Total clutter madness
Posted: 4th Mar, '08, 09:25
Kevin Rudd's bid to tackle inflation by encouraging people to save rather than spend has hit a hurdle with the news that the average Australian home has three rooms cluttered with unneeded items.
That leaves at least a couple of rooms uncluttered and Australians are expected to go on a massive spending spree to fill them up. The banks have selflessly offered to help Rudd's cause by raising interest rates in a bid to stop people having any money to spend. However, as a community service they are willing to lend people more money for vital items such as plasma TVs or coffee makers.
A report, Stuff Happens: Unused Things Cluttering Up Our Homes, by the Australia Institute, http://www.tai.org.au/documents/downloads/WP111.pdf, reveals 88percent of homes have at least one cluttered room. People move house, add rooms to their homes and buy storage containers for stuff they never use. They then buy storage containers for their storage containers and soon no one can find anything; not that they ever look for it, because they never need it anyway. Four in 10 Australians are psychologically affected by their clutter, the report says. Clutter makes people depressed, anxious, guilty and embarrassed, though that's nothing that a few self-help books, a stress ball, an executive toy and a meditation DVD couldn't fix. "One person interviewed said that at one stage she actually wanted her home to burn down in a bushfire - it was that cluttered," said the report's author, Josh Fear. People who have lost all their possessions in fires have been known to describe it as a liberating experience. However, as a solution to the clutter problem, fire does have its limitations. Arson carries a sentence of two to eight years, which can be distinctly unliberating. Plus, before you know it, your cell is cluttered with drugs paraphernalia, weapons and al-Qaeda literature and you're back to square one.
Consuming is all-consuming, a mass compulsion that has the world by the short and curlies, which, incidentally, are on special for $3.99 a packet at Spotlight. "It's a little like the obesity problem," Fear said. "Most of us would prefer to have less clutter, just like most of us would like to be slimmer and fitter than we actually are." The two phenomena are closely linked. Depression caused by clutter leads to eating, and exercise bikes can be hard to reach in a cluttered room, forming a vicious cycle. Eating and shopping are more or less the same thing - both are attempts to fill the great big hole left in our lives when we stopped believing in God and the baby Jesus. Dancing baby Jesus dolls are of course available from all good online stores, with edible versions to be released soon.
The clutter problem is terrible in Europe, where people have so much stuff that they literally can't see where they're going. Britain's Transport Office issued a warning last week about the dangers of truck drivers cluttering their windscreens and dashboards. The Times this month reported that truck drivers in France had been seen "steering by ear" - putting one wheel on the road's white line and following the noise, leaving them free to watch a DVD, play a computer game or read. An Italian driver was stopped in France with a 17-inch flat-screen monitor attached to his dashboard, and a Polish vehicle was stopped with its windscreen obscured by flags, an open laptop and a kettle on the dash, roadtransport.com reported. "Clearly this has a large bearing on road safety," said a government spokesman for the department of stating the bleeding obvious. He would have continued with his statement except he couldn't find the bit of paper for all the stuff on his desk.
Decluttering experts suggest people should start small - by going through a drawer and asking themselves key questions about each item, such as: "Does this add value to my life?", "When was the last time I used it?" and "Do I have duplicates of this item?" If something is deemed superfluous it should then be ascertained whether the item could be used by someone else, recycled or trashed.
Truck drivers going through drawers and asking themselves hard questions should of course always keep one ear on the road.
SMH Jan 08
That leaves at least a couple of rooms uncluttered and Australians are expected to go on a massive spending spree to fill them up. The banks have selflessly offered to help Rudd's cause by raising interest rates in a bid to stop people having any money to spend. However, as a community service they are willing to lend people more money for vital items such as plasma TVs or coffee makers.
A report, Stuff Happens: Unused Things Cluttering Up Our Homes, by the Australia Institute, http://www.tai.org.au/documents/downloads/WP111.pdf, reveals 88percent of homes have at least one cluttered room. People move house, add rooms to their homes and buy storage containers for stuff they never use. They then buy storage containers for their storage containers and soon no one can find anything; not that they ever look for it, because they never need it anyway. Four in 10 Australians are psychologically affected by their clutter, the report says. Clutter makes people depressed, anxious, guilty and embarrassed, though that's nothing that a few self-help books, a stress ball, an executive toy and a meditation DVD couldn't fix. "One person interviewed said that at one stage she actually wanted her home to burn down in a bushfire - it was that cluttered," said the report's author, Josh Fear. People who have lost all their possessions in fires have been known to describe it as a liberating experience. However, as a solution to the clutter problem, fire does have its limitations. Arson carries a sentence of two to eight years, which can be distinctly unliberating. Plus, before you know it, your cell is cluttered with drugs paraphernalia, weapons and al-Qaeda literature and you're back to square one.
Consuming is all-consuming, a mass compulsion that has the world by the short and curlies, which, incidentally, are on special for $3.99 a packet at Spotlight. "It's a little like the obesity problem," Fear said. "Most of us would prefer to have less clutter, just like most of us would like to be slimmer and fitter than we actually are." The two phenomena are closely linked. Depression caused by clutter leads to eating, and exercise bikes can be hard to reach in a cluttered room, forming a vicious cycle. Eating and shopping are more or less the same thing - both are attempts to fill the great big hole left in our lives when we stopped believing in God and the baby Jesus. Dancing baby Jesus dolls are of course available from all good online stores, with edible versions to be released soon.
The clutter problem is terrible in Europe, where people have so much stuff that they literally can't see where they're going. Britain's Transport Office issued a warning last week about the dangers of truck drivers cluttering their windscreens and dashboards. The Times this month reported that truck drivers in France had been seen "steering by ear" - putting one wheel on the road's white line and following the noise, leaving them free to watch a DVD, play a computer game or read. An Italian driver was stopped in France with a 17-inch flat-screen monitor attached to his dashboard, and a Polish vehicle was stopped with its windscreen obscured by flags, an open laptop and a kettle on the dash, roadtransport.com reported. "Clearly this has a large bearing on road safety," said a government spokesman for the department of stating the bleeding obvious. He would have continued with his statement except he couldn't find the bit of paper for all the stuff on his desk.
Decluttering experts suggest people should start small - by going through a drawer and asking themselves key questions about each item, such as: "Does this add value to my life?", "When was the last time I used it?" and "Do I have duplicates of this item?" If something is deemed superfluous it should then be ascertained whether the item could be used by someone else, recycled or trashed.
Truck drivers going through drawers and asking themselves hard questions should of course always keep one ear on the road.
SMH Jan 08
the dangers of living on land
![[smilie=icon_e_wink.gif]](./images/smilies/icon_e_wink.gif "icon_e_wink"){kind=icon}
and then clear it out. A 40 foot container is about right at the moment sob.![[smilie=rollingpin.gif]](./images/smilies/rollingpin.gif "rollingpin"){kind=small}