- Position1 of 3›
- No, quarantine is not bad for our mental health
- Argument1 of 4›
You can declutter your living space
Decluttering is often overlooked when we are balancing work with our social lives. Without these distractions, quarantine will allow us to improve our living spaces, and with it, our mental health.
The argument
This argument holds that quarantine supplies something ordinary working life withholds, and that what it supplies is good for mental health rather than bad for it. The starting point is a feature of the domestic environment. A cluttered, untidy home has been linked to an increased likelihood of depression, which means the state of a living space is not merely a matter of appearance but bears on the wellbeing of the people inside it. The surroundings a person occupies most hours of the day form part of the conditions under which their mood is maintained or eroded. The difficulty in ordinary circumstances is time. In the grip of a busy work week, tidying and decluttering the home takes a back seat: the task is never urgent enough to displace work or obligations outside the house, so it is deferred indefinitely even by people who recognise that their surroundings are weighing on them. The clutter accumulates not through indifference but through the absence of any interval in which to address it. Quarantine changes that constraint directly. As people migrate to online working environments and spend their weekends at home, the hours previously consumed by commuting and by activity elsewhere become available, and they are available in the very place that needs the attention. People can therefore devote the time required to removing the excess clutter from their homes — the task that was always worth doing and never possible to begin. The outcome is an improvement in the conditions under which they live: a living space that enhances rather than deteriorates their mental health, achieved during the period itself. Because it affords the opportunity to declutter a living space, quarantine is not bad for our mental health.
Context
A clutter-free home can decrease stress and anxiety levels.
Premises
Counter-arguments
This argument rests on a simplistic worldview. A tidy workspace can elevate happiness under normal circumstances but in the midst of a global pandemic when people are concerned about the health of their loved ones, their financial security, and their job security, the impacts of a tidier home on mental health are likely to be drowned out by the stress and anxiety of the moment.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P2] Quarantine imposes stresses that more than offset any of the benefits of decluttering.