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The real reason that you’re holding on to your clutter
As a new TV series shows participants just how much stuff they’ve accumulated in their lives, Miranda Levy explores the emotional ties that bind us to our belongings
On the kitchen island of Michelle Parr’s house there were to be found: 100 jam jars; a crate of school exercise books; assorted pans; a globe; six bottles of shampoo and a stack of Twinkle magazines from 1980.
Parr, 49, was unable to walk into her spare room because of the floor-to-ceiling boxes. “So I just shut the door on it,” says the former BBC script editor, who now runs a craft business from her home in Bramhall, near Manchester. “Another room was full of my craft stuff, cardboard, glitter and scissors, spilling onto the floor. It was like someone had vomited a lifetime of stuff.”
A fan of amateur dramatics, Parr had a self-proclaimed shoe fetish and was the owner of nine bursting wardrobes. “But my Dorothy costume and ‘dead bride’ outfit were stuffed in with all my other clothes, most of which were black so I couldn’t tell them apart,” she says. Parr couldn’t move her belongings into the garage, because of the four sofas crammed in there.
“There’s quite a lot of mess, Mummy,” said her sevenyear-old son
Nathaniel, at the time.
Parr – who had downsized with Nathaniel into a four-bedroom semi after her divorce in 2016 – always made sure they had clear bedrooms and a place to eat. But as she freely admits, otherwise, the place was chaos.
“Chaos” – or “Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome” – is one clue you have a problem, according to the professional declutterers. And right now, they are having a moment, as evidenced by the popularity of the BBC1 prime-time show, Sort Your Life Out. A recent programme attracted 3.9 million viewers: no small feat in the age of streaming.
Sort Your Life Out, presented by former X-factor contestant Stacey Solomon, is a makeover show in the Changing Rooms mould. A SWAT team takes over a family’s cluttered home and puts it in order; the climax involves the candidates facing every single possession being removed from their home and spread over a warehouse floor. Then, the experts help them sort through what they want to keep, and what to dispose of. The show is goodnatured, practical and surprisingly moving, with lines such as: “Do we really need 124 towels or 106 spanners?”
Dilly Carter is a professional organiser, and one of the hosts of Sort Your Life Out. “The show succeeds because it’s so relatable,” she says. “No matter what size house you have, or who you live with, you can relate to the family who have 45 mobile phone chargers, or who have recently lost a parent or a spouse. And if it’s not you, it could be your sister, brother or parent.”
The warehouse scene in particular is universal, she says: “Everyone watching thinks: imagine if that was my house!”
The show resonates, she adds, because we all have “stuff”, and we have an emotional attachment to it. And like the families on the show, we can’t bear to throw anything away.
“The first thing to emphasise is that it’s not about your stuff, it’s about you,” says Juliet Landau-Pope, a social-sciences-academic-turned-professional organiser, and the author of What’s Your Excuse For Not Clearing Your Clutter? “Most of what we buy or collect is not because of our physical needs, but because of our emotional ones. Our possessions represent a tangled mix of anxieties, aspirations, fears and fantasies. They link us through memory to the past and also with hope for the future.”
It is perhaps helpful to draw a distinction between living among clutter, and being a “hoarder” – a term which people with busy homes might use light-heartedly to describe themselves. Hoarding disorder is now recognised as a complex mental health condition.
“People exist along a continuum of tidiness,” says Sharon Morein, associate professor and head of the Possessions and Hoarding Collective at Anglia Ruskin University. “But living in clutter can become hoarding disorder when it’s chronic, distressing and maladaptive – for example: you can’t sleep in your bed, or use your bathroom, because of all the possessions you have.”
For most of us, thankfully, household clutter is more an annoyance, a manageable accumulation of years of acquisition. “We live in a society where we are constantly encouraged to buy stuff,” says Landau-Pope. “And so we accumulate: through shopping, the presents we receive, souvenirs from holidays. It starts from childhood: we are taught to play shopping games, but not how to let things go. People don’t learn ‘exit strategies’ – we aren’t instructed what to do with the old stuff.”
The BBC’s Dilly Carter points to an instant and increasing buying culture. “Everyone wants everything, now,” she says. “From my sunbed here in Marbella, I can buy something from Amazon on my phone. And despite the financial crisis, we show no signs of slowing down. We just buy cheaper things.”
It’s true, however, that some people amass more than others, and at different stages.
“Having surplus stuff is often associated with life-changes such as a bereavement, a divorce, or the children leaving home,” says Landau-Pope. “Older people, unsurprisingly, have more clutter. Immigrant families bring things with them so they have a stronger sense of connection to their ancestors: a sari, or a set of Shabbat candles.”
Comfortable clutter has been part of Ben Afia’s life since childhood. “My grandfather was born in Turkey,” says the 52-year-old Nottingham-based branding consultant. “He ran a fabric and furniture store and my earliest memories are of climbing around the items in his shop.” But then, when Afia was in his second year of university – “appropriately studying archaeology, the clutter from previous generations” – his mother died. At the age of 21, Afia was left with the contents of his family home.
“My parents had already split up, so I inherited all of it, including their wedding cutlery from the late 60s,” he says. “When I drove to Nottingham to start my first job, I had to hire a Luton van to carry 30 boxes with me. I started collecting more stuff to give me a sense of secu