I spent £20 on a rustic sauce jug during lockdown. It was aesthetic, it was comfortable. It was a request. It was the symbol of everything home decoration Influencers convinced me that this is what my home should be like. It was a complete waste of money, but I was now the kind of person who owned a rustic sauce jug.

My friends called this my breakdown pitcher. I quickly became addicted to highs and suddenly the closets were organized into clear boxes. My belongings were poured into jars: Make-up. Oat. Hair bands. Sesame seeds. In a strict organizational system, everything had a place: box or jar. My scented candles (there was a nightgown in each room) suddenly stood on a faux marble slab. Moving them would be an act of war.

At this time, I was also on a quest to have the perfect bathroom. I placed more candles and plants and drilled into the walls to put in a shower curtain, which we definitely weren’t contracted to do. At one point, I brushed away lime layer I was in the downstairs bathroom for the third time that week.

Despite all my efforts, the limescale did not get better and I started to devise various plans to eliminate it. Before quarantine, I wouldn’t bat an eyelid about my less-than-perfect bathroom, but suddenly the issue became urgent. “You know that fixing the lime stain isn’t going to solve your problems, right, Ellie?” my roommate reminded me as I ordered a quart of heavier bleach. Yes, it will happen.

That’s all that can be said: I was a woman possessed. It’s been taken over by home decor influencers and inspirational TikTok reels. Three years later, I’m spending fewer hours working from home as I only have walls to worry about, and so the spell is broken.

But my need for a sparkling living space is symptomatic of a much larger, national trend: our increasingly neurotic obsession with the perfectly organized home. This movement reaches new heights every week social mediaAnd I’m afraid we’ll never see the end of this.

Have you ever spent so long examining your hallway that you decided to mop the walls? And then the ceiling? A quick scroll through TikTok and you’ll see countless people doing this, calling it a “Market Reset” as if it wasn’t some crazy ritual.

Creators spray their couches with Febreze and clean the inside of their washing machines with some sort of mini power tool. And then there’s the refrigerator. Have you ever stared inside your refrigerator for so long that you decided to put ornaments inside?

How about a diffuser? Perfect homes now include “refrigerator organizing”; This means placing fake plants next to the milk, as well as arranging the vegetable beds aesthetically. (Each carrot must be peeled beforehand, washed and laid neatly on top of each other, like the wall of a red brick terrace.)

Even Siân Pelleschi, president of the Association of Professional Organizers and Promoters, worries that our preoccupation with our homes has gone too far. accuses Pandemic. “Over the last few years, especially since lockdown, when we’ve been stuck in our homes twiddling our thumbs, we’ve really started to focus on our surroundings. “There was nothing to do except sit in front of our computers and look at social media feeds or look around our homes.”

Inevitably the two collided, and people like me got caught up in the various home organization trends being shoved down our throats. This is no longer just an online obsession. The extent of this epidemic in Ikea is clear.

Where there were once Tupperware aisles and cheap plastic cups, there are thousands of tiny drawer organizers to separate your t-shirts from your long-sleeved tops; Your whites are from your colored ones. Next to the drawer organizers, there are hundreds of jars where you can put your biscuits or pasta. These are then placed in a closet, never to see light again.

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According to Pelleschi, the real problem is the abundance of trends. “Despite all these different methods and organizations, how many of them are permanent? This is part of the problem. Sometimes too much is too much. “We can get really overwhelmed by it,” he says. Once you start noticing this, you see these trends are everywhere, seeping into every aspect of our daily lives. Weekly meal preparation and influencers pre-cook sauces and sauces to be stacked in aesthetically pleasing glass containers, complete with a perfect label and perfect handwriting. These relatively harmless tendencies are yet another sign of the unattainable organization sold as a badge of success. Are you the kind of adult who plans out an entire dinner and stacks it neatly in a freshly cleaned refrigerator? If not, why not?

This organizational overload doesn’t seem to be slowing down. “People love to see new things. They don’t want to see the same thing 50 million times,” says Pelleschi. “They want to see the fifth and then they want to see something different. There is a constant need for something new, and some people I meet change their homes regularly; to follow their tones, colors, ornaments, and so on.”

Like many people, and often women, I feel an acute sense of shame if my apartment is messy or my life is disorganized. Even though I live with someone else, I feel like it’s solely my job to make sure the house looks nice for any imaginary guests who might stop by. At my weakest, I’m about 15 Instagram videos away from falling off the edge of a cliff and putting a fake plant on my fridge door (next to the milk).

Nadyne McKie is a therapist who works with many clients at home who suffer under the guise of perfectionism. “For some, creating the perfect home is a way to assert control over their environment, especially when other aspects of life feel chaotic or unpredictable,” she says. “The home becomes a space where they can feel safe, solid and responsible, offering them the opportunity to escape from external pressures.”

This feels right to me. As the uncontrollable lockdown chaos continued, I searched for something I was looking for at home. it could be control. The sofa cushions, the artwork on the walls. A nice sauce jug. This was made worse by the social media I consumed.

Therapist Vic Paterson, who specializes in treating anxiety in middle-aged women, believes this is a common problem. “As with many modern emotional issues, the need to have the perfect home stems specifically from anxiety. anxiety “We won’t be accepted or seen as good enough,” she says. “Interestingly, house cleaning influencers on social media have often made this problem worse because it is no longer good enough for cleaning. The way you clean; “The products you use and even how you look while cleaning have become something you can be judged on.”

This is frankly ridiculous. A constant stream of video content means we set incredibly high standards for each other when it comes to keeping a house clean and tidy. It took me a long time to accept that there were more important concerns in the world than how clean my carpet was. This revelation only came through the DIY exposure therapy of moving in with a very messy person. This person didn’t care about the carpet, and watching this carefree alternate reality felt freeing.

It took me a long time to accept that my home did not reflect me. Being busy with the perfect home is tiring, expensive and boring. We don’t have to worry about our refrigerators. Nobody cares if they look good or not. We do not need a pristine corridor with no trace of human life.

We need comfortable cushions, clean sheets and a basic level of hygiene. The rest is just a cycle of anxiety. Worrying about our homes is not an eyesore, it is a psychological punishment.