not the person you’re replying to, but when reading chiomi’s post the thing that jumps out at me about it is that her second roommate’s books “are stacked 3 deep some places.” if the books are stacked 3 deep, that means you’re gonna have a hell of a time finding the books at the back. in fact, not only does this make them hard to find, but any book not on the first/outermost ‘layer’ will have the issue of ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ making them more easily forgotten about and thus left unread. so in general a book shelving system that stacks its books 3 deep (even if only “in some places,” meaning some areas of the shelves may only be stacked 2 or 1 deep) makes the books at the back hard to find and (depending on one’s memory, ofc) hard to remember at all. as such those books are likelier to go unread. this is the issue i have when i read that post: not the # of books but the organization system that hides some of them away to be left (probably/potentially) unread. (of course, the ‘out of sight out of mind’ thing tends to hit my brain pretty hard, so i find it especially bad; someone with a much better memory for that kind of thing might be more okay with it.)
Ah. To me that just seemed a useful use of space, something i dont have much. Its IS an imperfect compromise but if you want to keep your books those can happen.
...there might or might not be a stack on the Washing machine rn because i use it as a shelf for when bathing. Also: my mum practices the 'stacked three deep in double rows' and lemme tell you she's got a pretty good grip on what she has and where, so finding is usually not an issue despite the shelf taking up the whole dinning room wall.
I tend to only stack in a single layer, but if my shelves are tall enough I'll have two rows sitting on top of each other. But only a single column. If I have more than I can shelve I begin stacking them in organized piles on the floor. In general I tend to have lots of piles of books around when I'm researching, kept in a pile system that makes sense to me and which is convenient for me and me alone. It looks very...homely. For me. It makes my room look like my room, because look there's my work space and look there's the signs of my research.
Yeah, my roommate also knows where everything is. The Romance bookshelf is organized vaguely by raunchiness/supernatural content, with the Nora Roberts shelves grouped in series according to that system. And she only keeps things that she's read in the last year. So, like, with the fact that she knows where everything is, theoretically that organization makes sense. I am horrified for a number of reasons, most of them boiling down to neurosis. In my parents' house, because two of us had dust allergies, the books all needed to be individually wiped down at least a couple times a year to keep the dust down. I haven't noticed dust on these, because I tend not to look at them and because it's only been 8 months and they get handled a fair amount, but I don't think they're ever dusted. I also, for a few years, could fit everything I owned into two suitcases and a box. Having more stuff than that feels like an anchor making it harder for me to leave anywhere. Tristan has made it slightly easier, because she likes stuff and also I am unlikely to drop everything and move to another country while married to them, but I still feel vaguely oppressed by physical possessions at all. The fact that I now own a fairly substantial desk and bed as well as some art something that would have given me a panic attack a decade ago. Also, like, novels I read for pleasure? They're mostly consumable, from my point of view. I am not keeping Hex Appeal around for a reference text. And getting rid of stuff is a hassle, especially if you have to find a used book store to take stuff to.
Somewhere in my closet I have a Soundblaster card I scavenged as a teenager. It was already very outdated when I picked it up from a computer that had literally been thrown off a ledge. The reason I didn’t feel bad taking it was because it was seriously bent by the impact. I’d be shocked if it worked, even if I had anything that could use it. I also have a very heavy old monitor I pulled out of someone’s garbage once. I don’t know whether it actually works because I have never had anything to plug it into. I should... probably throw that one out.
Huh, my mom is very similar. She periodically does want to thin out her book collection, to the horror of everyone else in the family. She does have a dust allergy and she was also an army brat. I think living in the same place for so long gets to her sometimes, and having too much stuff to be able to move if she were going to really really gets to her.
I'm a hoarder due to trauma, and try to keep a grip on it, but books are the exception. 2/3rds of my books are in storage, so when I'm at my parents looking for a book I know I own and can't find it I panic. I remember that it's in storage but.... I haven't set my eyes on them since we moved and so I panic a little every time that they got left. (This might be because that's happened to me multiple times. My stuff just goes *poof*) I had like... 6 or 7 3 foot shelves at my old house. some of those had decorations on, but then there were books piled on their side on top of the books shelved normally too. At one point I just had a stack like 10 books tall because they didn't fit on the shelves. Look, I loved scholastics book catalogs as a kid and I'm pretty sure I single handedly made it so that my high school librarian could keep offering them. (If anyone knows how to get like a subscription without being part of a school, they should let me know.) I have like 12 books that I haven't read sitting in my room right now, so I'm not letting myself buy books, but like. I want more ;-;
I honestly just get really freaked out by like. having too much stuff that isn't 'an essential'. clutter is stressful to me, and unlike things my brain deems essential (which stress me out so much when I contemplate letting them go that the only way they're leaving is if they like, disintegrate into dust), non-essentials have to Go if there are too many of them. and books are 'non-essential', and the stress that having books I'm not reading lying around far outweighs any pleasure having them might bring me, so if I don't enjoy reading it anymore ever, it's gotta go. it's not making me happy and I'm not using it, and I'm sure someone else would like it more than I do. (despite this I still have a pretty decent-sized book collection. I just like to read a lot and there's a lot of books I love still.)
Yeah im the polar opposite of that. Objects of any kind Cost Money so if I like them, like books, they're extra precious and important. I tend to refuse to aquire things i dont either want or really need rather than culling non broken things.
For me the idea of having Too Much Stuff is vaguely horrifying because I had to pick up and move a lot - first as a teen due to abuse shit and later as an adult due to housing affordability issues. So I have the double whammy of "if I have too much stuff I care about it will be used against me" and "too much stuff I care about will cost me a lot in money and spoons when I have to move". Also my mom was a hoarder so large amounts of Things feel suffocating to me. I'm well aware that this is very much personal damage, but it's part of why I only have two small shelves of books and religiously pare down my closet once a year. My (small, takes up maybe eighteen inches of the furniture I use for my TV stand) DVD collection is enough to make me antsy. I try very hard not to look at my best friend's crammed full bookshelves because they make me uncomfortable, so I can understand how some people may feel that a large mass of Things that other people like are upsetting, even if they're not personally passing judgment.
mm yeah living as a foreign national in the uk right now is an exercise in 'wow i like that thing but also if i own more than 150 pounds of objects some of it will be left behind when i am probably inevitably forced back to the usa' but i am lucky in having supportive parents with a big house so my 100-200 book collection still exists for whenever i actually stop moving around everywhere and stay somewhere for more than 2 years
I keep all textbooks if I’ve ever found a single iota of useful information in them. If I need to access that information again in the future, it’s extremely useful to have the physical book. I recently looked up fluids in my physics book, which I haven’t even thought about in so long I was shocked at the color scheme of the cover because I didn’t remember it at all. I just wanted to understand how gas pump automatic shut offs worked. I’d watched several youtube videos and read a few things on the internet and I still didn’t understand. The book, even one that far removed from my current mental place, is not just a reference. It’s an interface I know I’ve used before. It brings sense memories of the state of mind I was in at the point when I was best equipped to understand its contents. If it’s something I’ve seen before, I often remember approximately where it was in the book, and how it was oriented on the page. If not, I still know how the book is laid out, how to interact with it, how much I should expect to get from it, and vaguely how much effort that will probably be. I was damn good at physics. I know I trust that book, because I remember I took the class pretty early in the morning. The sleep meds I use now didn’t exist at the time, so I coped by going to bed in the afternoon and waking up in the early hours of the morning. I also regularly had trouble with zoning out during the lecture because I’m pretty sure my current ritalin solution also didn’t exist yet, so most of what I learned came directly from the book. I woke up, ate, turned on all the lights, and quietly put on familiar music like I would for math. Then I read the book and worked through every example problem. When I got to the end of the chapter, I would understand the material. Then I did my homework. There was only one problem in the entire term that I didn’t understand how to solve. I trust that book. Any book I read, even in part, I will have a relationship with the contents that’s completely individual to the book. I don’t have that with any other physics material. I wouldn’t have been able to get the same information nearly as easily from any other book, even though the material is so standardized that every college class in the state that can do direct transfer credits covers the same topics at about the same pace. My image processing textbook is interesting because it seems to be the only current textbook widely in print that covers that specific subject matter at that level. Wherever I go besides wikipedia, I see either research papers or various preparations of the entrails of the book I recognize, which is always a little unsettling.
The article was saying that white people aren't getting the konmari method, not that they can't; it was, iirc, explaining why so much of the criticism was missing the cultural context, particularly the influence from Shintoism. There is also apparently an issue with translation: a lot of Japanese words and phrases can't be translated directly, and even if you do translate them, English-speakers will be missing the complex cultural connotations involved. There was actually a set book in my Japanese class (though I cannot, for the life of me, remember the title) where each chapter was named after one such word or phrase, and the entire chapter was an attempt to translate it, using linguistics and sociology and history and so on. So the point is not "white people won't get it" or "white people can't do it", just "white people are, as a whole, missing the point at the moment". You might get a lot out of it!
A lot of it is that Kondo's method involves a lot of shinto philosophy and belief in the souls of inanimate objects, which westerners aren't familiar with. I'm no expert in any shape or form, but I at least know it exists, and I had a much easier time getting what was going on with the show than like, my mom, who had no idea shinto exists.
my last comment on the decluttering stuff is that what i really like about kondo's method is how personalized it can be. love having 300 books? great! keep em! hate having too many clothes that you never wear and that's started to stress you out? here's a way that might work to pare it down to a point where you're comfortable! her whole philosophy is, besides things like tax paperwork etc. type important things, if you are going to own Things make them Things that make you happy to own, because otherwise what's the point of owning stuff that just makes you feel bad?
I have never interacted with her stuff directly tbh so my horse in this race is a tiny tiny shetland, but it does sound like a nice method i feel like most people's comments that i heard are more accurately applied to like... episodes of what not to wear where people are forced to give up all their cool graphic tees because they're adults or something. that always made me crazy uncomfy
I love her & her philosophy & I feel it's definitely needed in the West where a lot of people have anxieties caused by our forced consumer identities where we're told day in and day out that you must own this and this and this and this to be happy and if you're not it's just because you don't have enough yet, don't get rid of it, you need that, need it!! I just think her philosophies can help IF you feel like you have those kind of anxieties or especially if you want to declutter your life or want a new way to think about things, but don't know how to start. Honestly I don't know why so many people badmouthing her on Twitter 'n shit act like she's said something's wrong with you if you like having a lot of (insert whatever). That's not her point & if you're happy & content sitting in the middle of your pile of 500 books, she'd be happy for you. But I am someone who starts getting paranoid & feeling trapped if I live in the same home for more than three years & needs everything I own to fit in the trunk of a single car at all times, so...I'm a bit biased, probably.
