Decluttering for Maximalists

let abundance and enchantment motivate you, not austerity and shame

It’s no secret that I am a maximalist—I love all the color, all the pattern, vignettes of beautiful objects, walls crammed with art, and books, books, and more books. I don’t feel comfortable in a spare, monotone, minimalist space—it sucks the joy right out of me. But it may come as a surprise that I hate clutter.

Decluttering is definitely on trend these days—I recently saw a prominent minimalist YouTuber who claimed to have been decluttering for seven years, and to have removed 95% of the stuff from her home.

She must have had So. Much. Stuff! She got rid of virtually all of it and still has a functional family home?

Also … seven years?

I don’t know, but this just strikes me as … weird. 

Minimalists accuse us maximalists of being obsessed with stuff—of being conspicuous consumers, of being sentimental, of caring too much about all the wrong things, even of being mentally ill. And of course I reject the pathology paradigm, so far be it from me to suggest someone’s passion is … obsessive  … but seven years of decluttering? 

Color me skeptical, but at the same time let me be clear: I too hate clutter. I hate ugly, random, discordant messes. They hurt my eyes and make it hard for me to lose myself in a sense of flow, to think clearly, or even just to relax and feel at ease. So there is definitely a place in my homemaking for occasionally decluttering that is in no way inconsistent with my skepticism.

There seems to be a whole decluttering industry rooted in an ideology (as opposed to a design style) of minimalism that values austerity for its own sake, individualist approaches to the problems of consumerism, and shame as a tool for selling an agenda.

So whether you consider yourself a maximalist or not, this idea of decluttering for maximalists embraces any sort of relationship you may have with your stuff, and any approach to curating your stuff, that is rooted in values of abundance, delight, and design thinking. You don’t need to be driven by austerity and shame to occasionally take a hard look at your stuff and curate some beauty and joy back into it. 

For me, decluttering isn’t even necessarily about getting rid of stuff so much as curating it, and making it beautiful again. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed and drag my feet, but when I actually get down to it, this sort of curation rarely takes much time or energy. I find that peer support, as well almost everything, helps immensely. Recently at a DDS workshop called “Decluttering for Maximalists: Kitchen Edition,” I managed to begin to make some sense of the baking supplies in my very messy open-shelf kitchen pantry. This took about half an hour and I didn’t actually get rid of anything:

open shelf pantry, baking supplies before and after

Of course, I’m not opposed to getting rid of stuff, especially stuff that we are holding onto from a place of fear or shame¹.

Sometimes that fear is perfectly rational, especially for people who experience financial precarity.² If you are living in or near poverty, holding onto some stuff can make a lot of sense—throw-away culture is definitely the province of the economically secure, who can just buy a discarded item again if it turns out they need it. But sometimes we can hold onto those fears even after the precarity has passed, and that is a relationship to our stuff that is probably worth examining, especially if both the stuff and the fear are getting in the way of well-designed spaces that allow us to live well.

Shame also can deeply animate our impulse to hold onto stuff that is no longer serving us. We may feel shame about having impulsively bought things we didn’t really need and don’t ever use. We may feel shame about participating in consumer culture and anxiety about being single-handedly responsible for climate catastrophe. Likewise, we may feel shame about cabinets and drawers and even whole rooms full of the supplies we bought for hobbies and projects we’ve now abandoned.

Why does shame make it hard to let stuff go? It might seem logical to get rid of the stuff that makes us feel ashamed, but shame rarely inspires logic. Instead it inspires denial and avoidance, making it feel nearly impossible to sort through and get rid of things that get in the way of creating comfortable, happy, inspiring spaces.

Often the fear and the shame combine. For example, our very real and rational fears about climate change can compound our shame about past consumerism, and some less rational part of our brain decides the solution is to never throw anything away, even stuff that no longer serves us.

Or, we might feel deep shame about the stash of beautiful and expensive yarn we bought when we became obsessed with knitting, and every time we open the bin or drawer with our knitting supplies, the three inches of a sweater still on the needles seem to mock us: What a failure! You are so fickle! You never finish anything! But even if we can push past the shame and imagine packing up our supplies, we become gripped by a fear of scarcity: What if I want to knit again some day? I’ve already spent all this money! Isn’t it wasteful to get rid of it, only to buy it all again later on?

Rooted in neoliberal austerity and individualism, the ideology of minimalism purports to critique a culture of consumerism, but only ever offers individualist solutions: most problems in society, according to their thinking, can be traced to individual conspicuous consumption, with no acknowledgement whatsoever that our whole economic system is predicated on that sort of overconsumption, that economic growth depends on it, and that enormous structures are deliberately ranged against us to coerce our participation. Minimalist ideologues will gladly shame you for the pleasure and beauty you find in your stuff, and accuse you of being shallow, of valuing all the wrong things, and even of being a mentally ill—but they are oddly silent about the multi-billion dollar industries whose sole purpose is to fuel such consumption. And I’ve never, not once, heard a minimalist talk about decluttering their stock portfolio, much less accuse billionaires of being hoarders.

Individually, each of us is a mere cog in the machinery of the structures and systems that have brought us to the social and climate catastrophes we now face. There is no effective solution to this moment that relies primarily on your individual consumer choices. Whether you throw away that fast-fashion t-shirt you never wore, or turn it into rags, or donate it to a clothing charity, or list it on Facebook Marketplace, or squash it deeper into your dresser so that it won’t remind you of your wasteful impulsivity—none of those individual decisions is going to keep us from the brink of climate disaster.

I think it is far better for us to design lives of collective enchantment and joy than to wallow in fear and shame. When you feel stymied by stuff cramping your life and you need to redesign and curate your space, maybe look to collective and local solutions and opportunities that are based in community and mutual aid, rather than fear and shame.

Are there Little Free Libraries where you can leave books you don’t want to keep? Is there a local tool library you can join rather than buying a circular saw you may only ever use once? And where perhaps you can donate that router you used once when woodworking became a short-lived special interest?

Do you live in a neighborhood like mine, where I can put clothes I don’t wear in a laundry basket on the sidewalk with a sign that says “free,” and feel fairly sure it will be empty by the end of the day? Maybe you should keep your knitting supplies, I don’t know … but maybe instead you could list them on Freecycle and make some aspiring knitter’s day. But whatever you do, let delight, generosity, and compassion motivate you! Who knows, perhaps in a year when you are once again gripped by the knitting bug, you will find a new stash on Freecycle listed by some former knitter who is in the same position you are in now, and it will be your turn to help someone else turn shame into delight.

1. Perversely, these are the very emotions the ideology of minimalism leverages to push an austerity agenda, see e.g. The Minimalist Guys on Cluttercore, and also The Spiral Lab’s take down of their nonsense.

2. Equally perverse is The Minimalist Guy’s suggestion in their documentary Minimalism: Less is More that having a lot of stuff is not a consequence of economic precarity, but actually a cause of it, and that minimalism is the solution to poverty. Really, you can’t make this shit up.