My mother in law refuses to pay for curbside garbage pickup. It's a vulgar luxury in her mind because it was a vulgar luxury when she was a girl. But she'll pay $30 a month for the exterminator to come by and keep the vermin down because she has no anchor.

Here's the problem:

What you or I see as "clutter" is often seen as a highly reassuring hedge against destitution by the person who possesses it. Hoarders are seldom rich. They're almost always from an impoverished background. All that materialist stuff they gather around them is proof that they aren't poor anymore. "Decluttering" isn't about that. It's generally about getting rid of all but your best watch because, you know, you don't need a Movado and an Omega.

I watched one of those tiny house shows where the couple was debating whether they could stretch to the $25k spiral staircase option for their 450sqft burl walnut shack. Okay, but. Really, it's just another shade of conspicuous consumption, greenwashed through the glory of minimalism.

And that's the thing - rich people are gonna live paycheck to paycheck. It's like the poor people - they could always live poorer. I mean, who needs a mobile home when you could live in an Astro van on blocks? We signal to our peers where we are in the strata, and we overspend to do that. And that one nice thing? Well, they can't be truly poor because they have a 50" smart TV and they can watch House of Cards just like that rich guy they sat on the plane next to that time Momma died and they needed to buy that flight to Orlando they're still paying off at 18% interest.