Thanks to the publication of a new, tightly-argued and rigorously theoretical study from the University of Chicago Press, I now have a word to describe the contents of the kitchen drawer. “Crap,” writes Wendy A Woloson, “is not a particular object but an existential state of being.”

Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America describes how we have learned to endure, accommodate and sometimes cherish the shortfall between our desires for slackly manufactured objects and the limited satisfactions they provide. “An object’s relative crappiness,” Woloson argues, “lies in the extent to which it offers false hope, was produced to hasten its own obsolescence, has no clear purpose, and/or has no emotional, utilitarian, or market value.” Her prose forms a Generation Game conveyor belt of tat: boob-shaped mugs, Hair-in-a-Can, chipboard bookcases, ceramic tributes to Princess Diana in gold vermeil and dishwasher-proof porcelain.

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The success of such products can sometimes be a mystery to its manufacturers. I once interviewed the exploitation film-maker Herschell Gordon Lewis, a mild-manned mountebank best known for Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), a stalk’n’slash version of Brigadoon. In the early 1970s he left the movie business to make a proper fortune selling collectible souvenir crockery. “They are my natural bastard children,” he told me. “First we did a 12-plate series based on the Book of Genesis. It was so successful that in six months we were on to Exodus.”

The power of the object is outré and mysterious. During lockdown, it compelled me to blow the cost of a good night out (remember those?) on a successful auction bid for a box of Peter Wyngarde’s cufflinks. It has driven me to preserve a Doctor Who chew bar from 1982, which has now entered a state of deliquescence that could only be remedied by Lenin’s embalmers. It is the reason why I can spend a good hour hunkered over a penny falls machine, rolling dirty tuppences in the hope of dislodging a gonk.

Such acquisitions would make Marie Kondo jump on a chair and scream, but I think Karl Marx would have understood the impulse. “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood,” he wrote, in the first volume of Capital. “Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”

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It may be getting queerer. Marx’s commodity fetishism — the idea that manufactured objects carry an occult charge — thrives online. Wish.com, founded by the Warsaw-born billionaire Peter Szulczewski, is its temple of doom. Here, users can scroll through images of three billion reasonably priced but mysteriously unknowable objects, many of which seem to be the product of some as-yet-undeclared school of avant-garde art. A five-foot long bolster in the shape of a pig’s trotter. A sunflower-seed dispenser with a slot for your mobile phone. Pastry cutters that would allow the gingerbread man Kama Sutra to be your Bake-Off showstopper. Plastic earthworms that smell of fish. Penis shaped wineglasses. Penis-shaped anything. All for a few dollars each, plus postage and packing.

Who buys this stuff? Who makes it? Having no need for a bumless mankini or an $8 angle grinder, I’ve never used Wish. But I did once order some T-shirts from a pop-up ad on Facebook. They looked great on the catwalk model in the picture, but when they arrived, three months later, they turned out to be made of a vinyl material that smelled like a tent from the Early Learning Centre. They are, of course, under my bed in the original wrapping. Posting them back to China and trying to extract a refund would only extend and complicate the misery of the original transaction. It may be that such objects only exist because their sellers have made a calculation about the appetites and apathy of their buyers. Perhaps, in a re-education camp in Xinjiang province, Uighur inmates are breaking their fingernails stitching these garments, which will never be worn, but are mailed west and then despatched to landfill as part of a mechanism for converting clicks into cash.

Its sound like capitalism’s final and most grotesque mutational form, but it has a precedent. Woloson traces it back to the burgeoning consumer culture of the 18th century, but she also finds commerce of this kind where I first encountered it — the back pages of 1970s American superhero comics. The strip stories at the front offered colourful adventures involving radioactive spiders and invisible planes. But the weirdest weirdness happened in the small ads at the back, where boy voyeurs used X-Ray Spex to undress the lady next door, and Sea-Monkeys — pinkish, smiling creatures with crown-like antennae and fan-shaped tails — sported in front of their underwater castle home.

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Those who actually sent their money discovered that X-Ray Spex contained feathers that made the viewer see blurry black lines that few would mistake for the real internal structure of the lady next door. Sea-Monkeys were brine shrimp mailed out in their dormant stage, from which, if you were lucky, they would revive, and go skittering about in a little tank. The man who patented both these products was Harold Braunhut, a former stunt motorcyclist whose other lines included the invisible goldfish — which was an empty glass bowl marked “invisible goldfish” — and a telescopic whip that he direct-marketed to the white supremacists of the Aryan Nation. There’s crap, and then there’s racist crap.

Is it possible to wash it all away? To live a life unencumbered by trashy, dubious and flimsy objects? In 2001, the artist Michael Landy performed a heroic and punishing experiment upon himself. The cataloguing and destruction of all 7,227 of his possessions. He shredded his passport and birth certificate. He broke down his clothes, an artwork by his friend Tracy Emin, and assorted kitchen drawer flotsam — batteries, copper coins, key-rings, plastic cutlery, felt-tip pens. A few years later, his appetite for divesting himself of objects not quite sated, he kindly gave me a copy of the inventory — a bound volume with the heft of a mid-century experimental novel. Along with most of my books and papers, its in the lock-up where I keep all the things I don’t have room for in our flat. There it sits, in storage, waiting to be part of a comfortable, book-lined life that, like most unpensioned participants in the gig economy, I’m pretty sure I’ll never be wealthy enough to have.

“Crap,” writes Wendy A Woloson, is “deeply revealing, laying bare in ways that nicer things cannot some of our deepest desires, drives, and anxieties: our crap, our selves.”

My access to the kitchen drawer remains unimpeded.

They don’t know how lucky they are. As a child, my mother would always make us eat a savoury pancake — usually wrapped around an old bit of bolognese sauce, or ratatouille — before we got to the pudding ones. And it wasn’t just because she’s a rapacious user-up of leftovers. She did it to honour what she saw as the real tradition of pancake day: using things up in preparation for the Lenten fast.

These days, far more people celebrate Pancake Day than bother with fasting afterwards. Those who do follow tradition tend to cut out alcohol, or chocolate. As a child, I always decided to give up chocolate, and then promptly forgot until I found myself half-way through a KitKat, when I’d give up and vow to try harder next year. I’ve still never managed it.

But this year, my goal for Lent is not about food at all. I don’t want to learn to live with only the nourishment I actually need: I want to learn to live with only the stuff I actually need.

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Just to be clear: I am an atheist. But I often find inspiration in the rhythms of religious rituals. I don’t think religions would have the great pull they have over so many billions of people if they didn’t offer so many little patterns and behaviours we human beings need. And Lent seems like the perfect time of year for radical decluttering of the whole house, not just the larder.

There’s a Persian tradition, also honoured in this season, called khooneh takouni: in English, ‘shaking the house.’ In preparation for the New Year — Nowruz festival — families clear their home from top to bottom, washing carpets, painting the house, and even decluttering the yard and attic. Cleanliness is seen as a way to keep evil away, in preparation for a fresh start, physically and mentally.

What I like most about this tradition is that it comes around every year. You’re never supposed to be fixed, or perfect. The year will accumulate its chaos around you, and every year you take on the challenge of pushing it back outside. Like the tide and the seasons, a big spring clean isn’t a sign of failure, it’s a natural ritual of life.

And as carpets get hung in the street to have the dust beaten off, and paint is slapped onto the walls of houses, it ends up being an explosion of colour in every town and village: a celebration of life. Tidying isn’t a chore: it’s living.

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This isn’t the kind of tolerance you get from the tidying evangelists who’ve become fashionable. Japanese ‘organisation consultant’ Marie Kondo says tidying is ‘life-changing magic’. Academic Jordan Peterson is clear that you’re basically a failure in life if you can’t keep your room tidy: his mantra is ‘sort yourself out’. They dole out their lectures about how to live and seem to expect you immediately become a perfect carbon copy of them. I am certain that both would look down their noses in contempt if they had to come back after a year and sort you out a second time. Frankly, I’d be frightened to get their help.

This year, I finally feel free enough to tidy my house because I’ve come to terms with the truth that it will never be finished. Yes: living with children is basically engaging in a permanent war with entropy, as you struggle to tidy faster than they can disarrange. But what’s the alternative? Living without them?

And honestly, I don’t think the chaos of my home is their fault. It’s mine. I think I hold onto things because of the potential they symbolise. The books I will read, some day. The clothes I might fit into again. The baking tin that might be useful if someone wants a train cake for their birthday. The ravioli maker that might be fun to use with the children if they ever start to like ravioli. The spare bits of fabric I might repurpose into a cushion or a costume for World Book Day; the sewing machine I might get fixed so I can do so.

The person I might be: the creative decorator, the well-read aesthete, the domestic goddess, the better mother, the more patient wife. All these futures have to be let go.

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There is also a lot of guilt to be dealt with, in our age of excess consumption. While you hold onto something you don’t need, you can still fool yourself that it was worth buying. Those trousers that didn’t look right; that juicing machine that was such a faff to clean; that box set you never watched. The moment you let these things go, you have to face the truth of the mistake you made. But I believe — and hope — that accepting that truth is the best way to learn to live differently.

I have not clutched objects to my heart and asked if they spark joy; I haven’t thanked any of the objects I have thrown away. My goal is not to have a home fit for an interiors magazine. It’s simply to let go of the lives I will never lead, in order to better appreciate this one. This is about living in the present — not just letting go of the past, but the future, too.

I have some tips to share, if you are a fellow hoarder, or just someone without visible horizontal surfaces in your home. Do something — a little something — every day. I set the whole family a challenge: we each took our age, and put that many items away every evening; even the littlest could manage two, and it’s such a faff counting all the way up to my advanced years that I just carried on and on until I was sure I’d done about double.

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Another good trick is the “30 day declutter”, where you give away one item on day one, two on day two, and by the end of the month you’re 465 items lighter. By breaking the job into tiny pieces, it helps conquer the sensation of being overwhelmed.

But above all, accept the ebb and flow. You will always make mistakes. The job will never be done. When the shed is tidy, and the toys are in boxes, and the washing up is done you’ll feel wonderful. And when they aren’t, don’t fret. There will always be another spring on the way, another opportunity to make pancakes out of your leftovers, and another chance to try again.