PPS: OK, I just saw Susan's post and it was excellent...so thanks, Susan, for restoring my faith in this discussion and saying some of the things I wish I had known how to say.
Overall Rating: 1 vote
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Posted 3 months ago #
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I agree with sleepykitten in her review of Susan's comment. I also agree with sleepy regarding her "outsider" line; I don't have anyone in real life to discuss these things with, so I can get rather intense here - because I like to talk and sometimes have to restrain myself both here and there... Haha.
Yeah, real life skillz; anyone interested in discussing the inner workings of the human being? Or how to make an infectious virus? Or maybe I can interest you in some boat navigation while singing in language of your choice and sewing a wonky quilt simultaneously (didn't say it has to look or sound pretty though)? Currently I love you guys but I might find myself in a forum for oil painting nerds in five years :P
Posted 3 months ago # -
I should probably also unclutter this discussion. But I am waiting to see how long it takes before we get the mandatory "see - you're defending yourself and denying it, that means that it is all true" response. I have been on various internet forums too long to have any illusions regarding this. It will come.
Posted 3 months ago # -
Candy: you're defending yourself and denying it, that means that it is all true. Can we stop now?
Posted 3 months ago # -
Thank you, susan :)
Posted 3 months ago # -
Thank you Susan and sleepy kitten for the recent thoughtful entries. I hope we can all reflect your civil and respectful tone.
Posted 3 months ago # -
umm, Netleigh, it's your own assumption that I'm angling for 'someone else do the work'. You sure didn't base that on anything I said, which was just that I'd follow if someone did it. You chose to read that as implying I want to dodge the work because you've already decided I'm a No Good Mean Bad Lazy So and So (add negative adjectives at will, there's just about as much sense really). But what was implied and I simply didn't write out because, god, how freaking long can a post be and respond to all the bitchin' while *still* not being so long that someone will claim it's too long to read, is simply that the launch of a new community is something I don't have the time to devote the proper amount of attention to IN THE NEXT FEW MONTHS. Which is like ages in online years lol (think dog years). After that, I can and probably will start it if nothing else turns up in the meantime (new or just new-to-me) *shrug*. It also means that if someone starts I can help out, I just can't wholesale take the reins myself at first (if you wanna talk about that or anything related in private, send me your address at unclutterermili@TempEmail.net within 14 days - after that this will be gone. I'll be glad to natter ;-)).
And djk - 'low aggression tolerance'? hardly. if you exclude places geared towards hot-button issues of the day - politics, social issues mainly - this site has a startling amount of hostility right from the early days I've been here. If you can't see that, it's most likely because:
- you're very inexperienced with online interactions (ie this place, maybe one more, is all you know), or
- you do have experience but it is very skewed towards one type, unrepresentative of the range (ie other than here you only hang out at say news or social networking sites, which are pretty notorious for being drama magnets), or
- ...you are quite simply a part of the problem.I think once again, bobyu has a great perspective with what he says about the being against something but not really FOR anything. Thanks for the insight man - I hadn't thought of it that way, and it is a *great* angle to approach this from. And now thinking back I realize that pretty much every other site or even thread in an otherwise nice site shares this trait - of being AGAINST something.
djk, it's not really a guess that I'm fairly young. It's one of the few identifying details I've shared (actually the only other I can think of is sex). As for your whole discussion re: intelligence and maturity in understanding the experiences of others, well, I suppose I thank you for the compliment to my intellect, but the maturity thing is rather a relative value isn't it? Obviously I am completely immature compared to what I'll be 20 years from now, but equally I know people 20 years older who think like I did ten years back. Age and maturity are in no way an absolute correlation. Aside from which, some people seem to find some small amount of merit to what I say, so you implicitly disagree with them too, and what, you gonna call them immature too? where does that stop? is anyone who doesn't agree with you immature? is the degree of maturity you assign them proportional to the degree to which they agree with you, or...?
I've already explained why I 'feel the need' (your words, not mine) to hang out here in a previous post, but here it is again anyway: if a community kind of suits you but not entirely, generally you can make it suit you much more merely by engaging with it actively and honestly - this encourages others who share your POV to post more and discourages those who disagree from being too fanatical about it. That is what I tried because I've seen it work time and again and done it myself a few times over the years. But this thread and a couple others in the last 2-3 weeks has me about 95% convinced this site is an exception and that this mutual adaptation is not gonna happen. But it's a recent realization; I couldn't have said that back when I started a few months ago because I wouldn't have yet given enough time for this process to happen. but ninakk - the number of threads started isn't really a good indicator of engagement with a community. It's more complicated than that when you are doing this 'engage to change' exercise.
There are several ways this place can get more inclusive; some start with the site itself (E.Doland and co), some we could do right here on the forum. But the point is that the forum is what *we* as a community can influence directly. It's not like the site owners are actively censoring threads here. Maybe they set the overall tone, but the forums and blog seem to work pretty much independently - it is rare that a discussion started there continues here, and if a discussion started here ever morphs into a post there, I've not seen it. More, I have seen several nicks here that I never see in the blog comments and vice versa, maybe some use different nicks here than on the blog but generally people don't bother with that
Re: specific suggestion: the reason I'm not listing the half a dozen or so I can come up with off the top of my head is simply, why bother? They take up room to list and effort to type, and why do that when chances are high it's just going to turn into one long session of picking the words and tone apart so much that the actual message gets at best ignored, at worst completely distorted?
I mean just check what clutter bug suggested about starting a radical unclutterer thread to get more 'feisty' responses! That is completely missing the point I have been trying to make, that there is TOO MUCH feistiness - bordering on hostility really - and too much intensity for just a household practice. Like, god, chill, it's just a way to keep your house in order, it's not a freaking retreat to rediscover yourself!! THAT is what I was saying puts people off (see this thread for examples:http://tiny.cc/u33sk), and moreover, the problem is there AREN'T other sites to go to if you want to discuss decluttering as an approach - there are sites on home keeping and cleaning and organizing but very few about *just* this perspective and only ONE with a forum - flylady, which I didn't go for initially because it seems to be for people with pretty big clutter problems so I thought it would not be a great fit for me. But looking at them again now through the lens of my experience on unclutterer I wonder if this might not just make them a bit less insular. I'll definitely check them out for a while before I think about making a new site.
I don't mean it's your fault specifically clutterbug, it's just that my entire point has been totally FUBARed and you just went with that. The other thing you mentioned about women doing most of the housekeeping or even just being more interested in talking about it is another symptom of the lack of variety, this time in ages - because that is in large part a generational thing. Among my own circle of acquaintances, talk about housey stuff is about equal parts males and females. But I know that my mother's generation is not like that, and that perspective's missing.
Posted 3 months ago # -
man y'all are on fire!
@ luxcat - "home-knitted yurt" - ROFL. Seriously, that is a mental image I shall cherish always.
Posted 3 months ago # -
also, @ mili - if perspectives are missing it's because those people with those perspectives *aren't interested in participating in these fora.*
The existence of a forum does not mandate participation by all. The forum may be open to all, but those who participate are not under any obligation to represent any interests other than their own. If the forum is designed around a specific common interest - as this one is - then those who participate are, ipso facto, participating *because of that interest.*
Also: Participation by all generally means there is no real common interest. It's just a bunch of people jumping in and out of discussions depending on whether they're feeling constipated/cranky or not. And you end up with waste-of-time BS like the comment threads on Yahoo.
I'd rather have the harmonious sameness and supportive, constructive contributions to discussions of our comment interest, tyvm.
Posted 3 months ago # -
i am checking out too, i kept a very civil tone and actually gave your posts some real thought, mili, as well as added some questions that were not aggressive in my opinion. you talk about bitchin' and hostility and chilling because it is household practice only, but i don't agree. i don't feel comfortable about your tone so thanks for the reply you took time to write but it is too much for me.
Posted 3 months ago # -
re: uncluttering=freedom. i realize that i value stuff less and less. it is not that i do not need or have stuff but i don t care if it is away when it can be replaced. i have swapped my home several times. i was scared at first. what if they destroy my coach, ruin my silver cuttlery, steal my books. i just don do not care anymore. i take a box and put some love letters and postcards in, also private banking stuff and my laptop and i bring this box to my moms house. that its it. the home exchange people sleep in my bed, use my cuttlery and they sit on my couch. and so do i in their home. it is great. :) this is a kind of freedom to me, leave my house, let strangers in, live in their house. i was never, never ever disappointed, and people were thrilled to live here. i wonder where i will stay this year.
Posted 3 months ago # -
nope.
the sky is still blue.Posted 3 months ago # -
sigh . . . I get busy and don't visit this forum for two days and look what happens!
OK, folks, I'm back. All is well now. (huge grin)
Posted 3 months ago # -
the only hostility i've seen is towards spammers.
if this is such an incredibly hostile place, then why on earth would you keep returning, mili?Posted 3 months ago # -
Quoting mili: "Like, god, chill, it's just a way to keep your house in order, it's not a freaking retreat to rediscover yourself!!"
Maybe not for you, mili. But this all-inclusive forum of ours DOES allow for straightforward housekeeping support AS WELL AS rediscovery of oneself by getting rid of the clutter that's obstructing the path. It DOES include respectful discussion of diverse points of view and diverse life experiences. Rarely does anyone here (apart from you) say: "You're wrong. My way is the right way."
mili, why don't you post on the straightforward housekeeping threads if that's your declared reason for being on this forum? Why instead do you go on the attack to criticize someone who finds freedom in decluttering, or someone who embraces minimalism's spare philosophy, or someone who's striving toward greener alternatives, or someone who's barely coping with grief complicated by clutter?
Why doesn't your so-called all-inclusive ideal tolerate these approaches in addition to your own view? Sometimes clutter IS merely stuff, and sometimes it represents much more. The forum as it presently exists tolerates all of the above approaches. And as many of us have noticed, we've welcomed quite an influx of new members lately, which seems contradictory to your assertion that the forum "puts people off."It puts YOU off, mili, and that's all you can authentically assert. If others chime in and echo your view, so be it. But speak for yourself and let people speak for themselves, even if their diverse ideas about the clutter in their lives are not in sync with your ideas.
I'm leaving this thread, too, now that it's reached major time-suck proportions.
A lotta clouds cluttering up that blue sky.Posted 3 months ago #
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