Mess is Good...

An article by Michael Duffy in the SMH this weekend, says exactly the right things to me:

The decline of mess and the pursuit of neatness start early. We abort foetuses if they show any sign of not being perfect. We're world leaders in our enthusiasm for caesarean births, which do away with much of the mess of ordinary labour. Imperfect, emotionally messy marriages are terminated. Children are farmed out to child-care centres. Old people are put into nursing homes. Those with a low IQ or a mental illness are hidden in welfare sinks such as Minto and Mount Druitt.

Religion, which helps people to cope with the existential messiness of life, is no longer necessary for most of us, except to provide a backdrop for wedding photos.

Our desire to eliminate mess is reflected in our obsession with health and gyms and cosmetic surgery. We see it in the gentrification that has transformed the cityscape, with good taste breaking out in homes and gardens and public places. Everything is new, renovated, freshly painted or planted. In dozens of housing estates around the city fringe this has been taken to extremes, with literally every square metre landscaped. The messy city I grew up in, a place of unguttered streets, vacant blocks and untidy backyards, has almost disappeared beneath the tide of gleaming new apartment blocks, and interesting street furniture.

For some years now I've been wanting to present a eulogy for mess, but I've felt so alone it didn't seem worth the effort. In the relentless search for heritage paint charts, tighter tummies and the perfect olive oil, who would listen? People I talked to about mess often turned out to be wracked by anxiety.

He goes on to quote the authors of a book in USA about the difference between people whose desks are tidy versus those whose aren't- this being the model behaviour that all the efficiently and time management gurus want us to strive to achieve:

[they] are particularly sceptical about personal organisers, who claim that having a messy desk means you waste an hour a day in looking for stuff. They surveyed real office workers and found that people with very neat desks spent 36 per cent more time on organising and searching than people with fairly messy ones. This is probably because an apparently messy desk reflects some intuitive organising principle inside its user's mind.

I knew that.

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