Messy or organizing crazy, how to deal with the culture of excess?

Our society is undeniably forced to consume more and more. The arrangement positioned itself as one of the responses to this culture of excess. The problem is that everyone has their own opinion on it and the subject is often a source of conflict!

Fixing is putting things in their place.
Through this holy and harmless gesture, the film “La culture du trop” by Nicolas Bideau aims to address the small quirks of everyday life to paint a humorous picture of our relationship to living in home

There are the order freaks who polish and polish, the messy ones who pose en masse and the hoarders who can’t part with anything.
Everyone is looking for domestic well-being.

According to Valérie Guillard, professor of management science at the University of Paris Dauphine-PS, the massive influx of objects into the home dates back to the dawn of the consumer society.

With the industrial revolution appeared the concept of convenience associated with these new devices, including household appliances, that made everyday life easier. We buy things because they have meaning and use.

After household items, the object continued to invade the domestic space with decorative, not always useful, but beautiful things. Even if useless, buying them is a pleasure.

We buy a lot, we get tired quickly and to make up for this tiredness, we buy again.
Household appliances, aesthetics, techniques, food, clothes…, useful and useless, occupy our daily life.

The surplus of this society is the permanent orders to buy, to have fun… to be happy. Behind the storage hides a tendency to feel good, a permanent pursuit of happiness imposed as a norm to the point that home life overflows with necessities.

It’s a mental overload, we think we have a lot of obligations, but why bother with all that?

Laurence Bouchet, travel philosopher

In this age of consumerism, we are led to believe that more is normal.

To make the shopping experience more memorable, brands aim for individualization. In a household of 4 people, there are as many toothpastes with different flavors, soaps for different skin types and as many fruit juices, cereals according to everyone’s taste.

We are burdened with purchase orders, we need something new, and the new is almost out of date in such a short time.

Olivier Douville, clinical psychologist

In this culture of excess, organizing doesn’t just affect crazy people, messy people or other hoarders, it concerns us all.
We are all saturated with things, papers, activities to the point that putting things in their place has become a necessity in everyday life so as not to be overwhelmed.
“Accumulation really becomes a problem from the moment it complicates your life and is synonymous with evil. Things become a burden on the mind” said Valérie Guillard, professor of management science.

Arranging means putting things in their place according to defined criteria (color, shape, etc.). An exercise taught to us from a young age with, for example, sorting educational games.
In society, order is everywhere : in the order of cities where everything is square with very straight buildings, to the shelves of supermarkets where the products are nested to the point of madness!

Organizing also makes room in your lifebecause there is a direct correlation between our inner self and our state of mind.

Behind our walls hides our daily life, where putting (or not putting) things in their place is less of a phenomenon and questions our way of life.
In our homes our actions in daily life unfold, a reassuring routine of life where things repeat themselves.

To live is to create one’s own place that is like us and where we are comfortable and where we are safe.

Valérie Guillard, professor of management science, Paris Dauphine-PSL University

To talk about arrangement is to observe the small quirks of each in their personal concept of everyday life. Among them, the great ritual of the household!
Marianne is a student and in order to feel good in her first residence, she felt the need to organize a clean and orderly daily life there. It is important for her that her small kitchen is scrubbed and tidy: ” I need to know where my things are… when I start my day, it has to be completely clean or it will distract me from my work.”

For the girl, cleaning and storage are inseparable. For this, it organizes “a cleaning circuit”. The arrangement of its beauty products in the bathroom is even arranged in order of use. ” If it’s stored in my apartment, it’s also stored in my head.”

Some people are fine with not returning anything to their place.

To live happily at home, is it necessary to reproduce the order of things? Can we, like Candice, free ourselves from the weight of these rules?

Candice Anzel is the author of a book in which she shows that “messy people” exist and they can be happy!

It’s reassuring for me when it’s everywhere, it means it’s alive…When everything is put away, it slows me down.

Candice Anzel, author and family coach

For him, there is no certainty about having things in their place and arrangement will be only a subjective criterion.

Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, the psychologist Jean Piaget… many famous people have completely messy workspaces.
According to Benjamin Pradel, an urban sociologist, there are theories that the messiest offices are often those of the most creative people: ” A creative doesn’t see his office as a mess because he knows where things are. It is in this ordering, seen as a chaos, that he finds his creativity and therefore his well-being.

Today, we have an interest in being “better at home” and this is part of having an aesthetic of our space and not having too many things that are a source of cognitive overload.
Storage is trending. We organize our wardrobes, we clean our dressing room by trying to get rid of parasitic things. Since Marie Kondo’s “roulé-plié”. storage continues to gain popularity in social networks.

The “Shelfie”the art of taking pictures of your shelves, dressing room, library where nothing appears, is the new trend of Instagram.

A growing frenzy for domestic order has seen the appearance of “cleanfluencers” (influencers of cleaning and storage) whose little tricks make it possible to have an always clean interior.

Behind the doors of the houses, the act of organizing took on meaning, putting or not putting things in their place is less important and reveals our relationship to consumption, to others, to our feeling- inside, in society. The Ranger chronicles the entire evolution of our lifestyles.

And you, what kind of resident are you?

La culture du trop, a film by Nicolas Bideau
Co-production Nomade Productions / France 3 Bourgogne Franche-Comté
Broadcast Thursday, January 12 at 10:50 pm and Monday, January 16 at 9:05 am
⇒ To see now on france.tv