Montreal journalist and author Josh Freed is a self-confessed mess – with an “order disorder.” His office is an extraordinary mess where he claims he gets his best ideas – although everyone else wants him to clean it up.
But should he?
Josh says his dilemma is part of a larger battle that pits man against woman, colleague against colleague, and mother against child. It’s the war between the Messy and the Neat, in a titanic struggle over the order of our planet.
We live in an Age of Organization, where the neat are sweeping the Earth with their weapons of mess destruction, in a rising tide of tidiness. Personal organizers are almost as common as personal trainers. Reality TV shows send SWAT teams of neat freaks into the lairs of the messy to reform them, promising salvation through sanitation.
But Josh wonders if this new obsession with order isn’t overrated. In an effort to bring clutterers out of the closet for the first time, he has written, directed and narrated the entertaining and humorous new documentary, MY MESSY LIFE. Does a disorderly desk really mean a disorderly mind? Or does an empty desk mean an empty mind?
In MY MESSY LIFE, Josh starts out in his own office, which looks (as our mothers used to say) ‘like a cyclone hit it’. Then he goes on an odyssey to meet other successful slobs and see what they have to say in defence of mess.