May 2025, Anyway…
Junk
Now that the temperamental weather is finally conceding to Spring, many people are taken by a desire to throw open the shutters, don the rubber gloves, and crank up their productivity play lists as they dive into spring cleaning. I feel the instinct calling me as well. So permit me to speak on the topic of Junk.
Generally, people have a good sense of what junk is, though some people are more aggressive with the label than others. My general rule of thumb is this; if the space the item takes up would be more valuable to you than the item itself, then it's junk. One may consider a collection of past year's Christmas and birthday cards to be junk, but if they are taking up otherwise unusable space in the back of a file cabinet, they are not such great offenders as if they made their permanent home on your nightstand.
Junk can cost us much more than space, though. There is junk that costs us time. A similar rule applies; if you would rather have the time than whatever the results of your activities were, those activities were junk. Some tedious tasks that seem like they would fall under this rule, turn out to be far more valuable than we think; doing laundry seems like it's time-junk, but consider the value of having clean clothes to wear. Most of what I find to be time-junk are things involving screens, such as arguing with people you don't know online about topics that neither of you are particularly informed about and which will result in no measured change and affect no one's life. Additionally, doom scrolling on social media or through the cable channels (the original doom scroll), checking your email or headlines every other hour, or playing just one more round of whatever mobile game you are addicted to this month are all forms of time junk. In the end, you would likely prefer to have that time back.
Unfortunately, unlike physical junk, where the space can be reclaimed by some effort and determination, the time lost to junk can never be recovered. So for this spring cleaning, ask yourself what pointless activities you can afford to lose and be better off for it. Clean out that time junk.
