying suit for when he was posted horizontally that would look skin tight.
But if he stood up and walked in that suit, it would wrinkle and crinkle in certain ways that were unflatteringly visible on television. And so they had a walking suit and ours is the walking suit. So used by George Reeves. When he was walking around in character.
Is there any sense or maybe you don't care, but is there any sense of the value of something like that?
We don't care about that. So yeah, I mean, you know, lots of people send us messages about items that they have, or asking us about items that we have. And we don't value our collections in that way. And so we don't really consider our collections from a monetary point of view. We're trying to take care of these things in perpetuity.
You have a baseball autographed by Babe Ruth, which probably has a lot of value, but I imagine there are a lot of baseballs floating around that were autographed by Babe Ruth, so talk about yours.
Yeah, so the Babe Ruth baseball, some things in our collection, we don't have great documentation on. They come to us, we know they're important, but it's hard to sort of pin down precise details. So that baseball is, the signature is authenticated. It's certainly Babe Ruth. And it was either from 1918 or from 1921. And we know that because the ball came to us
from somebody who grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and told us that Babe Ruth signed it when he came through Scranton, Pennsylvania, and he was really only in Scranton, Pennsylvania, playing baseball twice.
And so once was after the 1918 season, when baseball players, Babe Ruth had just won the World Series with the Red Sox right before he would be traded to the New York Yankees and the Red Sox would go a very long time before they went again. And all baseball players after the end of the season were told they had to find essential work because World War I was still going on.
The country was actually recovering from a flu pandemic in that year. And so many baseball players signed to play for factory baseball teams and claimed that they were doing factory work as part of their essential work. Babe Ruth signed with Bethlehem Steel, which was run by a guy named Charles Schwab, who's Name is familiar for all sorts of other reasons now.
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Chapter 8: What common mistakes do people make when decluttering?
Oh, man. So that was, you know, before my time at the museum. It was donated in 1993. The guitar first appears in Purple Rain in the movie. And only after Prince's death, when the curatorial staff at Paisley Park, his home, came to the Smithsonian and wanted to determine the history of the example in our collection, because there are other cloud guitars.
We took that guitar, we actually CAT scanned that guitar to look beneath the top layer of it and discovered that there are six layers of paint and that the guitar's body and neck were built by repurposing other smaller parts, some of which reflect the curves and lines of much older violins, like sort of 18th, 19th century violins.
And so the guitar, I think, symbolizes Prince's ability to combine and repurpose styles to express his own unique individual identity. You think about his costumes that sometimes pull elements from the Edwardian era around 1900, right, with high collars and ruffled shirts that were popular actually even in earlier periods.
and then he couples that with this electric guitar that keeps changing color and evokes late 20th century pop music but also violin scrolls from 200 years earlier the guitar i think is a statement about how we all pull from the past when we present ourselves today it's almost like the yellow cloud guitars prince's way way more innovative response to retro fashion you know it's you you want to bring back bell bottoms or high-waisted jeans come on here's how you make yourself timeless really
I'm sure just about everybody knows Kermit the Frog, but the Kermit the Frog that you have in your collection looks very different than what I think of as Kermit the Frog, because yours is one of the very first.
Our Kermit the Frog is certainly one of the first ones, if not the first. Kermit the Frog sort of premieres in 1955 on a very short program called Sam and Friends that Jim Henson led. It was a five minute show on Washington DC's NBC affiliate station that ran in the evenings. There were all kinds of crazy characters in there. There was a snake named Icy Gunk.
There was a French rat, spoke in a French accent named Pierre. You know, and so there were these little short segments of these guys sort of doing wacky things or having wacky conversations. The original Kermit has split ping pong ball for eyes. The green comes from one of his mother's discarded jackets. And there's a sleeve because sort of operated the early Kermit like a sock puppet.
And the sleeve is made from a leg of Jim Henson's jeans. the muppets which evolved from salmon friends these are a group of oddballs um and and over time henson really became very conscious and intentional in embracing that characterization his shows become a lot about being accepted for who you are no matter what you look like
You started out by talking about MASH and how you had a whole exhibit on MASH. And then, you know, a couple decades later, certainly one of the most popular shows on television was Seinfeld. And the item that you have in your book anyway, maybe you have other items in the museum, but the item you talk about and show in the book is...
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