Living in clutter does not mean that you are a slob or an undisciplined failure. It means that you are human, and your origins are showing. Way, way back in farthest branches of your family tree, your ancient ancestors lived a somewhat more hand-to-mouth existence than we do. Stocking up was a smart thing to do when antelope might not roam your way again for a while, and surviving a cold winter depended on how big a stash of firewood and dried berries you had in back of cave.

The urge to acquire is instinctive and completely normal. But kinds of circumstances that could lead primitive man to use up provisions he'd stashed away are no longer much of a threat to us. I am a big fan of Costco, eBay, and 24-hour convenience stores, but we don't really need them, and effect on our closets and garages (not to mention our waistlines!) has been catastrophic.

There seems to be an agreement in our culture that life was "simpler" back whenever. Yearning for simplicity makes us believe that our clutter is against way things should be. What was different in past was they didn't have credit cards, mail order catalogs, and Internet. Most people only bought what they needed and could afford. When was last time any of us did that?

In span of just a few generations cost of goods has gone down dramatically due to mass production. Take a moment to think about how much a basic T-shirt would cost if it were knitted and stitched by hand. How many would you own then? What if you had to make it yourself? Would you be so ready to think you need another one in a slightly different color or cut, or maybe with a little Lycra in it?

A common lament about contemporary social norms bemoans scattering of nuclear family, lack of a sense of community, and loss of spirituality in daily life. We feel disconnected, stressed, empty, and we have been trained by mass media since early childhood that having more things will make us feel better. At some point someone told us "you can't buy happiness," but we didn't listen, because everyone likes new toys and buying things makes us feel secure, which is almost as good as feeling happy.

So we shop and shop and buy more things for our homes (and our cars, and our cell phones) until we're drowning in stuff. And then we shop for things to help us manage other things and get them organized and neatly stored. Usually all that results from this is an over-abundance of misused, unused, or wrong-sized containers that metastasize into their own variety of clutter.

There’s interesting news from Medical College of George (MCG), evidence from a new study about children and pets published in Journal of American Medical Associatio that having pets may actually help with allergies.

Dr. Dennis R. Ownby, chief of MCG’s Section of Allergy and immunology has followed 474 babies from birth to age 7 and has found that children exposed to two or more in-door pets were half as likely to develop common allergies.

“Allergists have been trained for generations that dogs and cats in house are bad because they increase risk of you becoming allergic to the; we know that before you become allergic to something, you have to be repeatedly exposed to it.”