The More of Less (Stuff, Clutter, Stress)
CONFESSION: I AM A RECOVERING MAXIMALIST. As a child growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, I enthusiastically embraced a “more is more” mentality. With Madonna’s “Material Girl” cranked up to 10 in the background, I spent my formative years striving to accumulate and amass as much as I could get my paws on, a policy that I applied with equal vigor to my boundless scrunchie and Cabbage Patch Kids collections and to my teeming and precarious social circle. (I attended a middle school where it was standard practice for pals to receive the oxymoronic classifications “first best friend,” “second best friend,” and so on.) What can I say? Greed was good. By the time I graduated from college, in 1999, the whole planet seemed to be drinking the same supersize Kool-Aid.…