I’ve written before about trying to keep our household from being swamped with little plastic kid-related objects. (Yes, I am rapidly becoming Dadwagon’s chief domestic-order correspondent. So be it.) And then I run across a story like this in the Times.

Joseph Epstein once wrote about a fellow critic–a man he found personally cruel and repellent–that, when he found himself agreeing with the man’s point of view, he immediately reconsidered his position. Suddenly I see his point.

Never mind that this writer chose the world’s least interesting places to shop, chain stores familiar to every American who leaves the house. Never mind, also, that the subject’s comments are straight-down-the-middle commonsensical. Everyone gets a color-coded folder! Enough space on the calendar for everyone in the family to write in his or her soccer games! So useful! (And if Junior doesn’t log in every event, in the right color marker, well—we just won’t have that. Kid gets donated to Goodwill. )

The real problem is that her suggestions address … nothing at all, really. I can just about guarantee that setting up shelving and putting all your stuff into translucent plastic tubs from the Container Store will cost you hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars, and in six months you’ll have half-empty shelves filled with half-empty plastic tubs with crap piled all around them, all of it twice as inaccessible as before.

A little tip to everyone: You can’t buy your way out of disorder, any more than we can consume our way out of global warming. Either you put your stuff away, or don’t. Caveat organizer.