Clutter Like it’s 2025
First impulse would be to say my desk. It’s usually always my desk. I put way too many things on my desk in the hope that if I have it withins arm’s reach then I’ll somehow be more productive…or because I failed the kindergarten assignment of putting things back where I found them when I was a kid. Either way, I usually have way too many things, like a distracting amount of things, on my desk.
But to be fair, I do clean off my desk routinely. I have this weekly ritual, that sometimes I skip, but always come back to at least every other week, sometimes monthly, in which I clean off my desk and put everything back where it’s supposed to go. The process isn’t all that extensive, though in my head I make it out to be this massive production, which is probably why I only do it every month, sometimes once a quarter…I dunno, but I do in fact do it at some point.
I also have a lot of online clutter. My wife complains that I have way too many tabs open at once on my browser. It’s usually only 4 or 5, and I’ve seen worse, but still, I suppose she does have a point. It’s not like I’m using all those tabs at the same time.
Then there’s the amount of favorite links in my bookmark folders that I try to think about as infrequently as possible. Links to things that I’ve been accumulating for the past decade or so of things that I thought looked neat or were interesting ideas, but I’m embarrassed to say that there’s so many damn favorites in my bookmark folder on my browser that I wouldn’t know where to start with what’s still relevant or interesting. A couple months back, I did get a wild hair to go through the favorite links in my bookmarks and found a depressing amount of the links were to websites that were no longer available for whatever reason.
I also have a lot of computer clutter, whether it’s my email with way too many unopened, probably-spam sort of emails, or my computer’s local drive that has every story, poem, academic paper, or anything else that I’ve ever written dating back nearly 20 years. At this point, I think there’s little to no chance of me ever going back through any of my old writing, and getting rid of it all would be pretty simple. Just a blanket delete on most, if not all, of the files. Though I suppose it’s nostalgia that keeps me from doing so.
Sometimes I wish it was easier to just discard certain things in my life, live as ascetically as possible, do some of those things that self-help gurus are always yammering on about when it comes to improving ones’ life by living as simplistically as possible. But I suppose at the end of the day, I often find myself not caring nearly enough to declutter my life that much. As I told my mom back when I was a teenager, “I’ll clean my room when I’m good and ready.” But jokes on me, I don’t actually have a concrete plan…
Fred Aiken Writing 