An unexpected freedom in the COVID era

One of the lesser wake-up calls of the COVID-19 pandemic happened when Americans, forced to work from home with nowhere to go, spent some time with their stuff.

Stuff that clutters their homes, chokes garages and overwhelms storage units. Stuff that junks up the shelves behind us while we Zoom through the workday. As people turned spare bedrooms into home offices and remote classrooms, the big COVID-19 cleanup of 2020 became a thing; people struggled to manage the world inside since nobody could control what was threatening outside.

Across the nation, people began to get rid of stuff. Some took a page from professional organizer Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing” and began tossing out stuff that no longer inspired joy. Others took inspiration from Margareta Magnusson’s “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleansing: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from A Lifetime of Clutter” and said farewell to things they no longer needed so after they died, their loved ones wouldn’t be burdened with the cleanup. Donation centers and junk removers saw a big spike.

“A lot of it was psychological,” said Gigi Lehman, a San Antonio empty nester who recently celebrated getting rid of enough things that she could finally let go of a storage unit. “A lot of what we have as possessions is aspirational; a lot of what we hold on to is because we want to lead the kind of life where we would use this or where we would still use that.”

Lehman had been holding on to things she was saving for her adult children and found the kids didn’t necessarily want all the stuff that was waiting for them.

“My children are millennials. They have different attitudes toward possessions than their parents do,” she said.

They also have a different idea of what they want than their parents. It makes sense, then, to get rid of things that boast a combination of sentimental value and dust. No sense in keeping Dad’s burnt orange La-Z-Boy when the rightful heir would rather have the Ekolsund from Ikea in gunnared light brown-pink. And it isn’t about being spendthrifts, either — millennials might spend on Gladware instead of reusing the spaghetti sauce jar, but they’ll use the same reusable grocery bag for six months.

It also isn’t just about the things that fill our cabinets and closets. America is changing. Families used to live in the same house for decades, because owning a home was the foundation of the American dream that could be passed on through generations, especially if it was filled with heirloom furnishings. But being able to downsize is a luxury that frees homeowners from stairs that seemed like a good idea when they had 30-year-old knees. And those sophisticated home offices lined with shelves filled with volumes of reference books or leather-bound classics are a lot harder to manage than a clear desktop and a Kindle Fire. The 22-edition World Book doesn’t really have a place in today’s world.

The pandemic has cost Americans a lot, but the COVID Cleanup gave us an opportunity to free ourselves from stuff. It also gave us a chance to take an uninterrupted look at what we want, what we have accumulated, and what that says about who we are becoming. More important, it has given the haves and the haveenoughs an opportunity to see exactly how much we can do without — and how much we can afford to give the have-nots.

At a time when so many are still hurting, that’s something we ought to hang on to.

File photo Shelves filled with books are much harder to manage than a Kindle Fire. De-clutter!