Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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You can hear my conversation with Neil Vogel now, wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. So I've always been someone who loves, loves, loves, loves junk. I wish someone would come in and just rob me blind of my stuff. so I don't have to do it. My wife has a garage full of stuff and I have a garage full of nothing.
I don't know if you've noticed this, but it seems like every couple is made up of this exact combination. Someone who throws stuff away. This is like one of the boxes that I would love to get rid of. And someone who holds onto it for dear life. Like if I want to ship something, you know, I can ship it back in this box. Pranoy Roy and Haley Brochek have found a way to manage their differences.
Because of love. But also because you really don't have a choice when you live in a 600-square-foot apartment in New York City. We have a very small balcony that we are feuding with pigeons over right now. Every weekend. Yeah. Sometimes it'll be, I'm just on this kick where I'm getting rid of everything. And he has to say, like, wait, you might actually use this.
Like, this is something that you wear a lot. And I'm like, oh yeah, I didn't even like think about that. I'm just in the mindset of like, get rid of, get rid of. My goal is to like hold on to things so I can give it to somebody in the future. If we have children, if our relatives, our friends, something that kind of pass on to that also gives them the joy, then I can hold on to it.
Kind of thinking outside of yourself helps, you know, holding on to things. We have so much stuff. In fact, 71% of Americans say they buy things they already have because they can't find the original in all their clutter. At the same time, the minimalist aesthetic is extremely popular, even if, for most of us, all those clean lines and clear surfaces are way out of reach.
I'm Jonquilin Hill, and this week on Explain It to Me from Vox, it's spring cleaning. My name is Emily Stewart, and I'm a senior correspondent at Business Insider. Emily used to work here at Vox. And over the years, she's written a ton about our growing mountain of stuff and why we're so eager to get rid of it. A lot of baby boomers, right, are aging and they are downsizing.
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Chapter 2: Why is it hard to let go of clutter?
So I did an interview about this, actually, when I was still at Vox with an academic, and she kind of pinned this back to like the 1920s, really, because that doesn't just like mass consumption. It really is about like mass production starts to hit. And so it's not just that like you're not just buying like a dress at the dressmaker down the street, like these are being made in like a mass scale.
And so, of course, like the Great Depression hits that kind of goes on pause a little bit, and then in the 1950s, it really ramps up, right? People are buying their houses, they're buying their washing machines. Boiling action. That's the secret of really clean clothes. And there's a lot of things available. And you have, you know, the Sears catalog that comes to your house in the mail.
That's a very new Sears catalog. It's the Mad Men era of advertising. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. And so people are seeing a lot of ads. And there is something, I think, like social to this as well. Like we compare ourselves to other people.
And whether or not we like necessarily realize it, one of the ways we compare ourselves is like the things that we have, the things that we buy. Again, maybe in the 50s, it was like your neighbors, right? Like which washing machine did they have? What car do they have? Well, then all of a sudden you have like the television. And it's like, okay, well, what do the people on Friends have?
Like what fashion do they have? New haircut? Necklace? Dress? Boots? Boots! Now, they're a little more than I usually spend on boots. Um, or rent. And now we have the internet. If you think about these like micro trends that kind of sweep through, right? Like, was it last year that those mini Trader Joe's bags were all of a sudden trendy?
Trader Joe's came out with new Easter tote bags that everyone's going crazy for. Every single paycheck I get goes to these bags. And like, not to be rude to the bags, but truly who cares? Are you kidding me? These little micro totes? Okay, on the other end of the spectrum, when I think about the kind of luxury home aesthetic we're all supposed to be aspiring to, it's all about minimalism.
You know, I think of Kim Kardashian's home tour, and it's all beige and open spaces. We're in my family kitchen, and everything in my house is really minimal. I find that there's so much chaos out in the world that when I come home, I want it to be just really quiet and I want everything to feel calming. I mean, I feel like that is kind of very millennial coded to some extent, right?
Like the millennial gray of everybody has this gray house and everything's from Ikea. I mean, I'm sitting on... Oh my, as I sit at my Ikea desk. So I think, you know, but minimalism, I mean, it's one of those things where it's like understandable, right? And this is not a new thing invented now.
Like I think a lot of people have a sense that like we live in this very consumerist society and feel kind of a desire and need to like push back against that. This feeling that we are inundated with a lot of stuff. Maybe it would be nice to have not so much stuff. Now I do sort of think that minimalism can be a thing that we lie to ourselves about.
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Chapter 3: How does our upbringing influence our attachment to belongings?
I mean, you don't want to do that. Yeah. And like, I don't know, it just activates something. All the things just flood back to you. I think that the solution to getting what you theoretically want, you know, rationally is to sort of work with your system, right? You can't fight the system. So you just got to figure out ways around it.
And so one thing I do personally is just like take pictures, right? If I take pictures of a knickknack, and so I do see the pictures, they come up on my screensaver and stuff. it activates those memories and I feel good, right? So I think, you know, as long as you have some kind of cue there, some way to get back to those memories, it's still good.
And obviously a picture is a lot less space than the actual things itself. There's another category of stuff like the books I'm holding on to because I'll supposedly read them one day or the clothes that I tell myself I'll fit into again. I have very expensive jeans that I used to fit in.
uh back in my 20s i'm 42 now and i just still have the hope my style is probably outdated and i still hold on to things because i think you know what i might use this one day we have an ideal future self, right? I mean, you can picture it. But the thing that you don't want to experience is that situation where you're like, oh, now I really want to have this thing and I got rid of it, right?
That feeling, that negative feeling is weighted much more strongly than the little cost of like just keeping it around. And that's, you know, a lot of scientific literature showing that we are much more sensitive to negative feelings outcomes, losses and any kind of negative feeling than we are to sort of positive things.
Why do our brain, do we, is there a hypothesis on why the negative is so much more powerful? Survival, right? Negative is something bad happens to you, right? Physical pain, some predator, something scary, you know, all these things. And so there's just a much richer kind of map in your brain of all the negative things. And it's just, it just gets more attention.
You know, I envy minimalists in that they're able to shed things without having a lot of hangups. Why is it easier for some people than for others? Yeah, I think it has a lot to do with that decision-making process. So if you're somebody who's generally indecisive and you know that like, oh, I don't know, should I keep it? Should I not?
And you really go back and forth and you have a hard time making that decision. Again, your brain knows that you're gonna have a hard time making that decision. And so it's gonna be really hard to just confront that. But if you're somebody like me, who's more impulsive and not troubled by making decisions, I don't have that much difficulty. I'm like, whatever, I'm just going to toss it.
Some people, again, like my wife, for example, she has a very, very difficult time making decisions. And guess what? She tends to be someone who holds onto things, right? And so it really, I think it is very strongly correlated. Yeah, and there's the really tricky question, right?
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