All hail Josh Freed, patron saint of the organizationally challenged. The filmmaker and Montreal Gazette columnist exposes his messy life in My Messy Life, a hilarious documentary airing on CTV this Saturday, May 17 at 7 p.m. (see CTV.ca for local listings). It makes the case that some people are successful because of – not in spite of – their disorganization.
Freed apparently had difficulty enlisting interview subjects willing to show their disordered spaces to his cameras; non-neat freaks, the vast majority of the population, frequently face discrimination from those organizational zealots with their "weapons of mess destruction." But those he did manage to recruit offer an entertaining justification for messiness, a refreshing change in a world aligned more to the philosophies of Clean Sweep and The Container Store.
They also do a good job of making me far less ashamed of my own messy life, which is positively immaculate compared to those on display in the hour-long program.
We follow our genial guide from Montreal to Ottawa to New York to Boston to the Netherlands (apparently the clean capital of the world) as he disproves – or does he? – the notion that a messy desk is a sign of a messy mind. His thesis is that messiness may be underrated. Many of the interviewees make the connection between chaos and creativity, and posit the idea that piles mimic the brain's own organization better than files, and that the ongoing effort to file and sort has a hidden time cost that may even surpass the extra time the messier person might take to find something.
Like most people we meet in the documentary, McGill professor Arvind Sharma feels he understands his mess. Even more interestingly, in explaining his views he almost implies that chaos is a way of asserting control: "It's not messy for the person who is the master of the mess." Sure enough, he takes 20 seconds to find the letter from the Dalai Lama that Freed asks him to hunt down.
Crammed into haphazard stacks in his five New York apartments, legendary talk show host Joe Franklin has memorabilia from Charlie Chaplin, Bob Hope, Rudolph Valentino ... if only he could locate them. Yet he too makes a compelling point: "I can have the thrill that a neat man could never have, and that thrill is finding something you thought was irretrievably lost."
Article comments
1 - Greg McKone
Great review Diane,
Thank you.
Greg.