Psychological reasons for being a slob?

Factual Questions
41

I once had an aquaintance in Manhattan. I don’t know how many rooms were in his apartment, because I never saw more than 3 feet in front of me. Picture this: a room that is solidly filled with stacks of refuse, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with a 2-foot wide “canyon” allowing you to get through to the next room. If there were no next room, the refuse would literally fill the entire 3D space. Stacks of old newspapers and magazines, stacks of crates of cans and bottles, all from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, obliterating windows and unused doorways. One question I cannot answer is why his floors didn’t collapse into the apartment below.

My house tends to get cluttered, because I have so many interests and hobbies in addition to my work. The main problem is finding a proper place for everything and keeping it there. I do eventually get around to putting things away, one small area at a time. And yes, I do suffer from chronic depression with mild OCD, though I’m reluctant to use that as an excuse. (And don’t make the mistake of thinking that only the Felix Ungers of the world have OCD; the Oscar Madisons have it too.)

My partner is the opposite. Few of his interests or hobbies take up much space, and he can’t understand why I don’t always tidy up after a given activity. When we were living together it was a constant strain for both of us (he kept putting my stuff away, and I couldn’t fine anything). Our solution is to live next door to each other.

42

Echoing what everybody said already, but in my own words:

  1. Laziness. It takes more short-term effort to be organized than to just leave things where they are.

  2. Higher mess tolerance. For some people, that “I need to clean” moment usually comes when they can’t find something they really need, or if guests are coming over. For others, their house has to look like it was decorated by Martha Stewart at all times.

  3. That good old “hierarchy of needs” thing. People who are clinically depressed even start neglecting their personal grooming habits. If I don’t even feel like shaving every day, then picking up dirty socks isn’t going to be on my priorities list either.

In college, during a high-stress period, there were times when there would not be one bit of exposed carpet except one very carefully laid out footpath between the bed and the door. Everything else was covered with clothes that didn’t need to go into the laundry just yet, but we didn’t want to put in with the clean stuff. (As far as I remember, we were fairly good about the trash, though.) In my defense, that dorm room was tiny and we didn’t get visitors pretty much except when our parents came by to help us move out at the end of each semester (and of course by then everything was Neat Und Tidy).

Right now I’m content with a system of “organized chaos”. There is a general area of where I put stuff, but it’s a bit haphazard and every so often I do have to wade into the mess to throw away stuff that’s no longer relevant.

43

I assume your friend isn’t living with you:)

Have you spoken to your friend about your concerns? Does he agree with your assessment that he is living in “filth”?

44

adhay, you do realize your quoted post is 7 years old, right?

45

Well, actually …

46

I have a nice bed. I don’t believe in making the bed though. My wife is always like, “why don’t you ever make the bed”? For the same reason I don’t tie my shoes after I take them off. It doesn’t make sense. -Jim Gaffigan

For me, as long as I can find what I want and I’m not noticing bad smells or unable to find what I want it isn’t that high of a priority to clean. I have shit everywhere, but it really isn’t unhygenic or a bacteria trap or anything. My depression probably plays a role though. But I do manage to go to work, however 20 minutes to clean up is something that I really don’t feel motivated to do.

Not only that but to me, for some reason, a room that it too clean and organized feels artificial. Almost like a hotel room or a place I am just visiting or showing off rather than living in. That probably plays a role too.

47

My mom was kind of a neat freak, and the rest of us rebelled by being slobs. I have a brother and a sister with two kids each, all slobs. I’ll go with laziness.

48

I’m another person who fines severe neatness sterile and creepy. I also think that many people are lumping together sloppiness, slovenliness, and outright pathological behavior.

My reasons towards tending towards messiness:

#1: I really don’t care about neatness. Sanitation and safety yes; I don’t let things rot or rust, or leave them where they’ll trip me. But a little dust, some clothes tossed on the table, an unmade bed, a corner spiderweb, a random pile of books here and there? Meh.

#2: I gain no satisfaction from cleaning. I feel no sense of accomplishment, at most I’m glad its over with.

#3: Laziness. It’s hard to work up the willingness to make the effort when you fact in #1 and #2.

#4: Organization. My natural tendency is towards following the 90/10 rule form of organization (as opposed to the alphabetical order, a place for everything and everything in its place kind of organization). Stuff I use often I leave out, stuff I seldom use gets tucked in a drawer somewhere. This naturally tends to imitate and sometimes slides right into sloppiness.

One interesting theory I’ve heard for the traditional “everything sterile and shiny” standard of neatness. Several things came together at one point in history; the near universal implementation of electric lights (makes dirt and disorder easier to see), a push to insist that women stay at home keeping house, the spread of labor saving devices that helped ensure that those housekeeping women were soon done with the task and utterly bored, and natural feminine competitiveness among women who had little to compete over besides how they kept their house. You had all these women desperate for something, anything to do to occupy themselves creating an ever-higher standard of housekeeping to show off to each other because it was better than staring at the walls or at the TV. A hundred years ago that light layer of dust that bothers you wouldn’t even be visible in candlelight or indirect sunlight, and you’d be too busy doing other things to dust it even if you noticed.

49

Unless, of course, they are dying from an infection caused by their failure to follow normal cleanliness standards.

50

My experience with several roomies, dorm-mates et al has been in terms of “most of them simply never learned to clean”. At home, dishes cleaned themselves, beds made themselves, toilet paper rolls refilled themselves, empty toilet paper cylinders took themselves to the trash; therefore, when they’re someplace else, they expect all that to still happen magically. And, since the accumulation is gradual, they go through a “frog in hot water” kind of situation.

Then in sweeps someone else, and the bathroom rug turns out to have a hundred bright colors rather than varying shades of dark grey, the kitchen clothes turn out to be white rather than varying shades of yellow, the caulk in the bathroom has suddenly become white, the bathroom curtains have lost the foot-wide black strip at the bottom. And those people who hadn’t seen the filth because it had grown slowly and because they weren’t used to the habits that keep it from growing are suddenly asking “how did you do it?”

A lot of those habits aren’t even a matter of “applying elbow grease often enough”, more of “doing things in such a manner that elbow grease is not needed” - but it’s not something that will be learned from the Holy Ghost.

51

I’m quite a terminal slacker in this regard, as is my girlfriend, so you can imagine what our place looks like;) We do pride ourselves on being able to get everything presentable with an hour’s notice, though, so we’re not candidates for Hoarders just yet.

One thing not mentioned above is the propensity for stuff to get lost or tossed in a big cleanup. I know people will counter that this wouldn’t be a problem if I just put stuff away in the first place, but there’s a certain comfort in imagining that what you need often is probably just sitting in plain sight. I do find things when I clean, but things get misplaced as well.

52

Excellent thread! Alive forever-er-er.

I had a twisted insight: some male messiness is equivalent to a peacock’s tail or a Bower bird’s shiny objects. Other facets are cigar-smoking, scotch-drinking, and repairing things around the house. It’s a 50s-era subconscious sexual display crafted to attract a certain type of stereotyped mate: “Oh, he needs someone like me to take care of him.” If dad was a slob and mom did all the cleaning, then sons and daughters unwittingly set up displays to carry on the next generation of family roles.

53

septimus leaves piles of books, papers, etc. lying around. Mrs. septimus is not happy about this, but has learned that if she organizes the books and papers into nice piles, I’ll never be able to find anything! Yet my work required strong disciplined organization skills. (What needed organization were ideas in my head.)

Am I lazy? That’s certainly part of it. Yet I would do “all-nighters” at afore-mentioned work, with no overtime compensation or even deadline involved, just for the enjoyment of the work.

54

i don’ t think anyone mentioned control. i feel for for a lot of folks their level of “cleanliness” has a lot to do with how in or out of control they feel in their lives.

55

(Yes, I know this is a zombie, a double zombie in fact. But since it’s here…)

hank978, my mom was a level-2 hoarder, and I firmly believe that she did it to have a protective wall around herself. Empty space made her uncomfortable; she had to fill it up.

I may have told this story before, but here goes. When I was in the sixth grade, so twelve years old or almost, I wanted to make the guest room company-ready. It was not wall-to-wall-floor-to-ceiling, so I was able to get a lot of junk out of sight or into a different room. Then I swept, dusted, made up the bed, the whole nine. Called my mom up to look at it.

“Oh good,” she says, and goes up to the attic to bring down armloads of books.

“Uh…what are you doing?” says I.

“Now I have room to sort through all these!” And she continued piling up books and other junk until the floor was more covered than it had been when I started. Naturally, nothing got “sorted”; just stayed there until we moved two years later.

I resented her bigly for that, and for quite a while. First, because can you name a parent of a sixth-grader who would not kill to have them do that, much less voluntarily? I still think a simple “Good job” was not too much to ask. Second, because she effectively undid all the work I’d done (one weekend, off and on), as if I’d caused a problem by cleaning, and she had to correct it. (Well, from her POV I did, but I was decades away from understanding that.)

And third, because this was an ongoing source of friction between us. If, frex, I organized her heap of 5000 magazines, mainly because I didn’t want to slip on it and break my neck, I was messing with her “system”. Once, when I was 15 or so, I said “System? I don’t see it — it must be under one of these piles of crap!”

Anyway, yeah, my mom = typical hoarder. If there’s an empty space, it must. be. filled. DIdn’t stop her from bitching at me if my wastebasket was too full, though.

56

I think this illustrates that we see with our brain, not our eyes. A pile of junk that we piled up literally doesn’t look the same as a pile of junk someone else piled up. If you know everything in the pile, if you put it all there and have a reason for why each and every piece is there, it physically looks different than I’d it’s “random crap”.

Every messy person I know (including myself) thinks “my space is cluttered, not messy, unlike everyone else”. But it only looks like “clutter” if it’s yours. Your table covered with crop is just as messy as anyone else’s, it just looks different when you know the providence.

I think this is why I have always been obsessively neat at work. As a teacher, I literally and deliberate practice looking at my environment from the view of a student. I see it differently.