Today, Explained - Your clutter is holding you back

Episode Date: March 8, 2026

You won’t wear those jeans again. Or use that pasta maker. So why can’t you get rid of them? This episode was produced by Ariana Aspuru with Avishay Artsy, edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill.  Photo by Arthur Pollock/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images.  If you have a question, give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or email [e-mail]. Listen to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Many promotions are available both in-store and online, though some may vary. In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees can grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. So I've always been someone who loves, loves, loves, love junk. I wish someone would come in and just rob me blind of my stuff so I don't have to do it. My wife has a garage full of stuff. and I have a garage full of nothing. I don't know if you've noticed this,

but it seems like every couple is made up of this exact combination. Someone who throws stuff away. This is like one of the boxes that I would love to get rid of. And someone who holds on to it for dear life. Like if I want to ship something, you know, I can ship it back in this box. Pranoi Roy and Haley Brocheck have found a way to manage their differences because of love.

But also because you really don't have a choice when you live in a 600 square foot apartment in New York City. We have a very small balcony that we are feuding with pigeons over right now. Yeah. Sometimes it'll be, I'm just on this kick where I'm getting rid of everything. And he has to say, like, wait, you might actually use this.

Like, this is something that you wear a lot. And I'm like, oh yeah, I didn't even like think about that. I'm just in the mindset of like get rid of, get rid of. My goal is to like hold on to things so I can give it to somebody in the future. If we have children, if our relatives, our friends, something that kind of pass on to that also gives them the joy, then I can hold on to it. Kind of thinking outside of yourself helps, you know, holding on to things. We have so much stuff. In fact, 71% of Americans say they buy things they already have

because they can't find the original in all their clutter. At the same time, the minimalist aesthetic is extremely popular, even if for most of us, all those clean lines and clear surfaces are way out of reach. I'm John Gwlin Hill. And this week on Explain It to Me from Vox, it's spring cleaning. My name is Emily Stewart and I'm a senior correspondent at Business Insider. Emily used to work here at Fox.

And over the years, she's written a ton about our growing mountain of stuff and why we're so eager to get rid of it. A lot of baby boomers, right, are aging and they are downsizing. Some of them are passing away. And they are notoriously a generation that really liked stuff. I mean, in the 80s, there was this saying that was like, Whoever dies with the most toys wins. But I think a lot of people, a lot of families are looking around and saying, oh my gosh, like we're looking at mom and dad's house. They have all of this stuff that they've collected over the years, and they don't just have their stuff.

They have their parents' stuff that they held on to. And for a lot of Gen Xers, Gen Z's, millennials, we have also left stuff at their houses and we have kind of treated them. Track me. Yes. And so we kind of have treated our parents as storage. You know, the easy answer is just get rid of it. But that's actually like pretty complicated for a lot of reasons. I mean, you know, there's generations of like older women who they all have China. Right. It was a big thing to get wedding China. And now like you cannot get rid of it. Nobody wants it. Their kids don't want it. And it's also just like, I mean, it can be logistically difficult to get rid of things. You know, and reporting on this one thing I learned was that sometimes even like a goodwill won't take furniture. And that can be really hard. And so you look around and it's like, you know, I go to my mom's house and she has all of these big, like, brown wooden hutches

and they're like beautiful. But like I don't want that. I live in New York City. It doesn't fit here. And even if she were to want to get rid of it, like that's going to be an endeavor for her to undertake or someday, like, my problem. When did we become a culture that buys, buys, buys, and never gets rid of stuff? So I did an interview about this actually when I was still at Vox with an academic.

And she kind of pinned this back to like the 1920s really because that doesn't just like mass consumption. It really is about like mass production starts to hit. And so it's not just that like you're not just buying like a dress at the dressmaker down the street. Like these are being made in like a mass scale. And so of course like the Great Depression hits that kind of goes on pause a little bit. And then in the 1950s it really ramps up. Right? It's people are buying their houses, they're buying their washing machines. Boiling action, that's the secret of really clean clothes.

And there's a lot of things available. And you have, you know, the Sears catalog that comes to your house in the mail. That's a very new Sears catalog. It's the Mad Men era of advertising. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. And so people are seeing a lot of ads. And there is something, I think, like social to this. as well, like, we compare ourselves to other people.

And whether or not we, like, necessarily realize it, one of the ways we compare ourselves is, like, the things that we have, the things that we buy. Again, maybe in the 50s, it was, like, your neighbors, right? Like, which washing machine did they have? What car do they have? Well, then all of a sudden, you have, like, the television. And it's like, okay, well, what do the people on friends have?

Like, what fashion do they have? New haircut? Necklace? Dress? Boots? Now, they're a little more than I usually spend on boots. format. Now we have the internet.

If you think about these like micro trends that kind of sweep through, right? Like, is it last year that those mini Trader Joe's bags were all of a sudden trendy? Trader Joe's came out with new Easter tote bags that everyone's going crazy for. Every single paycheck I get goes to these

bags. And like not to be removed to the bags, but truly who cares? Are you kidding me? These little micro-toats? Okay, on the other end of the spectrum when I think about the kind of luxury home aesthetic we're all supposed to be aspiring to. It's all about minimalism. You know, I think of Kim Kardashian's home tour, and it's all beige and open spaces. We're in my family kitchen, and everything in my house is really

minimal. I find that there's so much chaos out in the world that when I come home, I want it to be just really quiet, and I want everything to feel calming. I mean, it, I feel like that it's kind of very millennial-coded to some extent, right? Like the millennial gray of everybody has this gray house and everything's from IKEA. I mean, I'm sitting on. Oh, my God. As I sit at my IKEA desk. So I think, you know, but minimalism, I mean, it's one of those things where it's like

understandable, right? And this is not a new thing invented now. Like, I think a lot of people have a sense that, like, we live in this very consumerist society and feel kind of a desire or need to, like, push back against that. this feeling that we are inundated with a lot of stuff. Maybe it would be nice to have not so much stuff. Now, I do sort of think that minimalism can be a thing that we lie to ourselves about. A lot of us fancy ourselves minimalist and then are quite guilty of having an Amazon package on the doorstep once a week. And so I do think it's one where it's become sort of this

virtue signal thing of like, I'm a minimalist. How many of us are actually that? Isn't open question. Lots of people who are in buy nothing groups buy plenty of stuff. But I do think like the trends change and generations change like your millennials were very like the millennial gray. Your house is like has nothing in it. And now like you might walk into a Gen Z's apartment. And they have like a lot more stuff sitting around in a way that maybe like your baby boomer mother would like a lot of this stuff just kind of comes back around. But I do think, you know, overall we kind of like to see ourselves as somewhat resisting the capitalist machine, even if that's a lot easier said than done. Why is it so much easier said than done? Up next, this is your brain on spring cleaning.

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Terms supply. Hey everybody. Astead Herndon here. I wanted to let you know that Vox Media is returning to South by Southwest in Austin for live tapings of your favorite podcast. Join us from March 13th through March 15th for live taping. of Pivot, Teffey Talks, Professor G's Markets, where should we begin with Esther Perel

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and get a special discount on your South by Southwest Innovation badge. That's voxmedia.com slash south by southwest. Hope to see you there. I'm J. Q. This is explaining to me. So how do we go from collecting stuff to tossing it out? One of the things that I think is most interesting and most important about how our brains are organized is how we motivate ourselves to do things that we do. Randall O'Reilly is a psychology professor at UC Davis, and he uses computers to track how our brains respond to certain tasks.

There's this kind of surprising thing that parts of our brain that actually do this are really ancient, kind of from an evolutionary perspective, and they're tied up with things like dopamine, which everybody knows about now. And, you know, this gives us a kind of understanding of, you know, what drives our decisions. and it's not kind of like what you think you might want to do. It's actually much more kind of basic and survival-driven kind of parts of the brain that are actually in charge. Anytime you have to make a hard decision, your brain, this motivational part of your brain, actually knows that that decision is going to be hard.

And there's a lot of studies that show like anytime you have uncertainty, like, should I keep it? Should I toss it? What should I do? many things should I have, you know, all these kinds of decisions really weigh down your brain. And you can just feel it, right? You just feel tired. I don't want to have to make that decision. So, you know, and again, this part of your brain is really kind of like pragmatic. And so if there's anything else you could do, your brain is going to say, ah, let's postpone that decision and just go have something delicious to eat or do some other even maybe not such a great thing. That's at least

easier than making these hard choices, right? What about our emotional attachment to our things? Why do we form those in the first place? You know, there's this part of your brain called the hippocampus, which is where these memories live, and that's plugged directly into these core emotional parts of your brain. And so that's such an important part of what, you know, what a person is, you know. I have like an emotional connection to every t-shirt I own, even if it's like really gross or like have holes in it. Those movie tickets, stuff, concert tickets, just like small trinkets from memories and travel.

They've come from apartment to apartment for years. Old records, we literally never use them, but we just cannot get rid of them with the sentimentality of it all. When you see some knick-knack, you know, and you're like, I remember this, this was important, this was meaningful to me, how can I throw out this memory that's so important and central to me? It really is like cutting off part of yourself. I mean, you don't want to do that. Yeah, and like, I don't know, just activate something. All the things just flood back to you. I think that the solution to getting what you theoretically want, you know, rationally, is to sort of work with your system, right?

You can't fight the system, so you just got to figure out ways around it. And so one thing I do personally is just like take pictures, right? If I take pictures of a knickknack, and so I do see the pictures, they come up on my screensaver and stuff, it activates those memories and I feel good, right? So I think, you know, as long as you have some kind of cue there, some way to get back to those memories, it's still good. And obviously a picture is a lot less space than the actual things itself. There's another category of stuff like the books I'm holding on to because I'll supposedly read them one day or the clothes that I tell myself I'll fit into again.

I have very expensive jeans that I used to fit in back in my 20s. I'm 42 now and I just still have the hope. My style is probably outdated and I still hold on to things because I think, you know what, I might use this one day. We have an ideal future self, right? I mean, you can picture it. But the thing that you don't want to experience is, that situation where you're like, oh, now I really want to have this thing and I got rid of it, right? That feeling, that negative feeling is weighted much more strongly than the little cost of like just keeping it around. And that's, you know, a lot of scientific literature showing that we are much more sensitive to negative outcomes, losses, and any kind of negative feeling than we are to sort of positive things. Why do our brain, do we, is there a hypothesis on why,

the negative is so much more powerful? Survival, right? Negative is something bad happens to you, right? Physical pain, some predator, something scary, you know, all these things. And so there's just a much richer kind of map in your brain of all the negative things. And it just gets more attention. You know, I envy minimalist in that they're able to shed things without having a lot of hangups. Why is it easier for some people than for others?

Yeah. I think it has a lot to do. with that decision-making process. So if you're somebody who's generally indecisive and you know that like, I don't know, should I keep it? You really go back and forth and you have a hard time making that decision. Again, your brain knows that you're going to have a hard time making that decision. And so it's going to be really hard to just confront that.

But if you're somebody like me who's more impulsive and not troubled by making decisions, you know, I don't have that much difficulty. I'm like, whatever, I'm just going to toss it. Some people, again, like my wife, for example, is very, very, she has a very, very difficult time making decisions. And guess what? She tends to be someone who holds on to things, right? And so it really, I think it is very strongly correlated. Yeah.

And there's a really tricky question, right? You're never going to like take somebody who is sort of, you know, has harder time making decisions, likes to hold on to things, has that strong sentimental reaction to things and like turn them into this like overnight minimalist. I don't think that's a realistic kind of expectation. But, you know, on the other hand, if you really, you know, if you really want to accomplish something like that, you know, I think there are ways to trick yourself into getting the job done. So one idea is to, instead of making the decision kind of all in one step, you can make a first-pass decision that you know is not the final decision,

but it's like a quick first-pass decision. And so you just go through everything and you just say, really quickly, I'm just going to sort stuff into piles, right? And then once you've started that, now you look at it and you're like, okay, well, here's how much stuff is in like the really must keep pile and here's all this other stuff. And it's so much easier to edit something than to write it from, you know, from scratch. So it's really that same principle, right? The other one that's classic is to break things down into smaller steps, right? So instead of thinking about, you know, I'm going to organize my entire closet, you know, just say, I'm just going to work on the socks.

You know, and sort of, okay, well, socks, I can do socks, right? And the trick is that once you get started, there's a process in your brain where it's kind of tracking the progress that you're making towards your goal. And this is a key part of the computer models that I make of the brain. And whenever you make a move towards your goal, you get a little bit of dopamine. And so there's this kind of positive feedback loop and you feel it, right? It's sort of, this is also what video games kind of tap into. And then these kind of mechanisms usually will take over and keep you going.

So I should treat my spring cleaning like a video game? Yes, absolutely. Give yourself points. Break it down into levels. And then you'll be like, huh, well, that wasn't actually as hard as I thought it was going to be. And once you have that feeling, then it kind of keeps that momentum going. Is there a plus side to keeping stuff? Like, what does that do for us?

Yeah. And in general, there's a lot of benefit to having, you know, more memories, more access to your memories. And so if you have more cues around, you can kind of remind yourself, like, you know, if you're feeling depressed or something, and you can go look at your shelf and see this knick-knack from some trip you took and it can kind of remind you of this prior experience that you had. and that kind of gives you a different perspective relative to what you're feeling right now, that's kind of what memory also does for us, right? In general, gives us a perspective of how things were at different points in our past, and having better access to those memories is absolutely, you know, very important. And that works for me because I actually have a terrible memory.

And I don't spend very much time organizing my memory. memory. I'm too impulsive, too much, you know, whatever, living in the present, etc. And so, again, my wife is my memory. Our stuff can be a reminder of these really special moments in our lives. Coming up, how to keep your past from limiting your present. At Desjardin, our business is helping yours. We are here to support your business through every stage of growth. From your first pitch to your first acquisition, whether it's improving cash flow or exploring investment banking solutions. With Desjardin business, it's all under one roof. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us and contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk.

Business. Here at Gastropod, we ask the tough questions, like what should go on top of a pancake? My mom always had peanut butter and brown sugar. She was not a syrup person. I am loath to judge people's personal pancake pleasures, but that's a hard no. I'm on team maple syrup. But for a long time, for a lot of Americans, maple syrup was too expensive, so they used pancake syrup. But what is pancake syrup? I mean, like maple syrup, it's also kind of caramel color.

This episode of Gastropod, we've got the answers to all your pancake questions, including what even is is a pancake. And does a Latka or a Dutch baby count as a pancake? To find out, find gastropod and subscribe wherever you get your pancakes. I mean podcasts. It's explained it to me. I'm JQ. Mary Dozier has seen how crippling having a bunch of stuff can be up close. I'm a clinical psychologist and a professor at Mississippi State University. You work with people who hold on to too much stuff in a way that really limits them and impacts their lives and a negative way. But I think a lot of us struggle to manage our stuff, you know, the things we collect or stuff we inherited from our family or just stuff we somehow ended up with. How often is throwing

everything out the answer? Like the pasta maker, the dress, the things, should we just be throwing everything in the garbage? Oh, that just, I felt my heart rate go up when you said that. It just sounds. And truthfully, one of the things we know is, um, so when people, have really, really severe hoarding problems that it's not safe for them to be in their home. Sometimes what has to happen is this big, massive clean out, but

it's an incredibly traumatic thing. It's the same level kind of a PTSD response as if you lost your home in a tornado because in essence you did, right? That a tornado swept through your home and took everything away. And I know that there's a broad spectrum of minimalism to maximalism,

but I think I'm a fan of keeping the things around us that help us feel like who we are, right? That it is that external way that we present the world, whether it's through our clothing or our accessories or the clutter that we have in our handbags, right? That I, right before this was digging through my purse being like, I know I have headphones in here somewhere. But just the things that we choose to keep on ourselves or to keep in our home that signal to the world of who we think that we are. I'm curious of things like the Marie condo method.

Did it spark joy? Or any of those other kind of minimalist decluttering hacks work for the people that you help? Is it that simple or is there a little more there? I think there's more to it. You know, anything in the moment can spark joy, right? If you put a puppy in front of me, I'm going to say this puppy is sparking some joy right now, right? But is it value consistent is what I always come back to, right? that there's a difference between happiness and fulfillment.

So I always encourage people to just whenever you're going to go through your home, go through your clutter and think about what you want to keep and what you want to let go of starting, before you even do that, of what are your values? What do you care about in the world? What's important for you on kind of that broader sense? And then as you're going through these items thinking through, is this item consistent with those values? The other day, my mom dropped off, like, everything from my high school, like, yearbooks, gown. And I started looking through at all, and I thought, what am I going to do with this stuff?

And I took it to the dump. And I kept waiting for regret for not hanging on to it. But I live in a 12-penter at Scliffith House with a family of four. I have a baby. And I found myself thinking, like, I don't want this crap. I guess what I encourage people to think about is you don't have to hold on to something out of guilt, right? That if somebody gives you a present and you don't want it, that's okay. It doesn't say anything about you or your friendship with that person to not keep that item.

That guilt and shoulds just, I guess, shouldn't be a part of why you're holding onto things. In your opinion, what are some of the good reasons not to get rid of stuff? coming back to that sense of what is this item doing for you? Is it that this is the one thing that seeing it gives you that connection to your grandfather, right, that holding on to this one particular book or this one hat and thinking about like, what is this item doing? And is this the only item you have that's serving that purpose, right? That I think sometimes people get lost and I'm going to hold on to everything that reminds me of my grandfather.

I'm going to hold on to everything that's about this dream I could be. And so really trying to think through of why are you keeping things and how many of those things do you need to keep? I think it can be helpful to kind of take that step back and think about, okay, if there wasn't anything in this home, what would I want to be in here? Everything that you keep, you're making a decision to keep that. And sometimes people default to that decision because it's hard to think through, could I let this go? But you're still making that choice. that inaction in itself is still an action, which I think is probably one of those broader truths about, you know, directions in life, right?

That are you staying in a relationship because you're choosing to be in that relationship every day? Or are you staying in the relationship just because it's been, it's what you've been doing? You can kind of think about our relationships with our items. Yeah, I think as boomers age and we start to get more of this stuff, it's like, what do you do with it? You know, we talked about the burden. Some people feel when they're facing.

with their parents' stuff. Do you have any advice for that? I'll even, I'll kind of circle it another way of there's something called Swedish death cleaning. I don't know if you've come across it, but it's this idea that basically it's putting the responsibility on the baby boomers, that they're the ones that should be going through their things before we're inheriting it. It's this idea of like cleaning out your things before you die. The first half of our life is really about accumulating things and the second half should be about starting to shed the worldly possessions. And this really is such a realistic and truthful motivator for minimalism and not keeping stuff you don't need

because at the end, someone will have to deal with it. It's actually, it's something that I deal with it with a lot of my patients that I've treated of these older adults who will say things like, I could get rid of these things, but I want to make sure it goes somewhere where it's going to be appreciated. And they're like, I want my daughter to, say, inherit my wedding china or something like that, but I know that right now she doesn't want it. And so they're like, so I'm holding on to it, I have this responsibility for it. And so I guess kind of coming back to the idea of you don't have to be responsible for the items. You know, what's our responsibility to people, but not necessarily to the things? Is it possible to be a happy maximalist? Because I don't know, I love the color.

I love the things everywhere as long as there's a place for it. Yeah, absolutely. It comes back to is it dysfunctional or not, right? But if your home is filled to the brim, but you're living a healthy, happy life in that environment, that's absolutely okay, right? That it's all about the subjectivity of it, just because there might be a current cultural norm for minimalism or I know cottage core was in for a while. I don't know if that's still a thing. But just these trends come and go, but kind of thinking about what's your truth of how you like your space to be, right? Are you someone who likes a completely blank wall or do you want it to be, is it called gallery style? Or you have all of, the whole wall is full?

filled with painings. I think just whatever somebody's truth is good, right? If it's, if you're healthy, if you're happy, if it's not hurting anyone. That's it for this week. Special thanks to Haley and Pernoy for welcoming us into their home. Is there something you want us to explain to you? Tell us what it is. Give us a call at 1-800-61845 or email ask Vox at Vox.com. If you enjoyed this episode, Consider becoming a Vox member. Membership comes with a ton of awesome perks, like access to our Patreon.

There, you'll find a Q&A I recently hosted about podcast bros and politics. Go to Vox.com slash members to sign up. This episode was produced by Ariana Aspuru with Avashai Artsy. It was edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and engineered by David Tattashore.

Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. I'm your host, John Glenn Hill. Thank you so much for listening. Talk to you soon. Bye.