Re:The Art of Tidying Up
by logfromblammo on Monday January 25, 2016 @10:56AM
(#10967822)
As an American, I must have missed the "thing census" that objectively gathered the data for that average.
The number is clearly an estimate, as getting the real number would be a colossal undertaking for no real benefit.
A rational person does not count the pill bottle as 251 things because it contains 250 pills. But that's the only kind of bloody-mindedness that could ever get you to an "average American home" filled with 300k "things". If you have any LEGO sets, each one of those little one-stud circular pips would have to count as a separate thing. But your dining room table would also be one thing.
We already have cromulent measures for the muchness of one's stuff in terms of kilograms (or pounds) and liters (or cubic feet).
If I plug an old ATA drive into an old chassis, does my thing count decrease by one, because I have the same number of computers but fewer loose hard drives? The volume remains the same, though it is arranged more efficiently. You traded empty space inside the case for empty space outside of it--in theory, you could store baby clothes in there instead of hard drives. The mass also remains constant.
In any case, I would not get that number from an anti-hoarding or de-cluttering consultant. I would objectively measure the change in mass of a moving truck after a household has loaded all their possessions essential enough to move between houses, but not essential enough to keep it under direct supervision. And by assuming that the truck is packed as densely as possible, you can also get a subjective estimate of total volume of possessions.
That would be a really easy way to estimate the median mass of possessions in an American home, without any of the temporary clutter that gets trashed instead of moved. And there would be no thing-equivalence between a dining room chair and a pencil stub, or between a television and one coupon in the junk mail, or between a refrigerator and an ice pack. Mass: x kilograms. Volume: y liters. Numbers where an average actually makes sense.
The number is clearly an estimate, as getting the real number would be a colossal undertaking for no real benefit.
A rational person does not count the pill bottle as 251 things because it contains 250 pills. But that's the only kind of bloody-mindedness that could ever get you to an "average American home" filled with 300k "things". If you have any LEGO sets, each one of those little one-stud circular pips would have to count as a separate thing. But your dining room table would also be one thing.
We already have cromulent measures for the muchness of one's stuff in terms of kilograms (or pounds) and liters (or cubic feet).
If I plug an old ATA drive into an old chassis, does my thing count decrease by one, because I have the same number of computers but fewer loose hard drives? The volume remains the same, though it is arranged more efficiently. You traded empty space inside the case for empty space outside of it--in theory, you could store baby clothes in there instead of hard drives. The mass also remains constant.
In any case, I would not get that number from an anti-hoarding or de-cluttering consultant. I would objectively measure the change in mass of a moving truck after a household has loaded all their possessions essential enough to move between houses, but not essential enough to keep it under direct supervision. And by assuming that the truck is packed as densely as possible, you can also get a subjective estimate of total volume of possessions.
That would be a really easy way to estimate the median mass of possessions in an American home, without any of the temporary clutter that gets trashed instead of moved. And there would be no thing-equivalence between a dining room chair and a pencil stub, or between a television and one coupon in the junk mail, or between a refrigerator and an ice pack. Mass: x kilograms. Volume: y liters. Numbers where an average actually makes sense.