Do I need that? - #32

Consumption culture, here I come.

I bought a dress this week. I was celebrating a big personal achievement, and as a “pick one toy” treat, I bought a dress. I considered a few factors: could I adapt it across multiple seasons? Were the colors classic? Would this dress work on Zoom and at a party? Would this dress serve me for many years to come? 

The answer had to be “yes” across the board, or I couldn’t get it. There is room for sexiness and joy and glamor in my life, but there’s just not room for stuff. When the dress arrives, another piece will head to either the free bin in town or the thrift shop. Space is limited, and because space is limited, I am always looking for ways to be better organized, less wasteful, and more thoughtful. Not necessarily succeeding, but always looking. 

In our town of 180, there is no house-to-house trash pick-up. All the trash and recycling produced in a household is that household’s responsibility to sort, compress, and drive to the town garbage shed. Every Tuesday, the shed is emptied. And if when you arrive with your organized trash, you find the trash bins full, then you take your trash back home. No piles of bags can be strewn. No “someone else’s problem”. Your trash, your problem.

To mitigate this, we make our own fizzy water, we save paper products for kindling, we buy as much food as possible through local farmers, and in general, we just try to not buy things we don’t need, and when we do need them, we do our best to buy them locally. No shipping boxes, no plastic bags. We make ongoing lists of things we can’t find locally so if we do need to order them online, we’re ordering them all together. Or in some cases, waiting until we have a trip to the city to find them. 

Considering all this, it’s no surprise that when Netflix posted a show called “Get Organized,” it felt right up my alley. I love organization because it prevents build-up. When you’re disorganized, you end up with ten different bottles of sunscreen because you couldn’t find the first nine. Get Organized is hosted by the women of The Home Edit, a home organizing business. From their site, “The Home Edit organizes every space in the home, from bedrooms and kitchens, to closets and pantries. Every project receives meticulous attention to detail, carefully considered systems, and our signature stylized aesthetic.” Their signature aesthetic is the rainbow. 

The Home Edit is the American answer to Marie Kondo, also part of the Netflix kingdom of content. Marie Kondo’s original conceit (prior to her launching a consumer goods arm), was to let stuff go, and then organize thoughtfully what’s left. Kondo would bring over an assortment of old shoe boxes to roll socks into, and the contestants would cry to her about their dysfunctional relationship with stuff. They acknowledge emotional barriers to letting things go, express their shame in allowing things they don’t use to overtake their lives, and promise to live more in tune with their needs while Kondo nods in the way you would to acknowledge a child’s extremely manageable booboo. “Maybe next time you won’t run when I explicitly tell you not to,” or in this case, “maybe you won’t use Target to fill the void in your life when you could just journal.”

Tidying Up with Marie Kondo is a quiet show that addresses challenging feelings brought on through consumption culture, encouraging people to face every single item in their home, themselves, and then either donate it or organize it, typically in boxes that had already served their original purpose. 

Get Organized is not that show. 

Get Organized is the Vegas-ification of sorting and storing. Look, I love the idea of organizing. I do think it’s a valid business, to help people get organized, but this show does not help people get organized — the hosts and their helpers, as they call them, ask the clients to leave the premises and then they organize the spaces for them. 

Occasionally, you’ll see a 3-5 minute segment in the show dedicated to “editing.” At one point in Season 2, one of the staff says, “these are to get rid of,” and another chirps, “you mean donate.” In one episode, they sit with a child, surrounded by toys, who refuses to throw anything away. They laugh. There’s never a moment with the parents when the hosts acknowledge the problem is not a lack of shelves, but a lack of self-control. 

The episodes are split between normal families and celebrities. I really feel for the normal families on this show. Consumption culture is the dominant culture, as is the narrowing of products. If you listened to what commercials tell you, you would need five different types of detergent for all your clothes. You would need tens of different cleaning products to address every surface. And clothes? Oh you need as many clothes as there are days and places. 

Every kind of Tide for every kind of time.

Advertising teaches us from day one that stuff is the best. From the latest Lego set all the way to the latest iPhone model, you’re only succeeding if you’re upgrading. And for the have-nots, those little moments of “have” can mean a lot. When your couch is a piece of shit because you don’t have $3,000 to buy a new one, you buy a $20 blanket from HomeGoods, and maybe another one with fall colors, and OK one more cute one for the holidays, because a few moments of twenty dollars each isn’t that much. But this invokes the Terry Pratchett “Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness” from his book Men at Arms. Here’s the excerpt:

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

A culture that celebrates stuff celebrates, highlights, and exacerbates the wealth divide. The families on this show are often just trying their best to keep up and bring their children joy. I don’t have kids, but I do remember being a kid and being so disappointed when friends wore Abercrombie and I couldn’t. When I started making my own money, I spent a regrettable amount of it on fast fashion, doing whatever I could to feel cool. Spending $300 on a dress that would stand the test of time and was made by someone being paid a living wage? It just seemed like a dream. 

So my heart goes out to the people who are trying to live what they’ve been told is the dream, because the real enemy on this show is the idolization of celebrity excess. 

The worst episodes on Get Organized are, without question, when The Home Edit team takes on the toys of celebrity children. In Season 1, they visit Khloe Kardashian. Khloe has one child and six motorized kid-sized vehicles. Here’s one of them. It is a mini G-Wagon — a tiny mimic of a car that retails new for over $130,000 — more than what 95% of Americans make in a year. And that’s the starting price. 

That 3-year-old better learn to parallel park.

Many episodes feature playrooms in celebrity homes that are bigger than entire houses I’ve lived in. The most “with it” celebrities express coy embarrassment over having so many things, while the hosts laugh, comforting and assuring their clients in near exclusive exclamation marks, “no, we totally get it! Oh my god, we would absolutely have all this stuff! It’s so cute!” 

When the organization begins, so does the addition of new stuff. The Home Edit team has their own line of organizing products you can buy, most of them plastic bins. Rather than having a heart to heart about what you’re attempting to buy when you spend thousands of dollars on tiny cars for one child, they just ensure that the next time you see the space, it will be filled with special plastic bins, making it easier to buy even more stuff. 

Regardless of whether the arc is celebrity or pedestrian focused, every arc has to end with the final gasp. The clients walk into their newly organized space and often cry, feeling so relieved to be unearthed from the stuff they have buried themselves in. But the acknowledgments of how those things accumulated, how they can prevent further accumulation in the future, or even how to maintain an organizational system they had no part in creating, are rarely if ever included.

I went into town to get my hair cut earlier this week, and my hair dresser and I were talking about consumption. One of the things we’ve both grown to love about living in this region is that you can’t just get whatever you want. Big stores are hours away, local stores are often boutiques with prices reserved for wealthy tourists, and there are months out of the year when those stores aren’t even open. I told her about a moment earlier this month when I was looking in the mirror thinking, “this outfit would look better with maroon leggings.” I thought about grabbing my computer, seeing who might offer them, and then thought, “what the fuck am I doing? I do not need maroon leggings.” 

My Walk-Up-To Closet

In this little town, I don’t feel the pressures I felt in LA or New York. Duct tape on puffy jackets is common here. Whatever goes in the free bin, someone else picks up. It’s as if the pervasive personal ethos of “I’m tough” extends to everyone’s belongings — “my stuff is tough too.” And with house sizes capped at 2,100 sq ft for the typical lot, excess simply can’t accrue. Of course, even that’s huge. The average house size in America in the 1970s was 1,600 square feet. As our desire for stuff grew, so did our houses. Now, the average single family home is around 2,300 square feet for — on average — smaller families. It is hard to see the forest for the trees.

If watching The Home Edit is good for anything, it’s for creating a feeling of disease, an almost Hunger Games adjacent experience of “yeah the makeup is cool but the child slaughter is really ruining it.” Stuff defines the greater majority of this country. Even in the austere minimalism of early Peloton ads, they still celebrated the idea with, “all you need is this one expensive piece of stuff.” In fact, not having stuff became the ultimate stuff to have. Cleaning stuff? Your cleaning lady brings it. Kid stuff? The nanny manages it. Stuff? How pedestrian. 

Kim Kardashian’s existing room, as I cannot in good conscious call this a living room.

In this house, stuff still creeps in. But space keeps it limited. The garage that I once sang about keeping stuff in is now exclusively a woodshop. The closets are small, and slowly being overtaken by our desire to do things in the space rather than put things in the space. Dance, yoga, drawing, all shoving out any potential things that could accrue. Not to mention, what would I do with new clothes other than just wear them under a jacket? (Excluding one special dress, waiting at the post office.) 

I’m not an eco queen shitting in the backyard and sewing my own clothes, but I am trying to be conscious about what it means to have Amazon come over the pass in a 4-wheel drive truck to kick up dust on an old mining road when I could’ve just… not had that face cream. This kind of consciousness is easier when everyone in town is wearing old boots and tattered flannels. The Joneses I’m keeping up with here aren’t fashionable, they’re fast. The best things you can acquire seem to be wrinkles, tans, and peaks, because even without stuff, envy can find a new target. 

We’re all just hunting happiness, belonging, joy, pleasure. We all want to be in our spaces, in any space, and feel good. We’re all just spending $40 on the lobster, forgetting it's the butter that makes it good.

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Related from Shangrilogs: But does it have character?

Related from the New Yorker: Kyle Chayka’s excellent piece on this show.

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