By JAMES SALOMON March, 2022
“Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually dirty kitchen, and 5 times out of 9 I will show you an exceptional man. Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I will show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.” – Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness.
“When your room is clean and uncluttered, you have no choice but to examine
your inner state.” – Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
“Look at that — more garbage.” – John Salomon, at any gathering that involves opening presents.
Okay Richard, let’s get to the matter at hand. What’s going on?
I am organizationally obsessive compulsive, and the problem is that when you live this way, you are constantly compelled to adjust and move things. At home, it got to a point where my family, I’m married and I have two kids, couldn’t take it anymore. I would fix and straighten everything. For example, they might throw down their backpack after school and I would have to set it upright, or put it up on a chair, I couldn’t just leave it laying on the floor. When they loaded the dishwasher, I would have to rearrange it. If they put their books down on a table, I would stack them neatly and in order of size. They couldn’t live with it anymore and finally told me. And I’m glad that they said something, because then I thought, why do I have to do this? So, I started to do research about it, and this led me into the study of mental health, psychology, physical sciences, and philosophy. I delved deep into the subject. I became more and more interested in studying the relationships between our minds and the objects we surround ourselves with. I started to see the world around us as a physical manifestation, or extension of our psyches. All the reading was informative, but I wanted to further my research, and decided to go into the field to find observable evidence of these relationships. Read Full Article
