Topic 118: Conservation of Social Resources

Carol:

Clutter-Mania   

Generally, I love working in my office, which has undergone a complete renovation since I retired. Fresh paint, new bookshelf,  desk and now a new computer. The room is small, but the space would function perfectly well except for one problem. I have become the conservator of not only the boxes of historical memorabilia handed down from my mother and grandmother, but also the boxes of social records of a women’s group I belong to. Conservation is about time and space, both of which I don’t have a lot of.
 

I knew I was in clutter trouble a few weeks ago when I was downloading photos from my camera. I couldn’t find  the charger for the camera’s rechargeable batteries. Yesterday morning, I found the charger but by then I had misplaced the camera. I only found the charger  because I was hunting for the book and notes I needed for the mythology class I take on Thursday afternoons.  I finally found the mythology stuff which I had put in a file box right next to my desk for “easy access.” My organizational system was clearly breaking down.
 

Megan tells me it’s because good organization is based on “intuition.” What does “intuition” have to do with organizing, I asked Megan--  the only person I know who alphabetized the books in her room when she was a kid (a natural-born librarian if I ever met one).  She explained that my kitchen is NOT set up intuitively, and that’s why Marc never knows where things are and never puts things back in the right place. I got huffy.  My kitchen is organized in zones: all the prep materials (cookbooks, measuring and mixing equipment)  to the left of the sink , all of the dishes, glasses, cutlery to the right of the sink closest to the dishwasher, spices and mixing spoons next to the stove. And, I NEST everything to maximize shelf space, which is a good example of conservation of kitchen resources.  It’s not my fault if people—i.e. Marc—haven’t caught on to the system
 

Okay,  I got so frustrated looking for my camera and my mythology books that all I could think about during the class itself  was that I needed to come home and totally re-organize my office. There I was watching a DVD of a professor talking about Mesopotamian flood stories, and my mind was drifting off to plan   how I could NEST my photo boxes in the closet to get more space. By the time he was talking about Aztec and Chinese flood stories, I was mentally mapping out “social resource” zones for the closet, one area for the file boxes from the women’s group, a separate bookshelf dedicated to my family history materials.  If there had been 15 more minutes on that DVD, I would have created a whole new file system for my personal correspondence and retirement benefits.
 

By the time I arrived home from my mythology class, I was ready to get upstairs and whip that space into shape. I had just enough time before dinner to shift all the contents of the closet into our upstairs hall and loft. By the time dinner was over, I had just enough energy to walk upstairs and move the file boxes from the couch to the floor so that I could watch TV. 
 

I’m feeling a lot of pressure right now. I had to get in my morning walk, my morning coffee talk with the neighbors, and now my morning daily theme. When I “deconstructed” my office, I thought I would have the rest of the day to implement my organizational plan (the zones, the nests, the filing system) . But, I forgot….I promised my temporarily-out-of-work-otherwise-known-as-she-who-must-be-obeyed –daughter that I would go to the movies today. Organization is all about intuition—I intuit that if I break my promise, I will be in big trouble. 

Megan:

Conservation of Social Resources

Social support provides a major reservoir for resources outside those endowed to the self (e.g. high self-esteem, sense of mastery).

When we pulled this topic from the little basket we have designated to hold the scraps of paper upon which the topics have been printed, my mother groaned and I cheered. “I don’t know what this means,” she said, “I don’t know what I’m going to say.” I guess it was the fact that the tables were turned for once, but I gleefully shouted, “I’m gonna write about how my friends don’t have time to hang out with me!”

And then I got sad for a moment.

And then I perked up again, because that’s not true anymore. But I should preface this by mentioning that in England, I met almost all of my friends through my job at the prison. We spent the day working together and then we went out to the pub after work and talked about work, or the people from work. I had an extremely active (if somewhat repetitive) social life. When I moved back here, I wasn’t prepared for the toll work, marriage and parenthood had taken on my childhood friends in terms of the free time they had available to spend with me. It was sort of a blow to realize that they had not just been sitting around for the 10 years I was gone, hoping and praying for my eventual return.

Anyway, after a few months, I adjusted to my new place in the world, and we’ve come to a sort of satisfactory arrangement. Instead of spending 12 hours together at a time, we have coffee, or lunch. We have children’s birthday parties. We have roller derby, and tonight, my friends’ friend’s band is playing in a local bar.

I have been looking forward to this all week, which means that it will not go well. I will spend more time getting ready than I will at the event.  It will be too loud to talk, so my friend and I will stand next to each other and watch the band and text our observations to each other. Observations like, “Your friend’s band sucks” to which she might respond that my parents were never married. (They were married. Twice!) I will wonder if anyone notices how amazing I look (even without the makeup with the extra coverage) and then I will remember that nothing good ever comes of meeting someone in a bar. Especially a bar called Hooligans.  Then it will be time to go, because my friend has to go to Phoenix in the morning and I have to go to a first birthday party.  But before we say goodnight, we’ll make plans to meet soon for coffee or dinner or roller derby.

The quote at the opening of this “essay” is from an abstract of a study with the same name as the topic. I couldn’t access the full-text of the article because it cost $25. That seemed like too much money to spend to read a jargon-filled study about social relationships, especially because I can guess the results. Having friends is important. Young people spend a lot of time establishing friendships they hope to maintain through the rest of their lives, once they are too busy working, being married and having families to devote much time to making new ones.  It probably concludes that those resources “endowed to the self,” such as self-esteem, are also supported by those external social resources (friends).  That seems logical to me, but if you want to know for sure, take your $25 and follow the link below.
 

Sources:
Stevan E. Hobfoll, John Freedy, Carol Lane, and Pamela Geller. "Conservation of Social Resources: Social Support Resource Theory" Journal of Social and Personal Relationships November 1990 7: 465-478, doi:10.1177/0265407590074004 http://spr.sagepub.com/content/7/4/465.abstract