Key Items

In any space, we mentally categorize things into signal and noise. The signal, we often think of as affordances. What is here to be interacted with? Maybe there’s a couch to sit on, a phone to pick up, a candle to light on the dinner table, a magazine to read on my bed, some clothes to wear on the floor, a bed to be slept in.
Whether or not we are able to keep a space clean depends on which things in the space feel to us like affordances. I’ll call these the room’s “key items”.
For messy people like myself, I believe the key items are things like the clothes, the phone, the laptop, the magazine. The things other people might consider clutter. Because these items are within reach, all is right with the room. It’s serving its function beautifully, so why clean the room and rearrange it?
For tidy people, I believe the key items are the furniture in the room. To me, the key quality of the arrangement “a laptop on a bed” is “the laptop is within reach”. For a tidy person, the key quality is “the bed is unable to be interacted with because there’s a laptop on it”. For them, the laptop is blocking the primary function of the room: its bed-ness. But I don’t perceive of a bedroom as a place for sleeping, I perceive of it as a place-without-purpose-that-has-a-bed-in-it-and-also-my-laptop. The laptop is usually more relevant to me than the bed (until it’s late at night), and I can sleep in the bed without moving the laptop, so it’s whatever to me. Again, to reiterate, my bedroom is not a bedroom, it’s a room that begrudgingly has a bed in it, just like it begrudgingly contains a laptop. And I like my laptop being nearby. The bed becomes a storage device, it loses its bedness very easily.
I think tidy people have a clearer sense of what things and spaces are for. The bedroom is for sleeping. The bed must be bed-like. That means not being covered in things that are not bed. One can imagine them trying, like in a video game, to highlight the bed with their reticle and interact with it, but instead random objects keep getting highlighted on the bed instead: dirty clothes,

outline

when people see a room, they break it down into discrete parts, items, objects, affordances
which discrete parts are most salient to them (the “key items”) dictate how the person interacts with the room
messy people who tend to clutter up rooms view rooms as collections of loose objects. their attention is drawn to the clothes on the bed, or the laptop on the dresser. they are not bothered by the mess because the key items are unobstructed and within reach. in fact, it might feel better to have these things easily accessible (read: in the way) because they’re easier to get to and take inventory of
i’m a messy person. when i think of my room, i think about how i mostly just want my stuff to be in reach. plus, when we don’t like our space, it’s easy to want to view the room as objects because viewing it as a room can be kind of painful! it’s easy to be avoidant about it, and thus try to cover it up with more objects so there’s no chance we can view the room as a room.
to borrow the en trende terminology, we all have expectations about what a room should be: a sort of roomostat that we try to keep the room towards. clean people also have to clean, and they don’t always enjoy it, but it does feel semi-natural to them i think. because they’re “restoring” the room to its proper state. whereas for me, a messy person, the proper state is one covered in stuff because the furniture is subservient to the items in the room and not the other way around. so cleaning is not only minor physical toil, it’s also violating a natural order. it’s like climbing uphill and instead of walking downhill. it’s pushing against expectation and nature and instict. part of me recognizes that, according to my own values and perception, what i’m doing isn’t just a chore, it’s leading to a bad outcome
clean people view rooms as collections of furniture. their attention is drawn to the bed, the couch, the dresser. but what’s this? there’s something obstructing the bed, the thing i’m trying to pay attention to? it has to be put away! the bed is actually the important component of the room, and by putting something on it, you’re decreasing the roominess of the room. it’s like if you’re trying to take a photo of your friend and a stranger keeps standing in the way. you get the stranger out of the way! but if you’re trying to take a photo of the stranger, it doesn’t matter that they’re obscuring your friend
this is why messy people can suddenly become clean people when someone else is around, or someone is coming over: to us the room is still a collection of objects meant to be easily accessed, but we recognize, on some level, that those objects have no use to others, and thus the primary use of the room is its room-ness: a collection of places to sit, or feel comfortable, or sleep, or use the restroom. so suddenly, we see our space in the same light, and wonder why it’s so messy. we don’t consciously understand what’s causing the difference, it simply feels as if we’ve “woken up”