Clutter and cleanliness are relative.  

How true. But I still have a deathly fear of "being weighed in the balance and found wanting".

It’s none of their business.  I once had a bunch of papers and things I was sorting out on a table when we had to have someone come into check something.  I overheard them asking their partner if we had been robbed.  The other one said, No they’re just messy.  I came in and asked Just how messy are we? They were embarrassed.  Anyone can have clutter here or there.

I do my own shopping.

There are people sufficiently afraid of clutter being seen by authority figures that they have been known to crawl out onto the porch to await an ambulance in a medical emergency so EMTs do not come inside. And of course many have been eventually found dead because they didn't call for help when they needed it.

I've read a lot about the phenomena and discussed it a lot on a clutter support group back in the 1990s.

Fear of being judged has resulted in a lot of needless suffering by a very large number of people over the years who have clutter issues.

It was one, although not the main reason, for declining to have children. Because the reasoning was, "I have enough to keep up with now, there's no way I'd avoid being reported to CPS for unsanitary or messy conditions, so best avoid that risk profile"

I do too.  Some people can’t.

We all have our own comfort levels.  A friend is so compulsively neat she can’t ever have anything out of place.  Her house is perfectly neat, but she’s miserable.  There must be a connection there.

Showtalk said:

A friend is so compulsively neat she can’t ever have anything out of place. Her house is perfectly neat, but she’s miserable. There must be a connection there.

Those are the houses I'm afraid to visit, because I'm afraid of possibly leaving traces of hair and fiber and of course whatever was stepped in while crossing the lawn.

But yeah - I've wondered how fast the people who keep a perfectly neat house would burn out and how many years they lop off of their lifespan from the stress, and how much less retirement savings they have from the expense of trying to keep everything perfect.

I figure, if the "special kitty" craps in the floor instead of the sandbox, wait till it dries to deal with it and it's far less work to clean up, then sprinkle Febreze there once it's scraped up, but it would be a Sisyphean task in futility to ever get the house even close to that level of clean, even with the floor and lower walls replaced in tile with a drain in the middle of each room so the floors could be hosed down.

This person cleans all the time. It’s therapeutic.

Sounds more like a bad case of OCD (Obsessive-compulsive disorder) but maybe it's therapeutic in a way.

But then there is also the hoarding type of OCD where one can never begin to declutter because they are afraid of not doing it perfectly so they never begin.