There’s a vast difference between being messy and being dirty
The gifted actor Christopher Walken told an interviewer recently that he’d like to play a psychiatrist — and that he believes he’d be good at it.
He went to see a psychiatrist once, he told Petra Weller for The Interview People — not because he thought he needed one, but because someone had suggested that he talk to this particular doctor.
The psychiatrist worked from his apartment and, as Walken described it, the phone rang during his visit and the fellow got up to take the call in another room. He walked through a swinging door into the kitchen and, for an instant, “I saw the rest of where he lived and there were all these dirty dishes.
“He was obviously dirty, and I thought, ‘You can’t tell me about my life if you can’t wash your dishes.’ ”
I thought that was an interesting reaction. Arguably, it was judgmental. It’s not that many of us aren’t quick to judge: We draw conclusions about people based on how they look or what they wear or what they choose to have for lunch. And to Walken, the fact that the man had dirty dishes piled up in his kitchen made him an unsuitable therapist. What if the sink was clogged — and the phone call was from the plumber saying he was on his way?
I thought it was interesting, too, that Walken seemed to correlate messy with dirty. To me, they’re not the same: I think you can be one without the other. Dirty makes me uneasy; messy doesn’t.
Maybe the guy just doesn’t like to wash dishes, so he uses everything in the cupboard first — and then washes them all at the same time. I’m as judgmental as the next person, but I don’t know that I’d dismiss someone as a competent professional based on the number of dishes in her sink. It happens that I wash dishes as soon as I’ve used them, but I don’t believe this says anything more profound about me than that I wash dishes as soon as I’ve used them.
And yet, collectively, we seem to take a dim view of messiness — to view it as some sort of moral failing or character flaw. We disapprove.
The novel Heartburn, Nora Ephron’s darkly funny 1983 roman à clef set in Washington, opens with the protagonist, Rachel Samstat, having learned that her journalist husband, Mark Feldman, is having an affair with Thelma Rice, the wife of the undersecretary of state.
“I know that lady,” Samstat’s housekeeper, Juanita, tells her. “She no good.”
Samstat, who is pregnant, does not need to be convinced of this. Still, she asks: “What’s wrong with her?”
Turns out Juanita had worked for Rice 10 years before. “She very messy,” she replied.
Why does morality invariably seep into the mix? Why is messiness perceived as a weakness, a condition one hopes to overcome — or wishes one could?
“I’m definitely a messy person,” said actress Katie Holmes. “I know where everything is, but I just can’t organize. I don’t make lists and find scripts on the laundry machine, and under my bed, or in the bathroom, kitchen. It’s bad; I really need to take control.”
It’s a safe bet that fellow actress Charlize Theron won’t be leaving scripts under her bed any time soon. “I have a problem with cabinets being messy and people just shoving things in and closing the door,” she has said. “I will lie in bed and not be able to sleep because I’ll say to myself: ‘I think I saw something in that cabinet that just shouldn’t be there.’ ”
Despite continual exhortations from bloggers, professional organizers and House and Garden TV that I simplify my life by decluttering it, I continue to be surrounded by the sort-of-but-not-too-terribly messy spaces that are mine. And I’m quite happy in them. Sure, I spend more time searching for items that weren’t where I thought I’d left them than I would if I were more organized. But it beats lying awake fretting over stray items in closets.
“Are you sick of home decorating shows and lifestyle magazines telling you to declutter your life?” Lea Winerman asked in the opening paragraph of a piece in the American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology last fall. “Would you rather just learn to live with your overflowing desk and messy shelves?”
She went on to describe a study in the September 2013 issue of Psychological Science that concluded that a messy desk encourages creative thinking. (As Albert Einstein famously quipped: “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”)
Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management found that “working in a tidy room encourages people to do socially responsible, normatively ‘good’ things like eat healthfully and give to charity, but working in a messy room seems to help them try new things and come up with creative ideas,” as Winerman wrote.
Vohs and her colleagues did different experiments in which subjects were seated in either a tidy room or one strewn with books and pa- pers. In one, they were given questionnaires to fill out, then asked to contribute to charity and offered the choice of an apple or a chocolate bar as they left: Fully 82 per cent of those in the tidy room donated money — compared with just 47 per cent of those in the messy room; 67 per cent of those in the neat room chose the apple over the chocolate bar; just 20 per cent of subjects in the messy room did.
In another experiment, 24 subjects in a messy room and 24 in a tidy one were asked to come up with novel uses for a Ping-Pong ball. Ultimately, they had the same number of ideas, but as Winerman wrote, a panel of independent raters found the ideas of participants in the messy room to be significantly more creative.
“Relationship partners, employers, everyone wants you to be neat, but there may be times being messy is good, too,” Vohs said. In the wake of the study’s findings, “messy people feel vindicated big time.”