Sort it

Six turns in how it became easy to own more than you can use.

• 1769: one new thing asks for another. The writer Denis Diderot was given a fine new dressing gown. Next to it his old chair, desk and pictures looked shabby, so he replaced them one by one. He wrote it up as “Regrets for my Old Dressing Gown”.
• 1872: buying without leaving home. Montgomery Ward’s first mail-order catalogue was a single sheet listing 163 things (Chicago History Museum).
• 1919: buying before you have the money. General Motors set up its own lender so people could pay for a car a little at a time, and buying that way became normal (Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond).
• 1932: goods meant to be replaced. In the Depression, Bernard London proposed that the government give every product a set length of life. It never became law, but the name of his pamphlet stuck: “Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence”.
• After 1947: a house with rooms to fill. Builders put up whole towns of new family houses. Levittown, New York, had 17,447 of them by 1951 (American Heritage).
• The 1960s: room to rent when the house is full. Trade histories place the first modern self-storage business in Odessa, Texas, in the mid-1960s (an industry history). An industry yearbook now counts nearly 58,000 storage sites in the United States (Self-Storage Almanac 2025). Its totals jumped in a single year, floor space by a quarter, so read them as a rough size, not a trend.

More room, and still not enough

The middle new house in the United States was 1,525 square feet in 1973 and 2,142 in 2025. Over the same years the average household shrank from about 3 people to 2.5 (US Census Bureau: new houses, households). By our arithmetic that is roughly 500 square feet a person then and 850 now, in new houses. A new house gives each person more room than it did fifty years ago, and we rent more on top.

A number to be careful with

You may have read that the average American home holds 300,000 things. We could not find anyone who counted, and neither could a writer who went looking (one search for its source). A big number repeated often is still not a count.

Room

Researchers from UCLA spent four years in the homes of 32 working families in Los Angeles. Only one garage in four had room left for a car (University of California, 2012). That is 32 families in one city, so it is a picture, not a national count.

Peace of mind, perhaps

In a study of 30 of those couples, wives who described their homes with words like cluttered and unfinished showed a stress pattern through the day that the others did not, and their mood sank toward evening. For husbands there was mostly no link (Saxbe and Repetti, 2010). It is a small study and it cannot say which came first, the stress or the clutter.

Does owning less make people happier?

A 2021 review of 23 studies found that people who choose to live with less tend to report being better off (Hook and others). A larger review of 259 samples found that people who care a great deal about possessions tend to be a little less content (Dittmar and others, 2014). Both links are modest, and neither shows cause. It may be that unhappy people reach for things.

Where things end up

In 2018 Americans threw out 17 million tons of clothing and other cloth. About 11 million tons went to landfill, and about 15 in 100 pounds were recycled (US Environmental Protection Agency). Giving a thing away is better than binning it. Not bringing it home is better still.

1. Is it yours to decide? If not, it goes to Ask first. Nothing else matters until that is answered.
2. What shape is it in? Broken things with no plan to fix them are the plainest case, so they go first. A good thing that no longer fits is not rubbish: it goes on to someone.
3. Have you used it? Use is the plainest test there is. If you use it, keep it and give it a home.
4. Why is it still here? This is the question that does the work. Each answer points somewhere different, so say the true one.
5. Where could it go? Sell it if it is worth your time. Give it if someone would be glad of it. Otherwise let it go.

Each pile ends with one next step and a date. A bag of things to give away that sits in the hall for a month has not left the house.

“I might need it one day”

Sometimes you will. Ask what it would take to get another one. If the answer is a few dollars and a short trip, the shelf space is costing you more than the risk. If it would be hard or costly to replace, keep it, and write a date on the box.

“I paid a lot for it”

The money left the day you bought it. Keeping the thing does not bring it back, and selling it brings back some. This pull has a name, the sunk cost. Check your thinking has a puzzle on it.

“It was a gift”

A gift is a way of saying something, and it was said. You are free to be thankful and still pass the thing to someone who will use it.

“It holds a memory”

Then keep the memory. Choose the best few things and give them one box. For the rest, take a photo first.

This one has been tested. In a donation drive in college dorms, signs suggested taking a photo of keepsakes before giving them away. Students who saw those signs gave 1,098 things, against 815 where the signs were plain. A repeat across six dorms found a smaller gain, about 15 in 100 more. It worked for giving, not for selling, and not for things with no memory attached (Winterich, Reczek and Irwin, 2017).

Papers

The IRS says to keep tax records for three years in most cases, and longer in a few (its own guide). Keep deeds, titles, wills and anything you may be asked to show. Shred what carries account numbers.

Someone else’s things, or a parent’s house

Do not decide alone. Ask the owner, or the whole family, before anything leaves. Let each person choose what they want first. Ask counsel is about hearing every side before you act.

• One in, one out. When something new comes home, something like it leaves.
• A day’s wait before you buy. A want that is still there tomorrow has earned a second look. The big purchase list on the scale helps with those.
• A home for everything you keep. If it has no home, it is not kept. It is only parked.
• One short pass each season. Ten things, one drawer or one shelf. The page remembers your last pass, so you can see it add up.

Rules other people swear by

“Could I replace it for under $20 in under 20 minutes?” comes from The Minimalists (2011). “Does it spark joy?” is Marie Kondo’s test. “Do not leave it for your family to sort” is Margareta Magnusson’s, from her book on Swedish death cleaning. We looked for a study that tested any of these against another and did not find one. They are rules of thumb. The best one is the one you will keep using.

Getting rid of things safely

Some things should not go in the bin or down the drain. Old medicine: a take-back site is best, and the FDA says what to do when there is none (FDA). Paint, chemicals and batteries: your town’s collection day (EPA). Electronics: a maker’s or shop’s return scheme, or a certified recycler (EPA).