How to Keep Your House Clean

LAST SUMMER, a friend was visiting from Australia. Our plan was to meet at my place at noon, and then he showed up thirty minutes ahead of schedule. “You’re early. I need to tidy up, it’s a mess,” I lamented like some kind of 1950s fridge-magnet lady come to life. It wasn’t. Messy, that is. I just hadn’t had time to do a pre-company spit polish. And now here was my dear pal, standing in my kitchen, and I was spinning out over coffee rings. As we hugged, I surveyed the dishes in the sink from over his shoulder, the high chair caked with egg-something, the bowl on the butcher’s block overflowing with the flotsam and jetsam of everyday existence. I wasn’t embarrassed. It was more like a visceral discomfort, like this reunion I had been looking forward to was somehow diminished against an imperfect backdrop.

My friend was unfazed: “You live here, don’t you?” he said, shrug-smirking in a way that suggested maybe he hadn’t flown for almost twenty-four hours to spend time with quartz countertops. For him, it was a throwaway comment. My daughter barrelled in—a tornado of snot and sand and uncapped magic markers—and we got on with our day.

But for me, his words landed like a transgressive truth bomb, a much-needed reminder that chasing picture perfect in the domestic sphere is absurd. Like going to a barnyard and being disappointed by the smells. You live here—as in, this is a home, not an Architectural Digest photo shoot or house porn on social media. You live here—as in, meeting the needs of three people who eat and sleep and do laundry and leave toothpaste spray all over the bathroom vanity every day is a messy business. You live here—as in, life is precious and short and rare, and not one single person ever said on their deathbed, “I wish I had spent more time with my Swiffer.”

So why can’t I stop stress-cleaning?

It’s a serious question, if not one I ever thought I’d be asking myself. I am not a naturally tidy person. My brain tends toward the chaotic, and so does my T-shirt drawer. On vacation, I am the friend whose suitcase explodes over the shared room. But more and more, I have found myself tidying at home as a way to take the edge off. I don’t have a therapist. I do have a Shark Rocket Pro Cordless, my emotional support vacuum whose dulcet whoosh provokes a Pavlovian sense of calm. Maybe I can’t meet a work deadline, get my princess-obsessed daughter to wear pants, book a driver’s test, or watch the news without crying. But I can spend five minutes in a suction-induced fugue state, and it feels like letting the air out of an emotional-pressure headache.

I’m not alone here. A friend dealing with relationship issues recently mentioned her post-midnight rage cleans; a friend of a friend confessed to locking herself in the washroom to watch sink-cleaning videos on TikTok—a way to summon the high without even picking up a scrub brush, and a good example of how mess has come to occupy a symbolic space in the modern psyche.

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THE BROOM WASN’T always set so high. Go back a few decades or so and many of the people in movies and on TV lived in nice but imperfect spaces. Monica Geller from Friends was a card-carrying clean freak, but still her kitchen betrayed some blemishes of regular use, and the set designer of Home Alone described the intentional placement of everyday junk to build authenticity. Today’s aspirational households are flotsam/jetsam free, the same, sterile, Scandi design–influenced spaces that are all over your Instagram feed. #CleanTok is an entire social media subculture that has turned tidying into a fashionable pursuit.

Not just the spaces but the cleaning solutions themselves are gorgeous: sleek stackable bins, geometric prints on Swedish dishcloths, that viral pink clean-all goop that is not actually related to Gwyneth Paltrow but does provoke the same deeply rooted feelings of inadequacy. #Fridgescaping is a recent trend that says your fridge is a functional appliance meant to keep food cold, but can’t it also be a place for freshly cut flowers? A framed vintage photograph? Fairy lights??!!! Of course, these images are content, and the algorithm favours the unhinged. Still it’s hard not to see fridgescaping as an absurdist manifestation of a more insidious norm.

In 2010, Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up was published in Japan. In the years that followed, it became a global bestseller, encouraging the world to get tidy by getting rid of our extra crap (after assessing its ability to spark joy). Kondo’s clutter war was key in the rise of the minimalist aesthetic, but fifteen years on, her most lasting legacy is the idea that all of our spaces—our living rooms but also our clothing drawers and our laundry nooks—should be not just uncluttered but beautiful. More recent trends like #cluttercore or “the messy girls aesthetic” often get positioned as a form of resistance against Kondo’s war on mess, but in fact, these carefully calibrated expressions of maximalism are another strike in the aesthetic arms race: now even mess is supposed to be pretty.

“So much of what I do is reminding my audience to get real,” says Melissa Maker, a Toronto-based cleaning expert who founded her business in 2006 BK (before Kondo). That book, along with Martha Stewart and the endless stream of before-and-after content on social media, has pushed us further and further from achievable goals: “We are challenging ourselves to participate in some kind of cleaning Olympics when the question we need to be asking ourselves is: What does ‘clean enough’ look like, so that we can tidy and move on and enjoy the rest of our lives?” There is, she notes, no static “after” shot in our daily existence. Those perfect vacuum lines are going to get stepped on, or someone will have to make dinner in that crumb-free kitchen. “Tidying up is Sisyphean,” Maker says. “You can either decide to lighten your boulder or get crushed by it.”

Maker came up with the “MIA” or “most important areas” approach to tidying—two or three spaces in your home that you think should look nice on a regular basis. “For me, I love to have an organized, clutter-free front hall, because it makes me feel a sense of calm when I come through the door,” Maker says. Someone else might choose their washroom, because that’s where they wind down and have a bath every night. I chose my kitchen (because it’s the room I walk into first thing every morning, and when it’s messy, I feel like my day starts off-kilter) and the front TV room (because it’s where we hang out in the evenings).

I was not overly hopeful that the method would have an impact, but a few days in, I realized something: For months, every time I walked by my overflowing laundry bin, I would experience a twinge of anxiety, but now that wasn’t happening. The way my dining-room table becomes a collecting place for random stuff that hasn’t been put away yet didn’t irk me either. This, Maker explained, was her MIA method’s secret sauce: “When we identify areas of focus, we are redefining what success looks like and giving ourselves permission not to tick every box.”

Another antidote to perfection-oriented pressure involves setting a timer and cleaning until it goes off. This hack pushes back against an all-or-nothing mindset and is, instead, about committing to a process. “Often we put off tasks because we think we don’t have time to achieve a certain end goal,” she says. But if the goal is the time spent cleaning, then you move away from fantasy ideals, and “success” is just working through short and regular increments. Sort of like going to the gym. “It’s a commitment to a routine. Nobody thinks they’re going to get a six pack from a single workout,” Maker says. She tells me that when I feel overwhelmed and don’t know where to start, I should accomplish whatever is possible in a few minutes and then let it go. In part, it’s about the cumulative impact of manageable effort over time, but it’s also about pushing back against goals that don’t serve us—one Beyoncé-backed five-minute micro tidy at a time.

IN HER 2016 MANUAL The Joy of Leaving Your Sh*t All Over the Place, Brooklyn author Jennifer McCartney makes the case for mess. Her book is a send-up of Kondo’s bestseller, but it is also a powerful rebuke against the tyranny of tidy. Most people are not neat, McCartney asserts. It’s just that the messy majority doesn’t tend to produce content or host dinner parties, and so we feel a sense of shame for failing to measure up without ever considering that maybe the metrics are off.

The KonMari Method was an important milestone—in cementing the relationship between mess and moral failure. But for homemakers (mostly women), the inclination to gauge self-worth with a feather duster goes back a lot further.

Long before the war on clutter, there were housewives, competing over who could produce the whitest whites, and while various technological advancements were supposed to give us our lives back, it can also feel like they’ve upped the ante. That was before social media, where you can spend hours just trying to figure out which cleaning hack suits you best, as if the perfect hack is going to solve everything. “We don’t need to clean more, we need to care less,” McCartney says. Which is an excellent tip, if someone could just alert my reptile brain.

A 2010 study conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that men and women have different emotions around mess. Subjects recorded video tours of their homes, then the language they used to talk about these spaces was analyzed. For women, living in a cluttered environment was associated with chronic stress. For men, that was not the case. Turns out that for some men, the collection of footwear scattered around the door is just shoes, whereas women are more inclined to experience this kind of everyday disorder as a physical manifestation of personal failings. Which explains my adverse reaction to a couple of coffee rings—but also why tidying has become such a popular tonic. “Cleaning is the easy way out” is how McCartney puts it. We want to tell ourselves that we’d be happier, more successful, have better sex lives, if only we could tidy up. But it doesn’t work that way.

Instead of setting a timer to clean, I tried setting one to address other anxieties. In ten minutes, I booked my driving test, fired off some long-overdue emails, and booked an appointment at the bank to start a Registered Education Savings Plan. And when the buzzer went off, I felt that same sense of calm that comes from my tidying blitzes. Instead of yet another suction spree, I sat down and completed this very article, still not entirely sure whether there is a best way to tidy, but equipped with a mantra to remind me of what matters.

We live here, I tell myself, as I walk past the pile of Halloween decorations (now a few days into November) and sit down with my daughter to read a book amidst the muddle.