Back in 1995, while revelling in the novelty of having a great big place, suddenly without a roommate, I had a bad idea... not a catastrophically bad idea, but rather an ineffective solution to the question of where to put things.

I had 1500 square feet. All to myself. I was young and lazy. An experiment was in order. Having much more space than I had stuff, I thought I'd just leave things where they seemed they wanted to be. Nothing gross, mind you--filth is unacceptable.

It took six months to fail. One day the mind just recoiled--I had reached a limit and discovered that stuff expands to fill available space. Worst thing was that it took forever to recover from it. Entropy is brutal, and order, once lost, takes a surprising amount of time and effort to reestablish. (Resulting years later in the inception of the stuff reduction plan)

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