Decluttering: Another Sign of Privileged Status?

Look at me, I have so much that I can give some away and not even notice.

Photo by Sarah Brown on Unsplash

I have to make an admission — I’ve been decluttering slowly for two years and am still not finished. I yearn for sparsely filled cupboards and a couple of empty drawers. Life will be more tranquil when I have less.

Decluttering is popular if you go by the TV shows, podcasts, Youtube and Facebook reels. These offerings aim at a specific audience and I wonder how a penniless person in a struggling country or someone homeless must view it all.

We need an active conscience, but it can be a heavy thing to carry around. This is especially so when you think that, according to the World Bank, half of the world’s population lives on less than US$6.85 per day and 8.5% of US$2.15 per day.

Recently, a wide-eyed refugee friend said to me that he had found a vacuum cleaner on the sidewalk. It was waiting to be collected as rubbish. It looked brand-new, a sleek black and silver model. He took it home to find the bag was full. There was nothing wrong with the motor at all.

I was hard-put to explain that we are not all like that in his adopted country.

I was not brought up in affluence and always regarded myself as an opponent of mindless consumerism, so what happened? I have…