REJ:2026.07.14.0001geo.IN (Interpretive Geology)PRJ-2026-0020Vol. 41, No. 2DOI 10.5281/prj.2026.0020Status: Rejected
Stratigraphy of the Miscellaneous: A Sedimentological Account of the Household Junk Drawer and a Conservation Law Prohibiting Its Organization
Marguerite O. Delve1, Piotr S. Krommenhoek2, Ada N. Fenwick-Osei3
1. Institute for Domestic Basin Analysis, Ghent · 2. Department of Interpretive Geology, University of the Interior · 3. Centre for Applied Complexity, Nkrumah Polytechnic
Submitted and rejected July 14, 2026 · 5 pages · 5 figures · review duration: 35 minutes
Abstract
Every home has one drawer that will not close: the drawer of dead batteries, orphaned keys, twist ties, and cables for devices no longer owned. It is universally treated as a failure of tidiness. We argue it is nothing of the kind. Excavating such drawers layer by layer, and dating their contents from the expiry stamps printed on coupons and batteries, we show that the junk drawer is a genuine sedimentary basin: its contents lie in ordered strata, oldest at the bottom, exactly as rock does. From this we derive a conservation law. The total “miscellany” of a home is a conserved quantity—junk is not destroyed when you tidy a drawer, only relocated to another one—so a single drawer cannot be permanently organized at all. Worse, because ordering one drawer exports disorder to the rest of the house, tidying raises the clutter of the home overall: in a randomized trial of households, homes told to sort their drawer were measurably messier six months later than homes left alone ( whole-home miscellany, 95% CI 4–18%). We conclude that the drawer belongs to a class of systems that cannot be managed by tidying, only interacted with by rummaging—and that the person who has never gotten around to sorting it has, in a strict physical sense, been right all along.
keywords: stratigraphy · junk drawer · conservation law · domestic entropy · Cynefin · clutter
Cite this rejection
@article{PRJ20260020,
title = {Stratigraphy of the Miscellaneous: A Sedimentological Account of the Household Junk Drawer and a Conservation Law Prohibiting Its Organization},
author = {Marguerite O. Delve and Piotr S. Krommenhoek and Ada N. Fenwick-Osei},
journal = {Peer Rejected},
year = {2026},
note = {Rejected manuscript, PRJ-2026-0020},
url = {https://peerrejected.com/papers/stratigraphy-of-the-junk-drawer}
}Citing this paper is done at your own professional risk.