Creeping Clutter

June 30, 2026 djarmul 2 Comments

It’s Return of the Clutter. Just when you thought it was safe to go home.

Champa and I downsized in a big way when we joined the Peace Corps a decade ago. We donated or trashed most of our books, clothes, furniture and other possessions before moving abroad with two suitcases each.

“It’s been humbling to confront how much stuff we’ve accumulated,” I wrote then. “Getting rid of it has been liberating. We’ve already downsized so much that our house will be nearly empty when we return.”

So it was. When we completed our service in Moldova and returned home in 2018, everything we owned was in a small upstairs storage room of our Durham house, which we’d rented while away. Marie Kondo could have featured us in her hit Netflix series on “tidying up,” which began airing a few months later.

Alas, that was eight years ago. Since then, clutter has crept back, with new kitchen gadgets, clothes, electronics and more.

It’s much less than before. We’ve tried to retain what we’d learned in the Peace Corps about living more lightly and purposefully. We’ve refilled empty rooms mainly with used furniture from consignment shops. We bought a single car, a Prius, which we still have. We resisted buying books or other kinds of paper, doing almost everything digitally. We’ve traveled a lot but have few other splurges. Even while traveling, we’ve brought home almost nothing except souvenir magnets.

Nonetheless, the empty space in our house — even emptier since our two sons left to start their own families — has acted like a vacuum. Slowly, steadily, our pile has grown.

Recently we’ve begun purging again. I just spent several days sifting through the bin of photos and memorabilia I filled when trashing our photo albums last time, top right, above. Back then, I digitized everything but retained copies of several hundred photos. Now I’ve reduced this pile by more than half. I’m about to unload my remaining vinyl records and music CDs. I have few books left but will be thinning those out, too.

We don’t want to leave our sons with a pile of stuff to sort through later. It’s not fair to them and, as I wrote previously, they and others of their generation have little use for many of the things we consider valuable. I do plan to keep some items that have special significance, but only a few.

For us, Decluttering 2.0 has proven easier than before since we did the hardest work previously. As we’ve seen, though, it isn’t a one-time job, and it isn’t just about “stuff.” Decluttering is also the emotional process of honoring your memories while making space for life’s next stage — space in your heart as well as in your home. Letting go makes it easier to grab whatever lies ahead, just when you thought it was safe to keep holding on.

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Strike a Pose

June 1, 2026 djarmul 1 Comment

Whatever happened to “cheese!”?

A big smile for the camera doesn’t cut it anymore. These days you need to strike a series of elaborate poses, as we saw recently in Southeast Asia.

Do the woman in the window, above, and her friend with the camera have Instagram sites? I’d guess so. Are they “influencers” with sponsors and large audiences? Probably not. But one thing I know for sure: They weren’t unusual.

Simple snapshots have given way to performance across Southeast Asia and beyond. Posing has become a new kind of visual literacy, with people tilting their chins and curling their fingers into hearts, just as in a K-pop music video. Everyone has a smartphone and social media accounts, along with selfie sticks and face-retouching apps.

There’s nothing new about young people expressing themselves; fashion, music, slang and dance have always evolved. Now they’re expressing themselves through images that are elaborately designed, posed, cropped and filtered. We have lots of wannabe Kardashians in our own country as well and I’ve seen them in other parts of the world, too.

What I saw in Asia took this to another level. Many of the young tourists who crossed our path seemed more interested in posing than in learning about where they were visiting. Was this because their countries have a tradition of presenting a carefully curated public self? Was it due to Japanese kawaii culture, with its aesthetic of cuteness, or to Korean beauty influences, or something else?

I can’t explain why it’s become so prevalent, but it has, and I found it interesting. After noticing it repeatedly for about a week, I began quietly snapping the photos you see in this post.

If you hadn’t already noticed this trend yourself, I guarantee you will see it the next time you travel, especially if you go to Southeast Asia.

I hope the people I photographed won’t mind that I shared their poses with you. They clearly wanted their photos to be seen and, well, it didn’t seem like they’d get cheesed easily.