Stuff and Nonsense

I love looking at other people’s homes for much the same reason I love listening to people tell personal stories: I get to judge them. So I was totally into Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century, a book about an 11-year UCLA project studying the homes of 32 Southern California self-described middle-class families with two working parents and two or three kids at home. It is one of the most amazingly depressing things I’ve read: a study of clutter, consumerism, chaos, Costco and, in the saddest cases, cats.

Soon, though, I started to wonder how my house compared with the average middle-class family’s. So I invited Jeanne Arnold, who led the project, over to catalog my stuff. Arnold, an archaeologist who studies prehistoric California, is interested in what she calls “the centrality of possessions in personality identity formation.” Which is exactly the right idea, in exactly the wrong words, for a Jay-Z song.

As soon as Arnold walked into my house, she looked at my refrigerator, which is what I do when I walk into anyone’s house. But she didn’t open it. Instead, she looked at our magnets. Arnold had found a pretty direct correlation between the number of objects tacked to a refrigerator and the amount of clutter in the house. “I saw two refrigerators that had nothing,” she said, “and they were not magnetized.” The average family had 52 items on the refrigerator. We have 51. One, oddly, is a New Yorker cartoon I had never noticed that says, “Only the rich can afford this much nothing.”

But because none of the items are on the front of the fridge and most are tiny magnets and because she knew I was writing about her, Arnold said it was one of the neatest fridges she had seen. Which reflected the house, which she said wasn’t cluttered. Better yet, she said the clutter we do have is unusual, which made me nervous that she had opened some drawers she should not have opened. But that wasn’t it. “You have far more books than the typical L.A. house,” she said, meaning that we have books. We also have more wine, wine maps, wine books and giant vases holding wine corks. She thought this all made our home “very French.” For those of you who aren’t liberal, trust me: the only bigger compliment an academic can give a journalist than “very French” is “very, very French.”

Unlike 78% of families, we don’t have a TV in our bedroom, because my wife and I decided that the only two proper uses for a bedroom are sleeping and not having sex. Like 47% of the families, we don’t have a second fridge, but unlike 75% of them, we don’t use our garage solely for storage. The average family had on display 438 books and magazines, 212 CDs, 90 DVDs and VHS tapes and 139 toys. The U.S. has 3.1% of the world’s kids and 40% of its toys. We also are responsible for 40% of the world’s military spending, which, I now believe, is to prevent other countries’ kids from taking our toys.

I was feeling pretty suprieur until Arnold saw our walk-in closet. “My mother can compete with your wife for clothing, but she’s got 50 years on your wife,” she said. The average family had 39 pairs of shoes; my wife has 70. To put that in perspective, it means that my wife can wear a different pair of shoes every day for 70 days.

The study showed that while clutter doesn’t really bother men, women get so stressed about it, their cortisol levels spike, which is undoubtedly one of the main factors that cause them to buy shoes, right after the existence of shoes. Although most of the homes had backyards with grills, decks and pools, more than 75% of parents never spent any leisure time outdoors. “They have the investment and the space, and they don’t carve out the time,” Arnold said. “It’s sad.” If she’s this harsh on modern families, I can’t imagine what kinds of things she said about digs of the Chumash of the Channel Islands, whose kids seem to spend an awful lot of time painting caves.

My cortisol levels felt fine, but as soon as Arnold left, I went on a spree, throwing out 56 books, 18 refrigerator items and, because I value relationships over material possessions, zero shoes. It was hard to do much more. I grew up in a tidy, modern house, but I’m a sloppy overvaluer of my belongings. My books remind me of college, and those corks remind me of times we broke our bedroom rule. And if I’m honest, I want people to walk into our single-fridge home, look at our wine maps and think we’ve lived a sophisticated life. “We wrap ourselves in these objects because they talk about our history, and without them what do we have? They’re our biographers,” Arnold had told me. That’s why I was so nervous showing her around. Also, I was afraid she’d see the glass animals I’ve had since high school, once stored in boxes but now on my office shelf. I’ve got a cruel biographer. You can tell by all the black leather boots.