11 Organizing Tips, An Article I Wrote For Redfin

Minus the booze and pill addiction

Minus the booze and pill addiction

I WAS FEATURED IN A REDFIN ORGANIZING TIPS ARTICLE …

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Redfin (a real estate company – Hi Julia!)

This is what the beginning of total domination looks like, friend…one small acknowledgment on a real estate company’s blog, and then BOOM I’m creating bills in congress to change the outdated ways of the world… No more Pelotons or Chef’N strawberry stem pluckers for you. It’s back to jogging on plastic-free beaches and arthritis from having to hand-stir your own cake batter with your one arm that’s slightly larger than the other. Technology is the devil!

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God I hate that thing.

But I digress…Let’s take a look at the quote I gave to Redfin for their blog post entitled “11 Organizing Tips You Will Actually Stick To.”

THINK LIKE A CHESS PLAYER

Think ahead before you buy something. Imagine where you’re going to store it, how long you will realistically use it, and when you finish with it if it will cost you time and money to store it or cost your children their future because it will end up polluting the ocean, earth, or space. For example, you don’t need a little plastic device to take the pits out of cherries or stems off strawberries. Anything that’s a novelty item or fad, you don’t need. The thought of all the Peloton’s piled on top of each other in some future electronic graveyard haunts me.
— LISA SHIELDS (ME)

Wise words indeed, especially when you learn that in the United States right now, landfills are filling up and closing at the rate of approximately 2 a day.  I bet you want to stop reading this post now, don’t you, gentle reader? You don’t want to have to think about that….there’s nothing you can do anyway, is there? 

Oh, but there is, and you can…However, if you choose to continue to look away, your children will have no choice but to deal with the consequences of your choices in the future, when the world looks like an episode of Black Mirror.

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Black Mirror episode called “Fifteen Million Merits”

That’s right, Black Mirror. Do yourself a favor and watch it. Then make your loved ones watch it, by force if need be…because that’s what lies ahead.

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Forcing my clients to watch Black Mirror so they stop buying Pelotons

STOP BUYING PELOTONS (THEY’RE GOING TO END UP BEING TELEPORTED TO ELON MUSK’S LANDFILL ON MARS ANYWAY)

When your Peloton becomes obsolete (and they will) do you think the company has a system in place to pick that thing up so they can reuse the parts? Nope. Why? Because it’s not in the company’s best interest, because it won’t make them money, it will cost them money. This is why there needs to be government regulations that make companies accountable. But since government officials use money from these very companies to fund their campaigns that likely won’t happen. So it’s up to you, and as you may know, gentle reader, I have no faith in you whatsoever.

After you’ve bought your novelty item with the invisible expiration date, your Peloton will at first sit there in the corner, like a neglected plant (don’t even get me started). Then maybe you’ll bring it up to your kid’s room when they leave for college, get it out of the way because it’s ugly and takes up space. Then one day, when you’re sick of looking at your unorganized home, you decide to take action: you sell it or put it on the street. Or maybe you can’t deal with it along with the other boxes of stuff and outdated technology, so you rent a storage unit, like so many of my clients do. Inevitably, after you die, your children and your grandchildren will be forced to go through that storage unit. When they are done taking pictures with and laughing at the relic they pay to have it teleported to Elon Musks landfill on Mars.

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With every Peloton bought there will be less land in the future to actually ride bikes on, since they will all become outdated in a few years and end up in a landfill, much like the 1 million cell phones that are thrown away every year.

Yes, a storage unit. Something no one should permanently keep and yet many do…

CHECK THESE STATS

  • the United States now has 2.3 billion square feet of self-storage space. (the self-storage association notes that, with more than seven square feet for every man, woman, and child, it’s now “physically possible that every American could stand — all at the same time — under the total canopy of self-storage roofing.”)

  • fifty percent of [self-storage] renters are now simply storing what won’t fit in their homes — even though the size of the average American house had almost doubled in the previous 50 years, to 2,300 square feet.

  • by 2007, a full 15 percent of customers told the self-storage association they were storing items that they “no longer need or want.” it was the third-most-popular use for a unit and was projected to grow to 25 percent of renters the following year.

  • between 1970 and 2008, real disposable personal income per capita doubled, and by 2008 we were spending nearly all of it — all but 2.7 percent — each year. meanwhile, the price of much of what we were buying plunged. even by the early ’90s, American families had, on average, twice as many possessions as they did 25 years earlier. by 2005, according to the Boston College sociologist Juliet b. Schor, the average consumer purchased one new piece of clothing every five and a half days.

  • “Human laziness has always been a big friend of self-storage operators,” Derek Naylor, president of the consultant group storage marketing solutions, told me. “because once they’re in, nobody likes to spend all day moving their stuff out of storage. as long as they can afford it, and feel psychologically that they can afford it, they’ll leave that stuff in there forever.”

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$150! That’s actually a great price. You should buy this. It’s not like your child will outgrow it in a year or two or that the tech will become obsolete or that it will cause child ADHD levels to skyrocket.

Depressed yet? If not you can read the full article from the New York Times, called “The Self Storage Self,” here.

That’s all for today. Solving the world’s problems tires me. 

DON’T FORGET TO SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER, FOO! And leave a comment below, goddammit!

xoxo

Your future president of The United LANDFILL THAT IS AMERICA

If this blog post helped you in anyway, please feel free to donate a dollar or two or ten to my Venmo @Lisa-Shields. It will encourage and allow me to write more life changing blog posts.

 
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