Slob versus neatnik: it’s time to come clean | Oliver Burkeman

Let your house get dirty enough and you really might get a nasty illness. The same can't be said for a non-alphabetised bookshelf

Recently, thanks to multiple studies, the old consensus that "a tidy desk equals a tidy mind" has been shouldered aside by its opposite. These days, mess is a sign of creativity. Frankly, as a neat-freak, I consider this offensive, though I confess there's a solid argument for it, stated most cogently in Tim Harford's 2016 book Messy. Learning to embrace disarray, he argues, helps disrupt our tendency to think along the same pre-ploughed furrows, and permits the fresh associations that allow new ideas to form. Fair enough. But don't expect me to stop arranging my notebooks and pens in a perfect line on my desktop. And don't give me all that stuff about how this is an external manifestation of a desperate quest to retain a sense of control in the face of a meaningless cosmos. I'm just not a slob. OK?

Except I've realised, over the last few years, that this slob versus neatnik dichotomy - subject of a thousand slanging matches between spouses - is an oversimplification. I'm a tidy person, but decidedly average when it comes to cleanliness; whereas my partner values cleanliness enormously, while being somewhat untidy. I'm baffled that she thinks it's OK to leave books strewn across the coffee table, when they could be nicely stacked. She's baffled that I care so much about arranging the rug so it's perpendicular to the floorboards, while apparently not seeing the crumbs and bits of pasta accumulating along its edge.