Stuff Infection
The road of excess leads to the palace of overwhelm

In April, I published my Digital Decluttering Diary, which chronicled the steps I’ve taken to reduce the time I spend on my phone and laptop, especially the idly-flicking-through-feeds time. I detailed the practices I’ve adopted and resources I’ve drawn on in my effort to reclaim my time.
Here we are, six months later. How am I doing? I’ve stuck to many of the strategies I adopted last spring—especially my “Poetry Before Screens” policy, which is perhaps the best discipline I’ve ever practiced in my life, and the no phone after 10:30pm rule.
I’ve backslid, though, where Twitter is concerned. It’s back on my phone right now—temporarily, I tell myself! The world’s on fire! I want to keep up!
But I know I need boundaries around all that overwhelming input. When it comes to staying informed, I want to put my time towards education and activism rather than, well, rubbernecking. It’s so easy to fall into a horrified scroll, scroll, scroll pattern. I tell myself: spend more minutes doing than scrolling.

Meanwhile, I continue to grapple with the role of stuff—both digital and physical—in our lives. I was a junkie for decluttering literature long before Marie Kondo’s book was published. As a young mom in the mid-90s, I was glued to Flylady’s daily decluttering emails. (I still use her zone cleaning methods to keep my house in reasonable order.) And yet, despite this long-stretching interest in stuff-wrangling, I’ve got a garage full of storage boxes and a cloud full of unlabeled photos.
In this, I know I’m not alone.
I’m fascinated by the constant push-pull of stuff management, both physical and digital. Why do we accumulate; why do we yearn to own things we don’t have time to use? Have you ever signed up for an online class and then ignored the assignments? Or subscribed to a magazine, newsletter, service, channel that you paid for month after month but didn’t read?
In this, I know I’m not alone!
Kate Bingaman-Burt on Obsessive Consumption
Artist Kate Bingaman-Burt has a brilliant, longrunning series of drawings that she shares on Instagram and her blog, in which she chronicles her daily purchases in simple line drawings. She records the cost of each item, where it was purchased, and who it was for or why she bought the thing.
This series of drawings, which is one of my favorite things on the internet, grew out of a period in Kate’s life when she was carrying some credit-card debt and began, in what she describes as a form of self-imposed penance, drawing her monthly statements in meticulous detail. Eventually, as she climbed out of debt, she shifted to documenting the individual items purchased. Many of these drawings appear in her book, Obsessive Consumption (affiliate link), and Kate continues the practice on Instagram.
Exploring Kate’s drawings, I often find myself contemplating the expenses I trade my own time for—because that’s what it comes down to, right? We have a finite amount of time and energy, and we trade these precious resources for shelter, food, clothing, utilities, healthcare, entertainment, education, decorative objects, and experiences. Often, the tradeoff is worth it. Other times, we sell ourselves short.
I want to use—and use well—the things I pay for with moments of my life. Objects, experiences, patterns of behavior. I’d like to make a regular practice of assessing these exchanges, and exploring the ways other people deal with the accumulation, organization, and experience of stuff (both physical and digital). I want to examine the ways stuff-accumulation makes people’s lives better (a good can opener, a warm pair of socks, a family board game) and the ways it saps our energy, burdens us with guilt, and interferes with relationships.
I’m going to continue my Digital Decluttering Diary and expand its scope beyond the digital in a series of posts about my family’s interactions with stuff (both tangible and intangible).
It’s a topic I’ve tackled several times over the past fifteen years, most notably in this somewhat tongue-in-cheek post about the challenges of stuff management when you have a zillion kids.
Since I first wrote that post, my family has moved from San Diego to Portland, Oregon. We purged a whole lot of stuff! And yet, here it is, all around me. And here I am paying for cloud storage on Google Photos and Amazon Photo because I’m paranoid that something will break someday, and I’ll lose…the hundreds of photos I didn’t feel were good enough to share anywhere but also couldn’t be bothered to delete.
If stuff-wrangling interests you, too, I hope you’ll join me for these posts. I’d love to hear your stories, too, about the ways you trade moments of your life for objects and experiences, and whether they are worth the cost.
Melissa Wiley is a children’s book author, poet, writing coach, and homeschooling mom of six. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her comic-book-writing husband and their brigade of booklovers. She is a frequent speaker on tidal homeschooling, children’s literature, comics, and parenting, and she blogs abundantly about personal enthusiasms such as hand embroidery, sketching, poetry, and houseplants. Her newest book, The Nerviest Girl in the World, will be published by Knopf in August 2020. She is @melissawiley on Twitter and @melissawileybooks on Instagram.
