December 30, 2025 • 20 mins
In 2025, we went viral for a concept that was maybe a little too relatable – micropettiness. If you've been feeling slightly annoyed with loved ones over the holidays, maybe a little bit of micropettiness is perfectly acceptable for this time of year.
Plus, hoarding, throwing, selling and Swedish death cleaning — we’re talking about 'stuff' and why what we do with it goes far deeper than just clearing clutter. We discuss why you either love having lots of things around you (or not) and the reasons why many people – particularly parents – hold onto random objects. If you’ve spent the past week surrounded by a growing pile of presents and wrapping paper, we think you’ll enjoy this conversation.
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What to read:
- We asked women to share their acts of micro-pettiness. Prepare to take notes.
- Dear Millennials, it's time to bury another one of our beloved staples.
- It's time we addressed the micro-pettiness in the room.
- 'My house is always a mess after Christmas. Then I found the easiest decluttering hack.'
- 'I just discovered this very specific hack for decluttering your kitchen drawers.'
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
You're listening to I'MM with mea podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Hello, I'm Jesse Stevens. This summer, we've curated your out
Loud playlist and are bringing you some of our most
talked about conversations so that your holiday listening is sorted.
We're sharing today's episode because out Loud as you loved it,
it went viral there were so many chats off the
back of it. In twenty twenty five, one of our
(00:39):
biggest conversations was about the concept of micro pettiness and
if you're feeling slightly annoyed with your loved ones over
the holidays, we think that maybe it's time to revisit
a little bit of micro pettiness. Plus, we are also
sharing a chat we had about well stuff, the psychology
behind why people hold on to random objects while others
(01:01):
love to clear their clutter. So if you have spent
the past week surrounded by a growing pile of presence
and wrapping paper, we think you will enjoy this conversation.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
We're big fans of pettiness here on Mama Mer out Loud,
or maybe that's just me, but no, I think Jesse,
you're very petty.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
You like some pettiness.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah, I do like a little bit of pettiness.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
I think it's an underrated personality trait. Personally, does being
petty make you the bigger person? No, it makes you
the smaller one, and sometimes that's okay. I'm excited to
report that we've discovered a new form of petty behavior
that's even more petty than the regular kind. It's more subtle,
it's smaller, and it's easy to miss, but it can
still be deeply satisfying. In case you missed it, we
(01:45):
learned about it via a viral tweet this week from
a woman called Bex Luthor, who wrote, there's someone in
our team who behaves horribly to me, and whenever I
have to type his name, I've taken to using a
slightly smaller font.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Size than for everyone else's. I loved that.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
I love it. Micro pettiness is pettiness via stealth.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yes, And what I love about it is that it
is a level of petty that makes the other person
feel crazy. Because if I said to you, guys, really weird.
But every time Mia sends me an email, I swear
she puts my name a little.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Bit smaller, people would even noticed.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Yeah, no paranoid, Yeah, it would make you question your
grasp on reality. But that means the person's really getting
to you.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
And I love that.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
We have asked out loud as if they do any
acts of micro pettiness, maybe in the workplace or in
their life generally, Jesse, you've got one.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
One out louder said that when someone in her family
is really pissing her off, she'll go and sit in
their usual seat, like say there's a head of the
table that someone normally sits in, because it just it
puts everyone a little off. Kiltup sag.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
One of the out louders said, I tell my best
friend if a boyfriend is being mean to her, she
should just take small things from his house, nothing important,
just inconvenient, like the base of his phone charge and
leave the cord. Just take the plug, one of the
stove dials, only one, the little spin thing under the
plate in the microwave. So well, yes, one shoe, but
(03:11):
leave the other. That's great. That falls into the whole, Like,
am I going crazy? I love that.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
I've got some examples from out louders of admin pettiness.
One person says, I'll stop using exclamation marks when I
talk to this person over email or slack.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Yeah, it makes me feel like I'm being That is
my peak. Rude is when you get proper punctuaity.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Yeah. Someone else said that people often get her name
wrong in emails, so she does the same back, calling
them by their last name or spell their name wrong.
Instead of signing off every email with many thanks, they
just sign off their email with thanks.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
I realize that I have been guilty of micro pettiness
in the last twenty four hours. I do this often,
which is when I get up in the middle of
the night with our baby, which has been happening a
bit lately. I will send my husband a text message
about something that's not very ard. But yes, today I
did it. At four fifteen. I went we need milk,
(04:09):
and I just was like a marker of just going
I'm awake, just so you know.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Do you know what I used to do?
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Every time I was annoyed with my husband, I'd take
off my wedding ring.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
That's not my cit petty, you never noticed.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
I wish I was more of an evil genius.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Maybe I'm going to try and develop that more this year.
Speaker 4 (04:30):
I'm not genius enough. Swedish death cleaning less fun than
Swedish meatballs or Swedish furniture, but arguably more important. An
article in The Sydney Morning Harold by Lisa Martin this
week got us talking about it again. It was called,
hey Boomers, for your kid's sake, please Swedish death clean
the house. What is Swedish death cleaning? Some of you
(04:53):
may ask, well, there's a TV show and everything about
it now, and it's broadly described as Swedish philosophy. You
know how the Scandies are good at everything. I assume
this is part of that Swedish philosophy of clearing your
house out of all your collected crap well in time
for your death, a sort of semi holy ceremonial tidy
up that allows you to confront the end of your
(05:15):
life in a pragmatic way, as well as gift treasured
items to those in your family who might remember you
by them. As Martin says in her story, although it
sounds morbid, death cleaning is about a home edit to
ensure your stuff has a purpose and the series. The
Swedish Death Cleaning Series was based on a sensible and
surprisingly not so sad book by author Margareta Magnuson, who writes,
(05:39):
one shouldn't ever imagine that anyone will wish to or
be able to schedule time off to take care of
what you didn't bother to take care of yourself out,
no matter how much they love you. I assume they
mean your adult children. Don't leave this burden to them.
Sounds like tough love. Mia, Is that what Swedish death
(05:59):
cleaning is?
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yeah, it's funny. My mum's been doing this.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
Oh, she not recently, but a number of years ago
she had to go and clear out her own father's stuff.
Her mother died many years ago, but then her father remarried,
so she was essentially cleaning out a lot of her
mother stuff and her father's stuff. And it was a
process that she and her brother did it over many months.
(06:23):
It took a really long time and it's a really
interesting process. So she's recently been going through a lot
of her stuff and getting rid of stuff, not for
any particular sake, although she did mention it. She said
things like, oh, you don't have to keep blah blah
after I'm gone, don't worry.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
I don't mind.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Because she's certainly not a horder, but she's a chronicler,
like she keeps every newspaper, clipping of every column or
every time I've ever been mentioned, every magazine I ever edited,
all of those kinds of things. Because she's of the
generation I think that the boomers are probably the last
generation that most of their memories will be analog, they'll
be printed actual objects, they won't be on hard drives particularly,
(07:05):
so there's a lot of stuff.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
There's also this hangover. I guess it's a wartime thing,
and it's also a hangover from the Great Depression where
the mass consumerism and having stuff meant you were okay,
and then you held on to that stuff because you
didn't know if it would be taken away. Like it's
the whole thing where it's gone down generations with my family, Yeah,
and you finish what's on your plate because you may
have come from a context in which there wasn't enough
food to put on the table. So there's definitely that
(07:29):
that's been passed down generations. And I know we've had
this issue in our family where you try and clean
out the house, or you try and put pressure on
an elderly relative to clean out the house and they
refuse to do it. And I read something from I
think It was someone who worked in aged care recently,
and they said that they talk about this period of
(07:49):
your life as the takeaway era because people just take
things from you. People take your car keys, people take
your stuff. People sometimes, you know, say that you can't
live at home anymore, and.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
There's ta goay home.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Yeah, there's this real resistance to having someone come in
and say we need to throw out your stuff.
Speaker 4 (08:08):
And my it's a terrible thing to have to say.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
My grandfather, who is all through his sort of early nineties,
we knew he needed to do it and it made
him really anxious and you know, big house, boxes of stuff.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
And confronting I imagine, Yeah, and he.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Just got to the age where he didn't have the capacity,
the emotional, cognitive, physical capacity to go through his stuff.
And that is a big job for a family.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
I reckon. There's two types of people in this, as
there are in lots of things, right. There are people
who are preemptively doing it, like your mom, and those
people are wonderful, but it's also really orks because every
time you go to the house, they're try and give
you something, yeah, and you're like, I don't I don't
want my good but I've seen them have it because
you know you're going through this deep, wholly clean up,
(08:51):
as it says, I'm confronting your life. And then there
are people who there's just no way they're going to
do it. And I have a feeling that I will
be that person, because although I'm not a hoarder, if
I ever have to move house, for example, or go
on holiday and pack, I like to leave it as
long as possible because I hate living in the transient space,
do you know what I mean? So, like, yes, I
(09:11):
had to move house a lot of times in a
very short period. When we moved to the country, I
moved three times in less than two years, and every
house I went to I unpacked all my books and
put them all on the bookshelves. And that's a big
annoying job. But I feel very at home and happy
with my books around me, right, and then they would
be the very last thing I would pack and take
with me when I'd go anywhere, because I don't want
(09:32):
to live in a living room without books, do you
know what I mean? So until the last moment, I'll
do it. So when I think about my parents, for example,
who are probably should be thinking about this in terms
of the home they've been living in and how long
they're going to get to stay there, and what it's
going to be like to declutter. I entirely relate to
the idea of them going. But this is my stuff
(09:55):
and I'm not going to preemptively prune. I'm going to
live in the exactly how i want to live with
my things, the way I want to live it, and
the new fuckers continue.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
You give me a big job to whoever has to
come go through.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
It's also about your own relationship to your mortality. I
think it's about either being a realist that I'm not
going to be here one day or being in denial,
which is no, I'm living in the moment. I don't
want to think about that, and that's fair to go.
That's not my responsibility. I mean, if my parents cleaned
out their place, it would just be all my stuff.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Well that's the irony too, you know, I think most
of us. I mean, I'm in my early fifties and
I'm sure I've got boxes of stuff.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
At my parents' house. Definitely, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
And it's like, at what age my kids who've moved out,
I have boxes of their stuff.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
At what age do you claim your own.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
Because I'm not proud of this, but I got really
upset once when I hadn't lived in the same country
as my parents for twenty five years, and yet when
I went home and found the little special box i'd
had with like some diaries in it or whatever my
teen years had got I was like outraged at my
poor mother. I was like, how could you have thrown
that out? And she's like, babe, twenty five years and
(11:04):
then add on to that, when you left home another
five to ten years, am I supposed to just carry
your shit with me?
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Was a story recently about someone was in like a
Vinnie or a Salvos and found family photos of Scott Morrison.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Did you say this? No? Yeah, and I.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Think he'd accidentally done a potentially Swedish death clane and gone,
I don't need these photos and Heed thrown them out,
and someone was like, I.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Have photos Morison childhood, which is.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Just so may on a Saturday. Actually it's so Lucra
on a Saturday, being like who needs photos?
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Who needs?
Speaker 4 (11:35):
About your relationship with clutter as well, like death cleaning
aside like me and you always say you're quite brutal,
like with clothes and things in out. Is it about
also how much you like your stuff?
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Yeah, I'm very unsentimental because I like buying stuff. I
am very able to let stuff go because I need
to physically make room for new stuff, right, which is
terrible for the planet.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
I will wear of that.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
But what I think is interesting though. I'll sometimes come.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Across like a box of child's.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Tea, and I don't know whose teeth they are, because
of course I didn't label the box, and I don't
know what I'm keeping them.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
For, but they make a lovely netlas.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
I feel like throwing them out is somehow upsetting, so
I just then put them back in the drawer to
deal with another day.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Apparently there's something called a ninety ninety rule of minimalism,
which means that if you haven't used it in ninety days.
If you haven't used a children's teeth in ninety days
and you're not going to have them in the next ninety, then.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Maybe there's time to no, no, not. I actually have
a theory about it, seriously, like play this through. What
am I going to do with them?
Speaker 3 (12:42):
Like? Why am I keeping them? Am I going to
show them to the actual children? Am I going to
show them to their children, like maybe some of them
Lucas'll like, go and sit down with Luna and go,
this might have been tooth one day?
Speaker 4 (12:53):
Are you going to frame them for a murder?
Speaker 1 (12:55):
With the I I think I'm going to do with them?
Speaker 2 (12:57):
And then how are you to throw?
Speaker 1 (12:58):
And that can also.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
Extend to things like I keep cards, you know, cards, letters,
those kinds of momentos. One of my love languages of
words of affirmation. So people, when anyone writes something nice
to me or about me, I put it in a
little box. I've got so many of these boxes, and
part of me thinks when I'm doing it, oh, one
day I will look through them and they will make
me feel good. No, I can't think of anything more
(13:22):
depressing to me. That's like Facebook memories that come up
and you just go. I find them viscerally upsetting because
it's like I don't want to see my child who's
now twenty when they were three, because then I'll get
so existentially sad that that little three year old's gone.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
And so with all these letters that I've got, and
I can't.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Have a broader theory about clutter and this decluttering minimalism
Swedish death cleaning movement, and I think that having less
has become the.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
New class signifier.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
So just like for our parents' generation or the generation
before that, having stuff, I remember this, it was like
you came in and you'd have you know, even having
a bench with lots of vases and lots of Alaskas
that leads yeah, just trinku stuff. It was like that
was a sign that you we're doing okay. Now. The
sign that you are wealthy clean surfaces is absolutely bare spaces.
(14:15):
And because it signals that you probably have a cleaner,
that you probably have the time to declar, you have
good stories, and that you can throw things out because
you have the income to buy it again if you
need it. And so there's this real like class thing
where I think that's why I find some of these
conversations hard is because people who keep stuff often have
either a different relationship to money or a different relationship
(14:37):
to throwing stuff out that I think is a little
bit more complexiond you.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Know what I think my boxes of letters and cards are.
I think that that's proof that I'm loved.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
Those boxes are exactly that they are a connection. They
are an actual physical manifestation of the relationships that are
important to you. I totally get why you don't. It's
like I was thinking that I'm not a hoarder, and
then I just thought about the fact that where we've
been living for two years, we have a big garage
that isn't a garage you put a car in. It's
just like a big garage, right.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
It is full of shit.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
We have filled it to the brim with shit within
two years. And some of that shit are two huge
plastic tubs that I keep of travel photographs, letters the
old boyfriends wrote me, diaries from my travels, letters that
my parents have written me, postcards again me are like
I have occasionally, like as a sentimental act of self harm,
(15:29):
sat down and rifled through those and gone, oh my god,
remember that. But I don't want to do that. But
how could I ever throw those?
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Stephanie Wood wrote an article in the Good Weekend I
think it was just over the weekend about the booming
industry of storage.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
You know, Yes, so that's exactly it. I don't want
to throw it, but I don't want it in my house.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
It's because so much of our memories and our lives
are digital now that there's something about the permanence and
the sentimentality of physical objects that feel like a connection
to something.
Speaker 4 (16:03):
Yeah, but also the cloud is like a virtual garage
full of shit, right because my kids are never going
to rifle through their travel pictures. When was the last
time you went and looked back in the cloud all
the old pictures that are up there of ten years ago.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Or five on my phone? Yeah exactly.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
We all live right here in this moment, yeah, right now.
But at least if it's in the cloud, we've got well,
they're there, So it's like that's the garage of the
digital age.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
I did a bunch of research on how you're actually
meant to declutter.
Speaker 4 (16:31):
Do you want to know what the tests I'd do?
Speaker 1 (16:33):
I do, definitely do so, Maricondo of you.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yes, there's a book called Reset your Home that everyone's
talking about and there are a bunch of rules and
here are the ones that stood out for me. You
have to treat decluttering as an appointment. So what time
is best for you? If you're a morning person, if
you're a Sunday afternoon person. You also need to have
a beginning and an end. Like with any massive task,
don't do the thing, which it just feels very mayup
(16:56):
where you would go into a room pull everything out.
Oh yeah, and then it's like, you know, you're not
getting through all.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
All the time.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
And then I lose the will halfway through and I
wonder off.
Speaker 4 (17:04):
And then you get well, if it's me, then I
go into a bit of a spiral of self hatred
about why am.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
I in the middle of all this shit?
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Yes, exactly, it's not what we like. So just start
with half an hour or so. And you've got to
start with the easy wins. So like I'm going to
start with my T shirts. So I'm going to start
with one of the boxes or whatever it is. And
you use the little and often method, so you do
a little bit every so often, and that's how you
keep on top of that. I'm allergic to clutter. We
(17:32):
are always decluttering in our house and Lucas box. I
have one sentimental box that I've got a hide from
Luca because he'll throw it out. I am on the
recorders saying I gave him a birthday card. He read
it and put it in the bin, not because he
didn't like it, he was just like and I think
that was the same day he threw out my hair
elastic that was sitting on me because it was I
think he needs to see a therapist.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Yeah, I don't know. I have to say I don't
know a lot of men.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
I keep memory boxes for all the men in my life,
my sons and my husband.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Because tell us out loud as I know.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
We've got some male listeners and also some women listeners
who have men in their lives.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Do men keep this ship?
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Because men don't do the dam the home.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
Brent has so many old photos. One of the things
about old photos, as we've already said me are now
they're mostly digital, but it's a version of yourself. You're
holding onto a version of yourself. So I posted some
of them a year or so ago. Brent loves to
go through his old travel pictures and the young hot
Brent striding over Nepoleese mountains. That version of Brent has
(18:29):
got well hasn't gone, but it's changed. It's like you
can't get rid of that. So I think they do,
but for different reasons. I don't think he keeps like
cards I've written him old my kids when they were little,
they would make the birthday cards, and that's lovely things
about you the homemade ones. They can't throw that shit out.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Something that's very challenging when you have children is that
you don't realize how much of parenting is about smuggling
your child's shitty craft pictures or scribbles into the bin,
because they come home and present them to you, and
the first few times you're like, oh, my god, this
is amazing, and then you're just like oh, and then
if they find them in the bin, you get in
(19:08):
all sorts of trouble.
Speaker 4 (19:09):
And like everything in parenting, the first couple of times
you're like, who would ever throw anything like that out?
I will never do that.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Ever, you like, where's the nearest incinerata? Because you can't.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
You have to dispose of the evidence. My brother and
my uncle have recently obviously been doing some clearing out,
and they each sent me letters that I'd sent to
them when I was much younger.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
I didn't even open.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
Them, Oh I did not. They sent me like photos
of the I just like I could not. I'm not
interested in revisiting. I find that too confronting. Revisiting old
pictures of my childhood or of my kid's childhood. It
makes me too conscious of the passing of time.
Speaker 4 (19:49):
One of the things that's interesting about the idea of
not leaving the clutter to the next generations because that
idea that no one cares about it as much as you.
The place that I live has quite a lot of
retirees there, and often you'll see lawn sales when someone's
passed and their house is gone, and the sons and
daughters whatever are doing this, and it's like seeing somebody's.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Life just like splayed out on the.
Speaker 4 (20:12):
Grass with like free to a good home or you know,
everything two dollars. And there's something very poignant about that.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
The stories have disappeared and all that's left is a
semi broken coffee table. And if you're looking for more
to listen to, every Mma Mia podcast is curating your
summer listening right across our network. From pop culture to
beauty to powerful interviews, there's something for everyone. There's a
link in our show notes. We'll be back to regular
(20:40):
programming on Monday, twelfth of January.
Speaker 4 (20:47):
Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on
which we've recorded this podcast
You're listening to I'MM with mea podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Hello, I'm Jesse Stevens. This summer, we've curated your out
Loud playlist and are bringing you some of our most
talked about conversations so that your holiday listening is sorted.
We're sharing today's episode because out Loud as you loved it,
it went viral there were so many chats off the
back of it. In twenty twenty five, one of our
(00:39):
biggest conversations was about the concept of micro pettiness and
if you're feeling slightly annoyed with your loved ones over
the holidays, we think that maybe it's time to revisit
a little bit of micro pettiness. Plus, we are also
sharing a chat we had about well stuff, the psychology
behind why people hold on to random objects while others
(01:01):
love to clear their clutter. So if you have spent
the past week surrounded by a growing pile of presence
and wrapping paper, we think you will enjoy this conversation.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
We're big fans of pettiness here on Mama Mer out Loud,
or maybe that's just me, but no, I think Jesse,
you're very petty.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
You like some pettiness.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah, I do like a little bit of pettiness.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
I think it's an underrated personality trait. Personally, does being
petty make you the bigger person? No, it makes you
the smaller one, and sometimes that's okay. I'm excited to
report that we've discovered a new form of petty behavior
that's even more petty than the regular kind. It's more subtle,
it's smaller, and it's easy to miss, but it can
still be deeply satisfying. In case you missed it, we
(01:45):
learned about it via a viral tweet this week from
a woman called Bex Luthor, who wrote, there's someone in
our team who behaves horribly to me, and whenever I
have to type his name, I've taken to using a
slightly smaller font.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Size than for everyone else's. I loved that.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
I love it. Micro pettiness is pettiness via stealth.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yes, And what I love about it is that it
is a level of petty that makes the other person
feel crazy. Because if I said to you, guys, really weird.
But every time Mia sends me an email, I swear
she puts my name a little.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Bit smaller, people would even noticed.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Yeah, no paranoid, Yeah, it would make you question your
grasp on reality. But that means the person's really getting
to you.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
And I love that.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
We have asked out loud as if they do any
acts of micro pettiness, maybe in the workplace or in
their life generally, Jesse, you've got one.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
One out louder said that when someone in her family
is really pissing her off, she'll go and sit in
their usual seat, like say there's a head of the
table that someone normally sits in, because it just it
puts everyone a little off. Kiltup sag.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
One of the out louders said, I tell my best
friend if a boyfriend is being mean to her, she
should just take small things from his house, nothing important,
just inconvenient, like the base of his phone charge and
leave the cord. Just take the plug, one of the
stove dials, only one, the little spin thing under the
plate in the microwave. So well, yes, one shoe, but
(03:11):
leave the other. That's great. That falls into the whole, Like,
am I going crazy? I love that.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
I've got some examples from out louders of admin pettiness.
One person says, I'll stop using exclamation marks when I
talk to this person over email or slack.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Yeah, it makes me feel like I'm being That is
my peak. Rude is when you get proper punctuaity.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Yeah. Someone else said that people often get her name
wrong in emails, so she does the same back, calling
them by their last name or spell their name wrong.
Instead of signing off every email with many thanks, they
just sign off their email with thanks.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
I realize that I have been guilty of micro pettiness
in the last twenty four hours. I do this often,
which is when I get up in the middle of
the night with our baby, which has been happening a
bit lately. I will send my husband a text message
about something that's not very ard. But yes, today I
did it. At four fifteen. I went we need milk,
(04:09):
and I just was like a marker of just going
I'm awake, just so you know.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Do you know what I used to do?
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Every time I was annoyed with my husband, I'd take
off my wedding ring.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
That's not my cit petty, you never noticed.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
I wish I was more of an evil genius.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Maybe I'm going to try and develop that more this year.
Speaker 4 (04:30):
I'm not genius enough. Swedish death cleaning less fun than
Swedish meatballs or Swedish furniture, but arguably more important. An
article in The Sydney Morning Harold by Lisa Martin this
week got us talking about it again. It was called,
hey Boomers, for your kid's sake, please Swedish death clean
the house. What is Swedish death cleaning? Some of you
(04:53):
may ask, well, there's a TV show and everything about
it now, and it's broadly described as Swedish philosophy. You
know how the Scandies are good at everything. I assume
this is part of that Swedish philosophy of clearing your
house out of all your collected crap well in time
for your death, a sort of semi holy ceremonial tidy
up that allows you to confront the end of your
(05:15):
life in a pragmatic way, as well as gift treasured
items to those in your family who might remember you
by them. As Martin says in her story, although it
sounds morbid, death cleaning is about a home edit to
ensure your stuff has a purpose and the series. The
Swedish Death Cleaning Series was based on a sensible and
surprisingly not so sad book by author Margareta Magnuson, who writes,
(05:39):
one shouldn't ever imagine that anyone will wish to or
be able to schedule time off to take care of
what you didn't bother to take care of yourself out,
no matter how much they love you. I assume they
mean your adult children. Don't leave this burden to them.
Sounds like tough love. Mia, Is that what Swedish death
(05:59):
cleaning is?
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yeah, it's funny. My mum's been doing this.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
Oh, she not recently, but a number of years ago
she had to go and clear out her own father's stuff.
Her mother died many years ago, but then her father remarried,
so she was essentially cleaning out a lot of her
mother stuff and her father's stuff. And it was a
process that she and her brother did it over many months.
(06:23):
It took a really long time and it's a really
interesting process. So she's recently been going through a lot
of her stuff and getting rid of stuff, not for
any particular sake, although she did mention it. She said
things like, oh, you don't have to keep blah blah
after I'm gone, don't worry.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
I don't mind.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Because she's certainly not a horder, but she's a chronicler,
like she keeps every newspaper, clipping of every column or
every time I've ever been mentioned, every magazine I ever edited,
all of those kinds of things. Because she's of the
generation I think that the boomers are probably the last
generation that most of their memories will be analog, they'll
be printed actual objects, they won't be on hard drives particularly,
(07:05):
so there's a lot of stuff.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
There's also this hangover. I guess it's a wartime thing,
and it's also a hangover from the Great Depression where
the mass consumerism and having stuff meant you were okay,
and then you held on to that stuff because you
didn't know if it would be taken away. Like it's
the whole thing where it's gone down generations with my family, Yeah,
and you finish what's on your plate because you may
have come from a context in which there wasn't enough
food to put on the table. So there's definitely that
(07:29):
that's been passed down generations. And I know we've had
this issue in our family where you try and clean
out the house, or you try and put pressure on
an elderly relative to clean out the house and they
refuse to do it. And I read something from I
think It was someone who worked in aged care recently,
and they said that they talk about this period of
(07:49):
your life as the takeaway era because people just take
things from you. People take your car keys, people take
your stuff. People sometimes, you know, say that you can't
live at home anymore, and.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
There's ta goay home.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Yeah, there's this real resistance to having someone come in
and say we need to throw out your stuff.
Speaker 4 (08:08):
And my it's a terrible thing to have to say.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
My grandfather, who is all through his sort of early nineties,
we knew he needed to do it and it made
him really anxious and you know, big house, boxes of stuff.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
And confronting I imagine, Yeah, and he.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Just got to the age where he didn't have the capacity,
the emotional, cognitive, physical capacity to go through his stuff.
And that is a big job for a family.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
I reckon. There's two types of people in this, as
there are in lots of things, right. There are people
who are preemptively doing it, like your mom, and those
people are wonderful, but it's also really orks because every
time you go to the house, they're try and give
you something, yeah, and you're like, I don't I don't
want my good but I've seen them have it because
you know you're going through this deep, wholly clean up,
(08:51):
as it says, I'm confronting your life. And then there
are people who there's just no way they're going to
do it. And I have a feeling that I will
be that person, because although I'm not a hoarder, if
I ever have to move house, for example, or go
on holiday and pack, I like to leave it as
long as possible because I hate living in the transient space,
do you know what I mean? So, like, yes, I
(09:11):
had to move house a lot of times in a
very short period. When we moved to the country, I
moved three times in less than two years, and every
house I went to I unpacked all my books and
put them all on the bookshelves. And that's a big
annoying job. But I feel very at home and happy
with my books around me, right, and then they would
be the very last thing I would pack and take
with me when I'd go anywhere, because I don't want
(09:32):
to live in a living room without books, do you
know what I mean? So until the last moment, I'll
do it. So when I think about my parents, for example,
who are probably should be thinking about this in terms
of the home they've been living in and how long
they're going to get to stay there, and what it's
going to be like to declutter. I entirely relate to
the idea of them going. But this is my stuff
(09:55):
and I'm not going to preemptively prune. I'm going to
live in the exactly how i want to live with
my things, the way I want to live it, and
the new fuckers continue.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
You give me a big job to whoever has to
come go through.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
It's also about your own relationship to your mortality. I
think it's about either being a realist that I'm not
going to be here one day or being in denial,
which is no, I'm living in the moment. I don't
want to think about that, and that's fair to go.
That's not my responsibility. I mean, if my parents cleaned
out their place, it would just be all my stuff.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Well that's the irony too, you know, I think most
of us. I mean, I'm in my early fifties and
I'm sure I've got boxes of stuff.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
At my parents' house. Definitely, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
And it's like, at what age my kids who've moved out,
I have boxes of their stuff.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
At what age do you claim your own.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
Because I'm not proud of this, but I got really
upset once when I hadn't lived in the same country
as my parents for twenty five years, and yet when
I went home and found the little special box i'd
had with like some diaries in it or whatever my
teen years had got I was like outraged at my
poor mother. I was like, how could you have thrown
that out? And she's like, babe, twenty five years and
(11:04):
then add on to that, when you left home another
five to ten years, am I supposed to just carry
your shit with me?
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Was a story recently about someone was in like a
Vinnie or a Salvos and found family photos of Scott Morrison.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Did you say this? No? Yeah, and I.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Think he'd accidentally done a potentially Swedish death clane and gone,
I don't need these photos and Heed thrown them out,
and someone was like, I.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Have photos Morison childhood, which is.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Just so may on a Saturday. Actually it's so Lucra
on a Saturday, being like who needs photos?
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Who needs?
Speaker 4 (11:35):
About your relationship with clutter as well, like death cleaning
aside like me and you always say you're quite brutal,
like with clothes and things in out. Is it about
also how much you like your stuff?
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Yeah, I'm very unsentimental because I like buying stuff. I
am very able to let stuff go because I need
to physically make room for new stuff, right, which is
terrible for the planet.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
I will wear of that.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
But what I think is interesting though. I'll sometimes come.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Across like a box of child's.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Tea, and I don't know whose teeth they are, because
of course I didn't label the box, and I don't
know what I'm keeping them.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
For, but they make a lovely netlas.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
I feel like throwing them out is somehow upsetting, so
I just then put them back in the drawer to
deal with another day.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Apparently there's something called a ninety ninety rule of minimalism,
which means that if you haven't used it in ninety days.
If you haven't used a children's teeth in ninety days
and you're not going to have them in the next ninety, then.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Maybe there's time to no, no, not. I actually have
a theory about it, seriously, like play this through. What
am I going to do with them?
Speaker 3 (12:42):
Like? Why am I keeping them? Am I going to
show them to the actual children? Am I going to
show them to their children, like maybe some of them
Lucas'll like, go and sit down with Luna and go,
this might have been tooth one day?
Speaker 4 (12:53):
Are you going to frame them for a murder?
Speaker 1 (12:55):
With the I I think I'm going to do with them?
Speaker 2 (12:57):
And then how are you to throw?
Speaker 1 (12:58):
And that can also.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
Extend to things like I keep cards, you know, cards, letters,
those kinds of momentos. One of my love languages of
words of affirmation. So people, when anyone writes something nice
to me or about me, I put it in a
little box. I've got so many of these boxes, and
part of me thinks when I'm doing it, oh, one
day I will look through them and they will make
me feel good. No, I can't think of anything more
(13:22):
depressing to me. That's like Facebook memories that come up
and you just go. I find them viscerally upsetting because
it's like I don't want to see my child who's
now twenty when they were three, because then I'll get
so existentially sad that that little three year old's gone.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
And so with all these letters that I've got, and
I can't.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Have a broader theory about clutter and this decluttering minimalism
Swedish death cleaning movement, and I think that having less
has become the.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
New class signifier.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
So just like for our parents' generation or the generation
before that, having stuff, I remember this, it was like
you came in and you'd have you know, even having
a bench with lots of vases and lots of Alaskas
that leads yeah, just trinku stuff. It was like that
was a sign that you we're doing okay. Now. The
sign that you are wealthy clean surfaces is absolutely bare spaces.
(14:15):
And because it signals that you probably have a cleaner,
that you probably have the time to declar, you have
good stories, and that you can throw things out because
you have the income to buy it again if you
need it. And so there's this real like class thing
where I think that's why I find some of these
conversations hard is because people who keep stuff often have
either a different relationship to money or a different relationship
(14:37):
to throwing stuff out that I think is a little
bit more complexiond you.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Know what I think my boxes of letters and cards are.
I think that that's proof that I'm loved.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
Those boxes are exactly that they are a connection. They
are an actual physical manifestation of the relationships that are
important to you. I totally get why you don't. It's
like I was thinking that I'm not a hoarder, and
then I just thought about the fact that where we've
been living for two years, we have a big garage
that isn't a garage you put a car in. It's
just like a big garage, right.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
It is full of shit.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
We have filled it to the brim with shit within
two years. And some of that shit are two huge
plastic tubs that I keep of travel photographs, letters the
old boyfriends wrote me, diaries from my travels, letters that
my parents have written me, postcards again me are like
I have occasionally, like as a sentimental act of self harm,
(15:29):
sat down and rifled through those and gone, oh my god,
remember that. But I don't want to do that. But
how could I ever throw those?
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Stephanie Wood wrote an article in the Good Weekend I
think it was just over the weekend about the booming
industry of storage.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
You know, Yes, so that's exactly it. I don't want
to throw it, but I don't want it in my house.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
It's because so much of our memories and our lives
are digital now that there's something about the permanence and
the sentimentality of physical objects that feel like a connection
to something.
Speaker 4 (16:03):
Yeah, but also the cloud is like a virtual garage
full of shit, right because my kids are never going
to rifle through their travel pictures. When was the last
time you went and looked back in the cloud all
the old pictures that are up there of ten years ago.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Or five on my phone? Yeah exactly.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
We all live right here in this moment, yeah, right now.
But at least if it's in the cloud, we've got well,
they're there, So it's like that's the garage of the
digital age.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
I did a bunch of research on how you're actually
meant to declutter.
Speaker 4 (16:31):
Do you want to know what the tests I'd do?
Speaker 1 (16:33):
I do, definitely do so, Maricondo of you.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yes, there's a book called Reset your Home that everyone's
talking about and there are a bunch of rules and
here are the ones that stood out for me. You
have to treat decluttering as an appointment. So what time
is best for you? If you're a morning person, if
you're a Sunday afternoon person. You also need to have
a beginning and an end. Like with any massive task,
don't do the thing, which it just feels very mayup
(16:56):
where you would go into a room pull everything out.
Oh yeah, and then it's like, you know, you're not
getting through all.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
All the time.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
And then I lose the will halfway through and I
wonder off.
Speaker 4 (17:04):
And then you get well, if it's me, then I
go into a bit of a spiral of self hatred
about why am.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
I in the middle of all this shit?
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Yes, exactly, it's not what we like. So just start
with half an hour or so. And you've got to
start with the easy wins. So like I'm going to
start with my T shirts. So I'm going to start
with one of the boxes or whatever it is. And
you use the little and often method, so you do
a little bit every so often, and that's how you
keep on top of that. I'm allergic to clutter. We
(17:32):
are always decluttering in our house and Lucas box. I
have one sentimental box that I've got a hide from
Luca because he'll throw it out. I am on the
recorders saying I gave him a birthday card. He read
it and put it in the bin, not because he
didn't like it, he was just like and I think
that was the same day he threw out my hair
elastic that was sitting on me because it was I
think he needs to see a therapist.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Yeah, I don't know. I have to say I don't
know a lot of men.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
I keep memory boxes for all the men in my life,
my sons and my husband.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Because tell us out loud as I know.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
We've got some male listeners and also some women listeners
who have men in their lives.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Do men keep this ship?
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Because men don't do the dam the home.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
Brent has so many old photos. One of the things
about old photos, as we've already said me are now
they're mostly digital, but it's a version of yourself. You're
holding onto a version of yourself. So I posted some
of them a year or so ago. Brent loves to
go through his old travel pictures and the young hot
Brent striding over Nepoleese mountains. That version of Brent has
(18:29):
got well hasn't gone, but it's changed. It's like you
can't get rid of that. So I think they do,
but for different reasons. I don't think he keeps like
cards I've written him old my kids when they were little,
they would make the birthday cards, and that's lovely things
about you the homemade ones. They can't throw that shit out.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Something that's very challenging when you have children is that
you don't realize how much of parenting is about smuggling
your child's shitty craft pictures or scribbles into the bin,
because they come home and present them to you, and
the first few times you're like, oh, my god, this
is amazing, and then you're just like oh, and then
if they find them in the bin, you get in
(19:08):
all sorts of trouble.
Speaker 4 (19:09):
And like everything in parenting, the first couple of times
you're like, who would ever throw anything like that out?
I will never do that.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Ever, you like, where's the nearest incinerata? Because you can't.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
You have to dispose of the evidence. My brother and
my uncle have recently obviously been doing some clearing out,
and they each sent me letters that I'd sent to
them when I was much younger.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
I didn't even open.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
Them, Oh I did not. They sent me like photos
of the I just like I could not. I'm not
interested in revisiting. I find that too confronting. Revisiting old
pictures of my childhood or of my kid's childhood. It
makes me too conscious of the passing of time.
Speaker 4 (19:49):
One of the things that's interesting about the idea of
not leaving the clutter to the next generations because that
idea that no one cares about it as much as you.
The place that I live has quite a lot of
retirees there, and often you'll see lawn sales when someone's
passed and their house is gone, and the sons and
daughters whatever are doing this, and it's like seeing somebody's.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Life just like splayed out on the.
Speaker 4 (20:12):
Grass with like free to a good home or you know,
everything two dollars. And there's something very poignant about that.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
The stories have disappeared and all that's left is a
semi broken coffee table. And if you're looking for more
to listen to, every Mma Mia podcast is curating your
summer listening right across our network. From pop culture to
beauty to powerful interviews, there's something for everyone. There's a
link in our show notes. We'll be back to regular
(20:40):
programming on Monday, twelfth of January.
Speaker 4 (20:47):
Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on
which we've recorded this podcast
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