Your Bedroom Is A Map of Your Mind

On the extended self, houseplants, dry skin, and the Dyson Sphere

Photo by Lucy Mui on Unsplash

Most of us subscribe to the notion that we are fixed. We know what we are. When pushed to describe themselves, most people will talk about their internal processes or behaviours. They believe themselves to be an interesting collection of bones and viscera with a person nestled somewhere in the middle.

Most of us don’t consider this very much at all. That’s all to the good; too much of this sort of ‘what makes me, me’ thinking can bring on the existential angst something rotten. Still, it helps to notice when the self begins to stretch beyond its usual boundaries.

Most people believe that the truly excellent Pixar film Inside Out reflects how they operate. Their brain acts as a central control centre for their body and sits somewhere behind their eyes. Most people exist between their eyes, until you remind them to feel the floor beneath their shoes and then ‘what is me?’ becomes a little more complex to determine.

Surely the shoe and the sock should feel the floor, and you should feel only the sock. Are you at least a certain percentage sock or shoe? Did you temporarily incorporate them into yourself?

The me behind the eyes thing is both true and a lie in equal measure.

The self and ‘me’ are not the same. Your self expands and contracts all the time.

If someone burgles your house whilst you and your loved ones are fast asleep, you’ll have a very strong reaction. Your entire house expands, becoming an extension of the self. You react to the event as though you have been personally violated, even though what has happened is that someone has simply emptied a delineated space you arbitrarily consider to be yours on the grounds that your family live there.

You probably weren’t the first family to live there… nevertheless, it is still ‘yours’ and ‘part of you’ — until it isn’t.

Once something stops being part of us, we psychologically separate ourselves from it. That’s why it’s okay to bite your nails and absolutely vomit-inducing to think about eating a spoonful of nail clippings.

There is no real objective difference.

Which is a clumsy pivot to personal grooming — but it’s where we’re going right now.

Knowing how I’m coping with the stresses and strains of life is very easy for me because the chaos of my life is written all over my room. My internal processes manifest in the world around me with reckless abandon, laying my entire psychology bare for all to see.

And not just me; all of us. The spaces we occupy and how we arrange, care for, or decorate them are extensions of our psychology.

My room is an extension of my thoughts, and I’m constantly running an internal algorithm to make me more efficient. Since I studied Psychology sometime in the 1860s, I’ve been fascinated by how and why I do the things I do.

This might be a low-level form of narcissism; it could be curiosity, and I haven’t decided which yet.

For example, the skin on my arms has been quite dry recently, which usually happens when I don’t follow my proper skincare routine.

The skin on my arms has been getting dry because I’m not applying cocoa butter after my showers. I’m not applying cocoa butter because I’ve recently acquired a houseplant I’m slowly destroying through panicked overwatering.

This houseplant now directly obscures my view of the cocoa butter when I sit on my bed to dry myself after a shower.

That’s it: the plant was in the way.

I’ve moved the cocoa butter now, and I’m sure the whole dry arms thing will soon resolve, and I will go back to smelling slightly like M&M World.

A quick fix for a small problem — one that seems incredibly pedestrian but has real-world implications for everyone. Overeating? Put the snacks away. Not sleeping properly? Leave your phone somewhere else. The point is simple.

There are two things I like to do with prospective romantic or sexual partners… Firstly, I steer conversations around to their childhoods; if they pass this part of the test, there’s a good chance I’ll want them to show me their bedrooms.

And not in the sexy way.

Once you’ve given me these things, you’ve given me almost everything.

If you want to understand someone, look at their room. Look at that little bit of personal self they’ve carved out of a universe of aesthetic indifference. Look at the psychological mechanisms that underpin their choices. Look at their art. Is it a rigidly controlled house? Is it cluttered and unwieldy? Is it a beautiful house where no dirt can be tolerated? Is it a place to live in, or a place to show people around?

Your existence, as much as we can call it either you or an existence, is a causal relationship between the space you occupy and the brain that interprets this information. What you call ‘you’ is simply the veneer on top of this informational exchange to stop you going insane.

And that ‘you’ is very interpretable by a Penguin wandering around your room looking at your bookshelf. Humans smear themselves across time and space. Long before we could write, long before we could hold conversations, we were changing our environments. Smearing ochre on walls. What for? What do primates barely out of infancy get out of putting handprints on walls?

A visual representation of the self in space.

A great day for me would involve being allowed into someone’s house to reorganise things for them. This isn’t a glib statement. I love doing this. I love considering where things need to be and where things should go. I’m less interested in how you decorate your room than where you put things, but the two do go hand in hand.

Attempt to operate as a human in a less-than-optimal space, and your mood will rapidly deteriorate, your relationships suffer, your productivity suffers, and then your life suffers. I’m not drawing a direct line between how you stack your cupboards and divorce; but I’m saying be very careful about how you stack your cupboards.

Take a look at your house and consider the many hundreds of ways that you might be undermining your own happiness. Is your laundry basket too small comparatively with your wash cycle? Do your sofas encourage people to talk or to watch the TV without discussion?

Does your washing up pile up? Does your bedroom let in too much light in the morning? Is your office too dark? How many lightbulbs haven’t you replaced? Does everything have a place or do you pile things up to sort out later?

This isn’t a judgement on whether you’re messy or not; it’s about whether you’re conscious of your own psychology. If you’ve got a desk that looks like it recently had a hand grenade go off in one of the drawers but you know where everything is, then great.

If you’re constantly missing bits of work, never know where anything is, and you’re on the edge of a nervous work-based breakdown, then maybe an inbox would be good for you.

Most people expend a huge amount of cognitive energy fighting an environment that isn’t suited to their needs.

I have very little in common with Admiral William H McRaven, but on the minor point of bed-making domestic pointlessness we agree. Making your bed in the morning does change the world.

Making your bed in the morning does change the world.

It reduces the total level of entropy in the universe, and by the universe, I mean the unique version of it that you’re running inside your skull.

We are beings acting against the tendency of the universe toward disorder. Life is a glitch in the matrix. Making your bed isn’t about tidiness; it’s about carving a niche in the universe and saying, right here, right now, I exist.

Same as the handprint on a wall.

Your space is a reflection of your mind, and you want to point it towards order. My bed is always made. I’ve never thought about joining the military or changing the world in any meaningful way.

But when you understand how space can be changed, you can change psychology too. That matters beyond the bedroom.

When we better understand the relationship between the space we occupy and our thoughts, we become better placed to help people like Edmund Trebus in Life of Grime or, more recently, Kathy Murphy in For The Birds. These are people whose problematic psychology has extended into the space far beyond their capacity to cope. That is where the wider lesson starts.

If we really explore our relationship with the space around us, we may become more aware of our place in the universe.

Let’s zoom out again, away from me trying to get a sneaky peek in your kitchen drawers and back to space.

We can’t talk about space without talking about ‘space’. The big black empty thing we’re hurtling through at 460 metres per second whilst spinning around at 1000 miles per hour.

Our space will grow over the next hundred years and our concept of ‘ours’ will grow too. For 99.9% of human history, the moon has mostly been a deity, usually a goddess, sometimes an earth-raping man, occasionally a wolf.

It is only in the last few centuries that it has become a rock and, like most rocks, it can be colonised and owned. The moon is now part of our collective self. It’s like a spare room in a cupboard we didn’t know we had.

Within my lifetime, Mars will become an extension of our collective space… and perhaps if we really crack on with the science, we may get our own Dyson Sphere.

From there, the scale keeps growing.

At this point, the solar system will become an extension of our collective psychology as a species. What that means for a warlike ape with spaceships I don’t know.

The changing scope of ‘self’ and ‘collective self’ and both ‘space’ and ‘Space’ is fun to consider.

In this house with its 190+ rooms, we’ve let some fall into disrepair. We’ve let the housemates steal from each other, argued over who should take out the trash, and fought over who owns which room. We brought dangerous toys into the house and left the thermostat too high.

We have not been good tenants, and the space we occupy reflects this clearly.

The next development of human consciousness must be towards a greater collective responsibility. We cannot take the mess from one room and place it in another any more than you can close the door to your bedroom and pretend everything is fine in the lounge.

You must sort out your own universe before we can sort out everything else.

When we gain the capacity to move the celestial house, we cannot leave the mess here and go find another home in the cosmos. Without learning the lessons of mental tidiness that begin with making our own beds — we cannot become responsible citizens of the wider Universe.

This article has been a hell of a ride…from houseplants to outer space. At least I did it smelling chocolatey and with my arms suitably moist.

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