“We’re binging on all the wrong things, and dying of hunger for the things we really need.” 

– Erwin McManus, Author

Like many moms I know, my only request on Mother’s Day is can we get a dumpster? I don’t need brunch or flowers (I’ll take some champagne from a mug in the garage while purging) but mostly I just feel so weighed down by stuff that the greatest relief I can imagine is to get rid of something. 

I’ve attributed that relief to feeling like the stuff we’ve accumulated interferes with my ability to write. It’s along the same lines of why I rotate the same five outfits throughout a few weeks and why I only keep a few things in the fridge—I just can’t stand rooting through chaos to get to the day-to-day things when I know I could be focused on my work instead. Maybe there is some truth to this, but really my attraction to minimalism was solidified by this one quote by Erwin McManus in the film The Minimalists: Less is Now: “We’re binging on all the wrong things and dying of hunger for the things we really need.” 

That’s exactly the problem—in my garage and in my mind when I’m trying to write. It’s cluttered with all the wrong things and it’s getting in the way of my ability to nourish (or even reach!) what really matters. We all have an awareness of binging on all the wrong things. I know this, because we all joke about “doomscrolling”. The scary thing is that the doom-scroll can apply to so much—endless news, television, ads, shopping, life hacks, self-optimization techniques, parenting “advice”, trauma addiction, emotional oversharing, scrolling for likes and comments, reading about other people’s lives while barely living our own…and even seemingly good things like over-learning and over-scheduling experiences. It goes on and on and on. And since it’s coming fast and furious from a single place, there’s no organization or method to the madness. It’s literal insanity. And mostly purposeless. 

My palms are sweating just writing this because my brain asks the same question about all this binging that I ask myself when I dream about my imaginary mother’s day dumpster rolling down my driveway: Where does all that go?

The answer to this struck me like lightning one day while talking to my good friend’s mom about raising kids “these days”. She said: “The job is no different than it was when we were raising you guys, it’s just that you have access to so much information all the time that your brain can never settle on one thing.” And it’s true! The mental landfill is overflowing. It’s cluttered from knowing so much and understanding so little–the information never finds a place to settle because it wasn’t given in the correct context or we never intended to take it in the first place.

Just like the planet is drowning in fast fashion and one-click buying, our minds are drowning in information with nowhere to put it. It piles up. It gets toxic. And the more we binge, the less we trust our instincts. The more we scroll, the more anxious we get. Think about what a little relief from that clutter would provide… Some conviction? Some confidence? Some instinct? Definitely less anxiety.

My challenge for you is this: next time you are aware of binging, ask yourself, is this important? Will this matter to me in five minutes (much-less five months or five years)? Why am I doing this? What could I be doing instead? Even if you don’t yet know the dream you’d rather be chasing, just notice the clutter. Write down what feels heavy and what feels like it matters.

Make that your anti-doom-scroll list.

And when in doubt—Mother’s Day or not—get the dumpster.