Mess in moderation
Everything you do has a cost, measured, at least, in time. So to earn their keep, your actions should be making your life or the lives of other people better in some way. If you think of your life as a machine for producing well-being, your goal should be to make it efficient, by maximising good done as a proportion of time spent.
Clearly, this means that we should stop doing things that don’t do us or others any good, and do more things that produce immediate, conspicuous benefits. It also means we should avoid doing things that produce some good, but not enough relative to the time they require. There are a lot of things like this, and they are harder to spot. The one that hits home for me is tidiness.
I embrace digital mess. Google, Microsoft, and Apple have employed hundreds of thousands of people to ensure that I never again need to organise my information. Gratitude requires that I leave those thousands of files on my computer desktop in their present jumble.
I’ve stopped prettifying the contents of the documents too, unless doing so will really move the needle. As far as I’m concerned, if only I will see a document, and worse still if I’ll probably never look at it again after this week, that thing should be ugly. If it’s a spreadsheet, I’d expect to see some magic numbers in unlabelled cells, and whole columns of what will appear to be gibberish in a few weeks’ time.
My sympathy for tidiness in the real world doesn’t extend very far either. I haven’t yet read Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life,” and he’s a smart man, so maybe he can convince me that making my bed is a good thing. But for now, I’m not buying it. I don’t feel more serene or organised after I’ve fluffed cushions and laid down a comforter. I feel like I’ve thrown five minutes of relative youth into the northern wind.
Now, if propping up pillows, or colour-coding files, or arranging drawers, or labelling dusty boxes, allows you to be present in the moment, or merely keeps your wife from slow-poisoning you, then keep on keeping on. But if it doesn’t, and you are just following some unexamined urge to put things in order, I suggest you examine it.
Chaos is often cheaper than order. And given that we’ll all be dead soon, it’s sometimes a better bargain.
