John North Editor & Publisher

A New Year’s Day column in The New York Times headlined “A clutter too deep for more bins and shelves” would have inspired a New Year’s resolution from me to clean up my office — but I couldn’t find the clipping in my piles of clutter until now.

Tara Parker-Pope — a name that surely does justice to a column about clutter — describes an industry thriving on a national obsession to declutter homes and lives.

Much of this industry, she noted, is focused on selling bins and organizers to clutter-holics for sorting and stashing their stuff.

But increasingly the anti-clutter business is being overtaken by self-help and psychotherapy gurus whose aim is to label and treat what is being termed a new “disorder” — compulsive hoarding.

Even as I write this, psychiatrists and psychologists are busily scanning the brains of people whose clutter overtakes their living, dining and sleeping spaces. Not to be outdone, bestselling authors and workshop hustlers are cashing in on the guilt felt by people who find parting with possessions difficult, if not impossible.

I grew anxious about my disorderliness when I read that David F. Tolin, director of the anxiety-disorders center at the Institute of Living in Hartford and an adjunct professor of psychiatry at Yale, told Parker-Pope that, contrary to most patients’ assertions, “It’s isn’t a house problem, it’s a person problem. The person needs to fundamentally change their behavior.”

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“Ms. Johnson explains that some people look at a shelf stacked with coffee mugs and see only mugs. But people with serious disorganization problems might see each one as a unique item — a souvenir from Yellowstone or a treasured gift from Grandma.”

In a similar assessment to Tolin’s, Johnson contended that usually the home space is adequate, but “the challenge is in teaching them to group, sort, set priorities and discard.”
Experts claim clutter is bad for the following reasons:

• Clutter causes confusion because people don’t know what they have and therefore don’t know what to buy and what not to buy.

• Clutter makes one inefficient — and waste costs money.

• Clutter causes stress, which, in turn, causes one to make blunders, such as buying more clutter-causing items.

As a procrastinator on clutter issues, I’ve always found that buying plastic bins and boxes was a good way to get items out of sight and out of mind without the dull and time-consuming process of sorting and, heaven forbid, discarding things.

Moreover, I think Johnson is so time and organization focused, she might be excessive in overlooking that some things, indeed, do have sentimental value.

Thus, I offer the following defense of clutterers:

• Given our wasteful, clutter-generating Western society, clutter problems likely are a sign of a balanced person who chooses not to fight the endless onslaught of junk mail, excess packaging and information overload.

• It takes inordinate time to do all that sorting and discarding — and a busy person doesn’t have much time. I wonder if these “neat freaks” have serious jobs?

• Regarding the coffee mugs, Johnson sure takes a cold and impersonal approach. What about history? It seems very typical for Americans to throw every item out as soon as it gets in the way of the next new thing.

So, I say, clutterers unite — and let’s stop the organizers from eradicating our much-beloved chaos.

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John North, publisher and editor of the Daily Planet, may be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .