What is gauging anyway, and why is it important? Gauging is the process of determining how to match exactly what is in a pattern to something you are making at home. Everyone in the world crochets in their own style. Daniel is exceptionally tight in crochet, and I am really loose. It's our rhythm in […]

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Editor’s note, June 7, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below originally published on November 3, 2024.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Stay tuned for more original Your Mileage May Vary columns coming in June. In the meantime, submit your own question here.

I’m at an age where I feel like I need to decide whether I want to have kids, but I’m very ambivalent about it and don’t know how to know whether I want them. I don’t dream of parenthood or filling my days with caregiving for a young child. But, does anyone?! That doesn’t seem like a good way to decide whether I truly want to be a parent. But then what is? The main place my mind goes is that I fear my life would be sad and depressing when my partner and I are 70 and childless. I like the thought of having well-adjusted adult children to spend time with when I’m old. That seems like a misguided and selfish reason to have kids. 

A better reason might be that I think my partner and I have good values, and I’d like to bring more people into the world who have those values, but that also seems selfish because there’s no guarantee that a child will embrace your values, and your duty as a parent is to let them flourish as whoever they want to be. I worry that I would be the kind of parent who struggles to support my kid if they rebel against everything I believe in. But I also feel like you just can’t know what you would be like in that situation until you’re in it. How do you decide that such a life-altering decision is right for you, let alone its ethical implications for a person who doesn’t exist yet? 

Dear Fencesitter,

Ah, parenthood ambivalence. So many of us can relate. And, like you, so many of us try to answer the question “Do I want to have kids?” by looking inward for the answer. We introspect, we ruminate, we dig through childhood traumas. We consider what makes us happy now in hopes of predicting whether kids would make us happier or more miserable later. We assume the answer is there within us, a buried treasure waiting to be unearthed.

That’s understandable: Most advice for people considering parenthood encourages us to do just that. Countless articles, books, and yes, advice columns are premised on the idea that the answer exists as a stable fact within us. So is the parenthood ambivalence coach Ann Davidman’s online class, the “Motherhood Clarity™ Course” which opens with a mantra: “The answers will come because they never left … It’s all within me.”  

But there are a few problems with that approach. For one, you could spend your entire adult life auditing your soul for the answer and still end up looking like the shrug emoji. That’s because introspection is an unbounded search process: You’ve got no way to know when you’ve searched enough. 

Another problem is that this approach centers you and your desires too much. As you pointed out, bringing a kid into the world can’t only be about its costs and benefits for you.

Finally, you’re just not well-positioned to predict whether kids will make you happier or more miserable! As the philosopher L.A. Paul notes, you can’t quite know what it’ll be like to have a kid until you have one, and besides, the “you” might become transformed in the process, so that the things that make you happy now are not the same as the things that will make you happy as a parent.

So, what I suggest is a radically different approach: If you want to arrive at a decision, you have to go beyond your own interiority. You have to turn your gaze outward and ask yourself: What is it that you find awesome, thrilling, and intrinsically valuable about being in the world? 

I’m not asking because I think the key is deciding which values you want to transmit to your kid. Like you said, there’s no guarantee that your kid will embrace your values. Instead, I’m asking because this is the basis on which you can make a choice — not “find the answer” but make a choice — about whether to have kids.

Up until now, you’ve been thinking of the kids question as an epistemic one — you say you “don’t know how to know” — but I would think of it as an existential one instead. The existentialist philosophers argued that life doesn’t come with predefined meaning or fixed answers. Instead, each human has to choose how to create their own meaning. As the Spanish existentialist Jose Ortega y Gasset put it, the central task of being human is “autofabrication,” which literally means self-making. You come up with your own answer, and in so doing, you make yourself. 

A decade ago, just for fun, my friend Emily sat me down in a park and had me do an exercise that would turn out to be extremely impactful: It was, believe it or not, an online quiz. It listed dozens and dozens of different values — friendship, creativity, growth, and so on — and instructed me to select my top 10. Then it made me narrow it down to my top five. I found that brutally hard, but it was revealing. My number one value turned out to be what the quiz called, somewhat idiosyncratically, “delight of being, joy.”    

I return to that again and again (my mind preserves the punctuation, so I regularly find myself talking to people about “delight-of-being-comma-joy!”) when I have to make tough decisions. It captures a core fact about me: I love being alive in this world! Whenever I snorkel with impossibly colorful fish, or experience deep connection with another human being, or stare up at all the galaxies we’ve barely begun to understand, I feel so grateful that I get to participate in the grand mystery of being.

And that’s what made me decide I want to be a mom one day. Choosing to have a child feels like one of the biggest ways I can say YES to life, at a time when many doubt the worthiness of perpetuating human life on this planet. It’s a way to affirm that being alive in this world is a gift, one I want to pass along to others. 

So allow me to be your Emily. Let me present you with an inventory of values (one of many similar inventories available online) and urge you to select your top five. Then ask yourself: Would having a kid be a good way to enact my values — or is there another way to enact my values that feels more compelling to me? Which path is the best fit for you personally, given your specific talents and your physical and psychological needs?

This depends a lot on the individual. Imagine three women who all rank “personal growth” as their top value. They might still arrive at totally different conclusions about kids. For one woman, that value may feel like a great reason to have a kid, because she believes childrearing will help her grow as a person and that she’ll get to guide a new person in their development. The second woman might say her primary mode of growth is art-making, so she wants to focus on that while being an active auntie to her friends’ kids on the side. A third woman might feel that, for her, the most promising path is to become a nun. All three are completely valid!  

A lot of people struggling with parenthood ambivalence say they’re scared that if they don’t have a kid, they’ll miss out on something sui generis — a completely unique experience, a sort of love to which nothing else compares. It sounds like this FOMO is playing a role for you, too; you mentioned that you fear your life would be sad and depressing when you and your partner are 70 and childless. 

But there are plenty of parents who will tell you that, while they adore their kids, the kid-parent relationship is not magically more meaningful than anything else in their life. In the excellent new book What Are Children For? by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, the former writes: 

While the relationship between a parent and child is doubtless unique, what if I told you that, phenomenologically speaking, it is not really grand and tremendous? That it’s not even particularly extraordinary? … To love your child isn’t like nothing you’ve ever known. It isn’t unimaginable. If you have known love, you have also known it, or something like it … What is so special about this love isn’t how exotic, mysterious, or astounding it is but how simple and familiar.

So, if you just like the thought of having children because you want lovely people to spend time with when you’re old, try first experimenting with other ways to get that same need met. You might find that it’s not something that only a child can provide. As the author (and my friend) Rhaina Cohen documents beautifully in The Other Significant Others, some people find that deep friendships meet their need for connection perfectly well, with no child-shaped hole or partner-shaped hole left over. 

But even if you believe having a child is a sui generis experience, the point I would make is: Other things are too! An artist might tell you there’s nothing that compares to the creative thrill of painting. Someone involved in political work may tell you there’s nothing quite like the feeling of fighting for justice and winning. Lots of things in the world are unique and incommensurably good. 

So don’t be pushed around by societal narratives of what the ultimate good looks like. Let your choice flow from your own sense of what’s most valuable about human life. Whereas what makes you feel happy or miserable can change a lot over time, core values are relatively stable, so they form a more enduring basis for making major decisions. Yes, it’s conceivable that even those values might shift a little over the decades, but making a choice that flows from your values means you will at least be confident that you had a very solid reason for doing what you did — no matter how you end up feeling about it in the future. 

And as for the future? You really can’t control it. So, your goal is not to control every possible outcome. Your goal is to live in line with your values.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, often called the “father of existentialism,” proposed the idea that life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward. This week’s question prompted me to revisit that idea. 

• As I wrote this column, I went back and reread a great New Yorker article by Joshua Rothman about how we make major decisions. It discusses philosopher Agnes Callard’s idea that “we ‘aspire’ to self-transformation by trying on the values that we hope one day to possess.” In other words, you don’t decide you want to be a parent — you decide you want to be the sort of person who’d want to be a parent, and lean into that. I found the idea interesting but too complicated by half: Why would I ground this decision in values I hope to one day possess instead of grounding it in the values I already hold dear?

• Lots of people bring up climate change as a reason not to have kids. I think that’s misguided. Having a kid is one of the things that can push you to take heroic action on climate change — so I was interested in this piece in Noema Magazine, which argues that we need to evoke heroism, not hope, with regard to the climate — and finds a prime example of that in … JRR Tolkien.  

The request to become a tester for The Crochet Crowd, aka Mikey himself, is a common question. It's not a paid role but more of an opportunity to help, learn, and be part of something that eventually reaches the public either as a paid or free pattern. The size of the pattern and work level […]

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Britain’s small and medium-sized businesses are quietly rewiring the way they operate, and the trigger is no longer the calendar quarter but the fixture list. From tennis fortnights to stadium residencies and a summer of football, a growing “event economy” is reshaping local trading conditions for thousands of firms, and the smartest operators are planning for it months in advance.

For businesses clustered around stadiums, parks and city-centre entertainment hubs, the pattern is familiar: a sudden, concentrated wave of footfall that tests customer flow, venue capacity and day-to-day operations all at once. New insight from insurer Hiscox suggests these spikes are becoming more frequent, more geographically spread and, crucially, more predictable, which means they can be planned for rather than simply survived.

This summer’s football tournament is shaping up to be one of the single largest short-term jolts to UK hospitality demand in years. Some 40 per cent of consumers already plan to book a venue or buy tickets to watch the action, and 47 per cent say they would pay extra for a prime viewing spot. Separate analysis points to an £898m boost for the sector, with roughly 12.4 million fans expected to pour into pubs, bars and restaurants over the course of the tournament. It is a windfall that lands after a punishing few years for hospitality, and one Business Matters has tracked closely as UK pubs, bookmakers and takeaways eye a multibillion-pound spending boost.

There is a regulatory tailwind, too. During knockout fixtures involving the home nations, pubs will be permitted to extend trading hours, staying open until 1am for matches kicking off between 5pm and 9pm, and until 2am for later kick-offs between 9pm and 10pm. The relaxation, set out in The Licensing Act 2003 (FIFA World Cup licensing hours) Order 2026, applies automatically to licensed premises when a home nation reaches the relevant stages, sparing operators the usual scramble for individual Temporary Event Notices.

Simon Ratcliff, Commercial Property and Liability Underwriting Manager at Hiscox, says the operational upside comes with strings attached. “Major tournaments like this year’s summer of football can create sudden and significant changes in how SMEs operate, particularly where businesses adapt their venues for live screenings or experience concentrated demand during match periods,” he says. “This can introduce considerations around venue capacity, customer flow, health and safety procedures and licensing requirements, particularly where businesses are operating later than usual or changing how they normally trade.”

The MATCH framework: a tournament playbook for SMEs

The appetite is already showing up in search data. Queries for “where to watch the World Cup” are up 880 per cent over the past month, according to Google search analysis, while searches for “World Cup screening” have climbed 153 per cent over the same period.

To help businesses convert that interest into well-run, profitable trading, Hiscox is urging SMEs to think MATCH:

M – Monitor demand peaks around fixtures and key match times.

A – Adjust staffing levels ahead of high-attendance games.

T – Track whether temporary changes such as screens, outdoor areas or extended hours are covered under your public liability insurance arrangements, and check that turnover projections remain accurate as trading increases.

C – Control capacity and customer flow to manage queues and congestion.

H – Handle health, safety and licensing requirements for late-night trading and alcohol service.

Ratcliff flags one detail that catches operators out. “If hiring screens or audio-visual equipment for the tournament, venues should check whether hire agreements make them responsible for insuring the equipment while it’s in their care,” he says. “Many AV hire companies have ‘continuing hire charges’, meaning the venue could be liable for any damages, along with lost rental income while items are out of use.”

The rise of the ‘event economy’

The tournament is the headline act, but it is only one date in a far busier diary. SMEs are increasingly operating inside a broader, more sustained event economy that runs the length of the year.

Between June and December alone, the calendar takes in sporting fixtures from Wimbledon and Royal Ascot to Henley Royal Regatta and major football; stadium concerts including Harry Styles’ 12-night Wembley residency across June and July; and a national circuit of music festivals, from Download at Donington Park and Tramlines in Sheffield to TRNSMT in Glasgow, Creamfields in Cheshire, Green Man in Wales and Boardmasters in Cornwall. London adds its own layer, with BST Hyde Park, Notting Hill Carnival, Pride, Taste of London and Wing Fest, the world’s largest chicken wing festival, returning to London Stadium in July 2026. Then come the seasonal staples, from local fireworks displays to Christmas markets.

As these events grow more frequent and more widely dispersed, the planning challenge changes shape. Businesses are no longer bracing for one-off peaks but managing cyclical spikes that recur throughout the year, much as coastal and seasonal firms have long done. It is the same dynamic that saw the summer economy valued at billions and tens of thousands of jobs, now playing out in city centres and stadium districts.

For Ed Savitt, owner of DropShot Coffee in SW19, the tennis championships are not a fortnight of matches but one of the most operationally demanding stretches of the year. As tens of thousands of fans, tourists and media teams descend on the area each summer, the small independent shop turns into a high-pressure operation that takes months to plan.

“Wimbledon completely changes the pace of business for us. We now prepare months in advance across staffing, stock and planning,” Savitt told Hiscox. “Temporary setups require detailed planning around logistics, staffing and approvals, as well as additional operational considerations we don’t normally deal with day-to-day. We also introduced clearer queue systems, adjusted layouts and carried out additional risk assessments to manage crowding and maintain safe working conditions.”

For Common Pizza, the summer calendar brings more than warmer weather. With sites near both Clapham Common and Parsons Green, the pizza and live music chain sits next door to everything from large-scale festivals to Polo in the Park, each bringing its own wave of footfall and timing pressures.

“We see a noticeable uplift in footfall during major summer events on Clapham Common, with customers often spending more time in the area before and after events,” a general manager at Common Pizza told Hiscox. “For Polo in the Park, we expected increased demand during peak arrival and departure times, so we reviewed stock levels and ensured operations were prepared for busier trading periods. The biggest challenge is maintaining service quality while responding quickly to changing demand throughout the day.”

That mix of caution and opportunity reflects the wider mood across hospitality, where operators are weighing a welcome demand boost against thin margins and stubborn costs, a balance the sector knows well as the hospitality sector raises a cautious toast to returning pubgoers. The fundamentals of the tournament economics are encouraging, with the BBC reporting that pubs banked a significant trade boost during England’s recent run at the Euros.

For Ratcliff, the bigger shift is structural. “Major events are increasingly shaping how SMEs plan and operate throughout the year, particularly for businesses located near venues, parks and city event spaces,” he concludes. “What were once considered isolated busy periods are now becoming more regular operational challenges for many SMEs, requiring more proactive planning around how they manage demand, space and safety.”

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Editor’s note, June 14, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below originally published on June 8, 2025.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Stay tuned for more original Your Mileage May Vary columns coming in June. In the meantime, submit your own question here.

My husband and I have a good relationship. We’re both committed to personal growth and continual learning and have developed very strong communication skills. A couple of years ago we were exposed to some friends with an open marriage and had our own conversations about ethical non-monogamy. At first, neither of us were interested. 

Now, my husband is interested and currently is attracted to a colleague who is also into him. She’s married and has no idea that he and I talk about all of their interactions. He doesn’t know what her relationship agreements are with her husband.

I’m not currently interested in ethical non-monogamy. I see things in our relationship that I’d like to work on together with my husband. I want more of his attention and energy, to be frank. I don’t want his attention and energy being funneled into another relationship. I don’t have moral issues with ethical non-monogamy, I just don’t actually see any value-add for me right now. The cost-benefit analysis leaves me saying “not now.” 

My husband admitted that he’s hoping I will have a change of mind. I don’t want to force his hand, although I am continuing to say very clearly what I want in my relationship. How do we reach a compromise? If he cuts ties with this woman, he has resentment towards me. If he continues to pursue something with her, I feel disrespected, and while I don’t want to leave him I would feel the need to do something.

Dear Monogamously Married,

I want to start by commending you for two things. First, for your openness to discussing and exploring all this with your husband. Second, for your insistence on clearly stating what you actually want — and don’t want. 

I think Erich Fromm, the 20th-century German philosopher and psychologist, would back me up in saying that you’d do well to hold tight to both those qualities. For starters, radical openness is important because, according to Fromm, the basic premise of love is freedom. He writes:

Love is a passionate affirmation of its “object.” That means that love is not an “affect” but an active striving, the aim of which is the happiness, development, and freedom of its “object.” 

In other words, love is not a feeling. It’s work, and the work of love is to fully support the flourishing of the person you love. That can be scary — what if the person discovers that they’re actually happier with somebody else? — which is why Fromm specifies that only someone with a strong self “which can stand alone and bear solitude” will be up for the job. He continues:

This passionate affirmation is not possible if one’s own self is crippled, since genuine affirmation is always rooted in strength. The person whose self is thwarted can only love in an ambivalent way; that is, with the strong part of his self he can love, with the crippled part he must hate.

So far, it might sound like Fromm is saying that to be a good lover is to be a doormat: You just have to do whatever’s best for the other person, even if it screws you over. But his view is very much the opposite. 

In fact, Fromm cautions us against both “masochistic love” and “sadistic love.” In the first, you give up your self and sacrifice your needs in order to become submerged in another person. In the second, you try to exert power over the other person. Both of these are rooted in “a deep anxiety and an inability to stand alone,” writes Fromm; whether by dissolving yourself into them or by controlling them, you’re trying to make it impossible for the other person to abandon you. Both approaches are “pseudo-love.”

So although Fromm doesn’t want you to try to control your partner, and although he suggests that the philosophical ideal is for you to passionately affirm your partner’s freedom, he’s not advising you to do that if, for you, that will mean masochism. 

If you’re not up for ethical non-monogamy — if you feel, like many people, that the idea of giving your partner free rein is too big a threat to your relationship or your own well-being — then pretending otherwise is not real love. It’s just masochistic self-annihilation.

I’m personally partial to Fromm’s non-possessive approach to love. But I equally appreciate his point that the philosophical ideal could become a practical bloodbath if it doesn’t work for the actual humans involved. I think the question, then, is this: Do you think it’s possible for you to get to a place where you genuinely feel ready for and interested in ethical non-monogamy?

It sounds like you’re intellectually open to the idea, and given that you said you’re committed to personal growth and continual learning, non-monogamy could offer you some benefits; lots of people who practice it say that part of its appeal lies in the growth it catalyzes. And if practicing non-monogamy makes you and/or your husband more fulfilled, it could enrich your relationship and deepen your appreciation for each other.

But right now, you’ve got a problem: Your husband is pushing on your boundaries by flirting with a woman even after you’ve expressed that you don’t want him pursuing something with her. And you already feel like he isn’t giving you enough attention and energy, so the prospect of having to divvy up those resources with another woman feels threatening. Fair! 

Notice, though, that that isn’t a worry about non-monogamy per se — it’s a worry about the state of your current monogamous relationship.

In a marriage, what partners typically want is to feel emotionally secure. But that comes from how consistently and lovingly we show up for and attune to one another, not from the relationship structure. A monogamous marriage may give us some feeling of security, but it’s obviously no guarantee; some people cheat, some get divorced, and some stay loyally married while neglecting their partner emotionally.  

“Monogamy can serve as a stand-in for actual secure attachment,” writes therapist Jessica Fern in Polysecure, a book on how to build healthy non-monogamous relationships. She urges readers to take an honest look at any relationship insecurities or dissatisfactions that are being disguised by monogamy, and work with partners to strengthen the emotional experience of the relationship. 

Since you feel that your husband isn’t giving you enough attention and energy, be sure to talk to him about it. Explain that it doesn’t feel safe for you to open up the relationship without him doing more to be fully present with you and to make you feel understood and precious. See if he starts implementing these skills more reliably. 

In the meantime, while you two are trying to reset your relationship, it’s absolutely reasonable to ask him to cool it with the colleague he’s attracted to; he doesn’t have to cut ties with her entirely (and may not be able to if they work together), but he can certainly avoid feeding the flames with flirtation. Right now, the fantasy of her is a distraction from the work he needs to be doing to improve the reality of your marriage. He should understand why a healthy practice of ethical non-monogamy can’t emerge from a situation where he’s pushing things too far with someone else before you’ve agreed to change the terms of your relationship (and if he doesn’t, have him read Polysecure!).

It’s probably a good idea for you to each do your own inner work, too. Fern, like Fromm, insists that if we want to be capable of a secure attachment with someone else, we need to cultivate that within ourselves. That means being aware of our feelings, desires, and needs, and knowing how to tend to them. Understanding your attachment style can help with this; for example, if you’re anxiously attached and you very often reach out to your partner for reassurance, you can practice spending time alone.

After taking some time to work on these interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, come back together to discuss how you’re feeling. Do you feel more receptive to opening up the relationship? Do you think it would add more than it would subtract? 

If the answer is “yes” or “maybe,” you can create a temporary relationship structure — or “vessel,” as Fern calls it — to help you ease into non-monogamy. One option is to adopt a staggered approach to dating, where one partner (typically the more hesitant one) starts dating new people first, and the other partner starts after a predetermined amount of time. Another option is to try a months-long experiment where both partners initially engage in certain romantic or sexual experiences that are less triggering to each other, then assess what worked and what didn’t, and go from there.

If the answer is “no” — if you’re not receptive to opening up your relationship — then by all means say that! Given you’ll have sincerely done the work to explore whether non-monogamy works for you, your husband doesn’t get to resent you. He can be sad, he can be disappointed, and he can choose to leave if the outcome is intolerable to him. But he’ll have to respect you, and what’s more important, you’ll have to respect yourself.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• This week’s question prompted me to go back to the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow, who was influenced by Fromm. Maslow spoke of two kinds of love: Deficit-Love and Being-Love. The former is about trying to satiate your own needs, while the latter is about giving without expecting something in return. Maslow characterizes Being-Love as an almost spiritual experience, likening it to “the perfect love of their God that some mystics have described.”

• In addition to Polysecure, which has become something of a poly bible in the past few years, I recommend reading What Love Is and What It Could Be, written by the philosopher Carrie Jenkins. I appreciated Jenkins’s functionalist take on romantic love: She explains that we’ve constructed the idea of romantic love a certain way in order to serve a certain function (structuring society into nuclear family units), but we can absolutely revise it if we want. 

• Many people are already revising the traditional view of romantic love. As a piece in Wired documents, millennials and Gen Z are increasingly forming non-hierarchal relationships with multiple partners and friends. This is often referred to as “relationship anarchy,” a term coined in 2006 by writer Andie Nordgren, who said it “questions the idea that love is a limited resource that can only be real if restricted to a couple.”

Soul Searching is Casper ter Kuile’s new monthly column drawing on ancient wisdom to live a spiritual life in the modern world. Casper is the author of The Power of Ritual, holds master’s degrees in Divinity and Public Policy from Harvard University, and co-founded the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, and Sacred Design Lab.

I wish I could pray.

For religious friends of mine, prayer seems to open a portal to a world that’s beyond my reach. Like there’s some divine VIP area where you can whisper in God’s ear to plead for what you need. Not exactly a holy vending machine that gives you what you want, but certainly a secret language that can lead to ecstatic mystical union and profound peace.

I’ve tried to trick myself into praying. But I don’t believe in a deity that’s listening to my complaints and desires. And many traditional prayers feel too weighed down by patriarchy for my taste. So getting on my knees for God, or swaying back and forth, let alone prostrating myself — it all feels absurd. 

And I’m not alone. A 2020 Gallup survey found that less than half of Americans belong to a church, synagogue, temple, or mosque. And despite recent headlines pointing to religious revival, a 2025 poll from Pew Research Center suggests otherwise: Only 30 percent of young adults born between 1995 and 2002 say they pray every day.

So, it seems, prayer isn’t for me, or for many of us. 

Or is it?

Starting in the 1990s, Dr. Herbert Benson led a decade-long study on the efficacy of prayer. He was an esteemed cardiologist and the founder of the Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. His rigorous study confirmed what nonbelievers might have expected: Praying for someone who was sick had no positive impact on their recovery. But during his many years of research, he also found that there was an impact on the person doing the praying.

Even though I didn’t grow up religious, I got a taste of that positive impact as a child. When I was around 10 or 11 years old, I’d often stay over at a friend’s house because I liked him and loved his PlayStation. When it was time for bed, his mother would tuck us in. Standing at the door of his bedroom, she’d turn out the light and say:

Goodnight, goodnight

Far flies the light

But still God’s love

Shall flame above

Making all things…

And, together, we would respond, “bright!” 

It felt good to hear those words before falling asleep. And it felt good, too, saying them out loud, just now, all these years later. So if we know that prayer can improve our psychological well-being, but we don’t believe in God, what can we do? 

It starts with telling the truth.

Psychoanalysts Ann and Barry Ulanov describe prayer as “primary speech.” By this, they mean that it is a basic and fundamental way we say who we are, and we do it with total honesty. That might involve expressing longing and love, yes, but also fear, anger, bitterness, and jealousy — the good, the bad, and the ugly of our human experience. Dive into a sacred text like the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible and you will find examples of people berating the divine, confessing that they’ve lost all hope, or even pleading for the death of their enemies. Prayer is unsanitary. It’s messy. It’s real-talk.

The 20th-century Russian Orthodox teacher of prayer Anthony Bloom would agree with this. In his book Beginning to Pray, published more than 50 years ago, he wrote (using religious language, of course), “As long as we are truly ourselves, God can be present and do something with us. But the moment we try to be what we are not, there is nothing left to say or have; we become a fictitious personality, an unreal presence, and this unreal presence cannot be approached by God.”

I’ve found the best way of practicing this kind of honesty without bringing God into it is writing in my journal. Especially in the dark. There’s a level of ugly honesty that can flow from my pen when my eyes can hardly make out the words I’m writing on the page. 

But saying those words out loud? That still feels difficult. 

So, I considered advice offered by the Rev. Alba Onofrio, a queer, feminist pastor — and someone who isn’t afraid of speaking the truth. She co-founded the Sexual Liberation Collective and her work focuses on eradicating shame and reclaiming sexual pleasure as a way of connecting to the divine. In an episode of her podcast, Onofrio advises those just beginning to pray to start with words they already know.

Is there a song or quote you already know every word of? A piece of text that your mind goes to when you are stressed or scared? Or is there something you’d want to learn? 

I’ve found myself reciting poems by Marie Howe and Lucille Clifton as a form of prayer. I go someplace where nobody can hear me, and I say them out loud to get the prayer juices flowing. I’ve tried singing, too.

But this still doesn’t solve the question of who is listening. For that, Onofrio’s advice is simple: “Who do you want to talk to?” Is there someone who’s loved you who has passed away and who you wish was here to listen? A grandparent, a favorite teacher or mentor, even a pet? Onofrio suggests thinking about who you need to hear from. “The point of prayer is just connection…a spiritual digging the mud and silt out of the channel that connects us to the erotic, to God, to creation” she says in her podcast. Perhaps this is why so many religions have saints or lesser deities to pray to; it gives you a phonebook of options to connect with. 

Truth be told, I still struggle with this. When the going gets tough, an imaginary person at the other end of my prayers still feels too abstract to be compelling. 

Not to worry, the Rev. Micah Bucey tells me. We don’t need someone to be listening to benefit from prayer. 

Bucey is the author of the The Book of Tiny Prayer and has been posting his very short prayers on social media since the pandemic began. In an interview, he explained that the only necessary ingredients for his prayers are attention, intention, time, and quiet.

“Every morning, I take a moment to pay attention to my body and then the news,” Bucey told me. “And then, I set an intention for what is mine to do today.” He follows a simple framework to set that intention:

• Naming: Identify the problem, issue, or thing in need of prayer.
• Going in: Reflect on what I might do differently for myself.
• Going out: Look outward to consider what I might change together with others.

I find that the first step — naming — is really where this version of prayer has its impact. Honoring the hurt I feel, or the anger, the shame or the sadness, is what unlocks something deeper than my everyday thinking can reach.  

Do I sometimes wish there was some supreme being that might then make it all okay? Sure, that would be nice. But prayer, for me at least, has been much less about peace and stillness. Prayer is struggle. It’s the discipline of discovering what I really feel. It’s being honest enough to write or say it aloud. And it’s trusting that this practice will help me do what is mine to do in a world with so much pain and suffering.

So, dear reader, will you pray with me? 

Mikey has a preferred crochet hook that can be found on Amazon, and you will likely be able to see it on various Amazon platforms worldwide. There are two sets of crochet hooks that he has, and he has several sets. I discovered these hooks in 2019 and switched the preference of the hooks. They […]

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Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. 

The questions I tackle in this column usually come from strangers. But this time, the call is coming from inside the house. 

My partner is due to give birth to our first baby any day now. And as parenthood approaches, she’s started grappling with a nagging question. I decided to tackle her dilemma in my last column before beginning my parental leave because, as you’ll see, it’s not only relevant to parents. It’s relevant to anyone who worries about failing someone or making lasting mistakes, and who wonders how they’d deal with the guilt they might feel afterward. 

We’re about to have our first baby. I’m so excited! But I’m also a bit overwhelmed by all the actions and choices that go into trying to raise a kid who’s happy and healthy. I feel like the modern world’s never-ending desire to optimize everything has crept into parenting. Yet the world is so unpredictable. And there are so many opportunities to mess up and harm a kid in ways both big and small.

The questions swirling through my mind range from “How soon after birth should we take the baby into crowded indoor places, knowing their immune system isn’t fully formed?” to “When should we introduce our kid to sugar?” to “How much unsupervised play time should we let them have as they get older?”

There’s not a lot of definitive data about certain things. And a lot of kid stuff involves situations where the risk of something bad happening is very low, but if it does happen, then it’s really terrible. For example, I’ve heard some parents aren’t letting their kids go to sleepovers anymore because they’re worried someone will touch them inappropriately. The likelihood is that sleepovers are going to be positive experiences for most kids, but there’s always a small chance of something negative happening. Trying to think through these situations feels like a little bit of torture. If I make a certain parenting decision and something bad happens, am I always going to blame myself?

Dear Parent-to-Be,

Can I confess something? When you voiced this question, I actually felt relieved, because the same question has been secretly hammering at me for months. 

I haven’t talked about it much because I thought maybe it was just a function of my own anxiety. But I’m starting to think it’s more common than I realized. So I’m going to share the idea that has helped me the most with it. It doesn’t come from a parenting book or even the mental health field, but from that philosopher I’m always yammering on about, Bernard Williams. 

In 1976, Williams coined the term “moral luck.” It’s a surprising term, because what does morality have to do with luck, right? Surely what matters for my moral status is “what I did” and not “what the world did”! But Williams’s point is that life does seem to present us with situations where our goodness or badness depends a lot on factors that are out of our control — on whether we get lucky or unlucky. 

How can that be?

To illustrate, Williams invites us to imagine a truck driver who accidentally runs over a kid. The driver isn’t drunk or careless or negligent. He’s just driving along when suddenly a child darts out into the road. The kid gets hit and dies.

Clearly, a terrible harm has occurred. But has the driver done anything wrong?

Now let’s imagine another truck driver. He sets out that same day on that same road. But this guy is drunk. He careens down the road carelessly. He could easily hit somebody. But guess what? It just so happens that no kid darts into the road. The driver makes it home without incident.

In this scenario, no one’s been harmed. Yet the driver has obviously done something wrong. But for fortune, he would forever be branded a killer. He just got morally lucky.

What’s useful about this thought experiment is the way it clarifies that harm and wrongdoing are two separate things. We usually clump them together in our minds, because it’s often the case that a harm results from someone doing something wrong. But they can occur separately.

And when they do, how guilty should a person feel? Take the first driver, who wasn’t drunk or careless and yet ended up killing a child. It wouldn’t make rational sense to feel remorse, per se, because it’s not like he voluntarily did a bad thing. It’s more like the bad thing happened to him. At the same time, he certainly won’t feel nothing. He’ll probably feel pained in some nebulous, hard-to-name way. 

Well, Williams came up with a name for that: “agent-regret.” It’s the feeling you might experience if you inadvertently do a bad thing through bad luck.  

What’s the upshot for you, me, and everyone who fears failing or accidentally harming someone they love? 

Your goal is not to control every possible outcome. The reality of luck makes that impossible: You could do everything right and something terrible could still happen. Plus, trying to prevent every possible harm often leads to exhaustion and paralysis — you’ll feel like you can’t make any decision or take any action, because, as you said, everything has some small chance of a bad outcome.

Instead, your goal is to live in line with your values as best you can. The trick here is recognizing that you have values, plural. Sometimes, two values will be in tension with each other — keeping a kid safe from possible harm, say, and allowing a kid unsupervised time to play, grow, and form social bonds with other kids. In those cases, you have to weigh all the different factors and make a decision that seems best on balance.

Could something bad still happen? Yes, and that’s gutting. But remember that even if harm occurs, that doesn’t mean you were guilty of any wrongdoing. It doesn’t mean you deserve blame. It means you deliberated as well as anyone could have expected of you and something terrible happened anyway. That’s not your fault. 

Risk of tragedy is just the cost of living in our world. 

And I do think you should live in it. Fully. Bravely. Without endlessly second-guessing every move you make.

That brings me to the contemporary philosopher Susan Wolf, one of Williams’s best interpreters. In her essay “The Moral of Moral Luck,” she questions what we should take away from his concept.

“Morality is deeply and disquietingly subject to luck,” Williams wrote. But, Wolf asks, is that just the result of our own irrational judgments?

Wolf considers a slightly different truck driver thought experiment. In her version, two equally negligent truck drivers set out on the road. One has good luck: No child darts into the road, so no one gets hurt. But the other has bad luck: A child darts in front of the truck and is instantly killed. 

If humans were purely rational beings, surely we’d judge both drivers just as harshly, even though one killed a kid and the other didn’t. That’s because they’re both equally guilty of wrongdoing. But Wolf observes that, in reality, the driver who strikes the child is probably going to feel a lot more guilt. And members of society are likely to direct a lot more blame at him — after all, he actually killed someone, and they’re going to feel angry about that (while they won’t even know the other guy was ever driving negligently).

It’s tempting to say that this condemnation doesn’t tell us anything real about the unlucky driver’s moral status — it’s just an artifact of human irrationality, and we should toss it out. But Wolf doesn’t want to go that far. She thinks it’d be “positively eerie” if the driver who struck a child saw himself as being in the exact same moral position as the driver who didn’t. He’d be revealing a sense of himself “as one who is, at least in principle, distinct from his effects on the world.” 

Wolf suggests that there’s a better way to see ourselves: 

We are beings who are thoroughly in-the-world, in interaction with others whose movements and thoughts we cannot fully control, and whom we affect and are affected by accidentally as well as intentionally, involuntarily, unwittingly, inescapably, as well as voluntarily and deliberately. 

To form one’s attitudes and judgments of oneself and others solely on the basis of their wills and intentions, to draw sharp lines between what one is responsible for and what is up to the rest of the world, to try in this way, to extricate oneself and others from the messiness, and the irrational contingencies of the world, would be to remove oneself from the only ground on which it is possible for beings like ourselves to meet. 

This is a beautiful passage that describes a beautiful virtue: the ability to recognize that none of us is a separate and independent self. Wolf says this virtue has lived without a name, so she calls it “the nameless virtue.”

But I think it’s only nameless in Western philosophy. In Buddhism, it’s a foundational principle known as “dependent co-arising” or “interbeing.” The idea is that nothing has its own fixed, boundaried essence. Everything is always changing, because everything is subject to different causes and conditions, which act upon it all the time. That includes us human beings. We are constantly remaking each other — through the kind or unkind things we say to each other, through the ideas we expose each other to, through the actions we do or don’t perform. 

We are all each other’s causes and conditions. 

This undercuts the traditional Western understanding of agency. According to that view, I’m a discrete agent and when I decide to take a certain action, that decision starts in my own mind. My intent is what sets a causal chain in motion. Therefore, if I decide to do a bad action and harm results, I’m blameworthy.

But from the Buddhist perspective, we can’t say that my decision “started” with me. The “I” that decides isn’t a self-contained originator of action — it’s a node in a web that runs in every direction. That means the clean line between “what I did” and “what the world did” was always a kind of fiction. All my decisions have been conditioned by everything and everyone that ever influenced me in life. Which means blame, in the clean Western sense, doesn’t really hold up.

Williams found moral luck disquieting because it seemed to undermine the self-originating agent at the heart of Western ethics. But in the Buddhist view, there was never such an agent. That means that when something bad happens, it’s appropriate to recognize that you’re part of the causal web that yielded harm — but not to blame yourself as an individual.

You asked me: “If I make a certain parenting decision and something bad happens, am I always going to blame myself?”

No, I don’t think you always will. Although you’ll probably feel pained if some decision of yours leads to harm, eventually, your pain will not take the form of “I’m a terrible person.” It’ll take the form of “I was doing the best I could with the information and awareness I had at the time — with the conditions I was given. I wish that the conditions could have been different.” 

We’re all so used to the Western understanding of agency that our brains default to it in situations of crisis or panic, making us prone to self-blame. But I’ll be there to remind you of this other understanding. And I feel lucky knowing you’ll do the same for me.  

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Speaking of the world being so unpredictable…I’m excitedly digging into Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI, by the philosopher Carissa Véliz. She argues that predictions are often power plays in disguise.
  
• On a new episode of the podcast Philosophy Bites, a professor of Buddhist philosophy tackles the question: Without an enduring self, can there be moral responsibility?
  
• I’m loving the illustrated book Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts. It shows just how normal it is for new parents to have an inner monologue that runs something like: “What if I drop him? What if I snap and hurt my baby? Mothering is so hard. I don’t know if I really want to do this anymore. Gosh, I’m so terrible for thinking that!”

The art of reading a crochet diagram is a method I prefer over reading written words. It's like teaching yourself hieroglyphics but for crochet. The symbols mean something and are a language all their own. For myself, my first crochet book, when I was fourteen, had written words and diagrams for each pattern. Standard Crochet […]

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The internet is full of ambitious people, particularly when it comes to home improvement. You will find people installing an entire kitchen themselves, buying and renovating an abandoned house, or even digging a series of tunnels under their home. And even renters are getting in on the DIY game.

Take Imani Keal: The Washington, DC-based influencer has transformed just about every corner of her apartment almost entirely by herself. “I have painted every room — I installed new peel and stick floor tiles in the kitchen; I did most of the light fixtures,” she told Vox. “For most of the things in here, if it is required to be built, I built it. I do everything.”

Some of those changes happened by necessity — like her kitchen cabinets. As she says, “There was a colony of mice living in the wall behind my kitchen. And because there was a little teeny tiny hole, they were able to come through there and play hopscotch in my kitchen and I wasn’t having that anymore.” She ended up renovating her entire kitchen.

For all of that work, though, Keal is still only renting her apartment. So how do you decide how much to invest in your living space? And when should you leave a home improvement project to the experts? We discuss that and more on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Keal, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

How is your landlord cool with this?

Let me be very clear. They weren’t, but if there is a significant mice problem and you are not addressing it, we have to go forward. It became a situation where they said, “We’ll give you a credit to fix the problem and then you can fix it yourself.” And I said, fine. They rebuilt the floors and rebuilt the wall. Then I came in and purchased the cabinetry, painted it, purchased the fridge, put everything back on the wall, and made it look how it looks today.

You’ve invested a good amount of your own money into your apartment. How much?

Over three years — and a lot of this is stuff that I will take with me — maybe $30,000 or $35,000.

Some people are going to hear that and be shocked. What do you say to them about why you’re pouring so much investment into a thing you don’t own?

Number one, I live here and I think that I deserve to have a beautiful space to live in. I’m not going to sit in something that’s ugly just because other people would be upset about how I spend my money. 

Number two, I was able to turn this into a career. I have made significantly more money by doing all of these things than I have spent on the apartment. 

And number three, some people have hobbies where they will go out and tinker with a car. Some people want to go to a run club. Some people want to play pickleball. I want to learn how to use a circular saw and build furniture in my apartment. This is my hobby.

What’s the hardest task you’ve done?

Plumbing. To me, the potential for damage that can come from water is a lot greater than other things.Years ago, when I was doing a DIY project at my mother’s house, I accidentally turned the stop valve and the water just was shooting out. It was dripping down the chandelier in her living room and she had to replace all the hardwood floor.

How skilled were you when you first started doing DIY projects? Was this just something you always had in your skill bank?

No. In fact, it’s so funny. My sister was really known as the kid that would come and put an Ikea thing together. Then as I got older, I wanted a certain look and I could not find it. When the pandemic happened I was working at two different restaurants and I had a full-time job. I got laid off from my two restaurant jobs and then hours got cut for the main job that I was working. 

I went from being out a lot to being in the house, and there were so many things that I wanted that I couldn’t afford, that I couldn’t just go to the store to buy because nobody was open. Ace Hardware was an essential business, so I would spend a lot of time going to Ace Hardware because that was the only place you could go. 

You poured all this time and money into an apartment, but on the way out, you’re going to have to undo so much of it. How do you think about that? How does that feel?

It feels fine, because we all know people who get so excited about buying a house, then they buy the house and the house is hideous. They keep the same teeny tiny Ikea couch. They never get a bigger rug. They never move in. Even after spending all of this money, you are still not living in your home to the fullest so that you can make sure that your home will be nice for the person that you might sell it to in 25 years.

I have every intention of living the life that I was granted to the fullest. I’m going to do everything that I want, everything that is within my means and is possible for me to have a good life. And if that means that I have to spend a couple of days after five years of enjoying the same apartment, taking the wallpaper down, okay, sure. Whatever. 

A lot of things that I put up here can very easily be taken apart. I built this entertainment system, but I built it in five pieces that can easily be taken apart and walked out of this apartment and then moved into wherever I moved next.

My biggest issue with the term junk drawer is the word junk. If something truly has no purpose, why are we storing it in valuable space in our kitchen, mudroom, or office? Now don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying everything in your junk drawer needs to be high quality or particularly valuable. What it does need to do, however, is serve a purpose.

When organizing any space in your home—from your fridge to your closet—every item should earn its keep. If you don’t wear those black pumps, donate them. If you keep buying that bag of spinach but never finish it, it might be time to re-evaluate. The items in your junk drawer should follow the same rule.

Once you stop thinking of it as a catch-all space and start thinking of it as a utility drawer with a purpose, it becomes much easier to keep organized. Below is my step-by-step system for organizing a junk drawer so it actually stays that way.

Rachel Rosenthal

Rachel Rosenthal is an organizing expert and founder of Rachel and Company, a Washington, DC-based professional organizing firm. Since 2007, Rachel’s firm has worked with 3000+ clients and teamed up with prominent brands, including West Elm, Pottery Barn, The Container Store, and Four Seasons. Rachel’s expertise has been featured in 100+ publications, including Real Simple, Martha Stewart, House Beautiful, The Rachael Ray Show, and local NBC, ABC, and Fox morning shows. Rooted in the belief that organization can be achieved by all, Rachel emphasizes solutions that are easy to use and enhance a home’s existing aesthetic.

How to Organize a Junk Drawer (Quick Steps)

If you want the quick version, here’s the simple system I use:

1. Empty the drawer completely
2. Declutter broken or unused items
3. Relocate items that belong elsewhere
4. Create categories for what remains
5. Add drawer organizers or dividers
6. Return items thoughtfully—and prep them for use

Now let’s break down each step.

Why Junk Drawers Get Out of Control

The biggest problem with a junk drawer is the catch-all mentality. We’ve been conditioned to toss items we don’t know what to do with into one drawer and deal with them later. That’s how you end up with drawers bursting at the seams and never being able to find the battery you know you have, or the matchbook you need when the power goes out.

Just like every other space in your home, your junk drawer should contain intentional categories. When every item has a place, the drawer becomes useful instead of chaotic. Changing your mindset from “junk drawer” to a drawer that holds categorized items with purpose is the first step in organizing it.

Step-by-Step Guide to Organizing a Junk Drawer

Step 1: Empty the Junk Drawer Completely

Yes, everything. I know the thought of it can make most of us wince, but the first step to organizing your junk drawer is to dump it all out. It’s the only way to see exactly what you’re working with. Once the drawer is empty, wipe it down so you’re starting with a clean slate.

Step 2: Declutter and Remove Broken Items

Next, declutter the items you pulled out of the drawer. Some things will be obvious—like tossing trash or recycling old receipts. But don’t stop there. Write with each pen to make sure it works. Test batteries. Turn on flashlights. Check tape rolls. You might be surprised how many items in a junk drawer are actually broken or unusable. Think through which items you truly need in your home and which ones can be discarded or donated.

Step 3: Relocate Items That Belong Elsewhere

After decluttering, look at what remains and decide whether it actually belongs in this drawer.

For example:

• Does your screwdriver need to live in the kitchen, or should it go in the garage or toolbox?
• Is that ruler better suited for the kids’ homework area?
• Should extra charging cables live in an office drawer instead?

Relocating items helps prevent your junk drawer from becoming a storage space for things that belong elsewhere.

Step 4: Create Categories for What’s Left

Once you’ve decluttered and relocated items, you’ll be left with the things that truly belong in the drawer. Now it’s time to create categories.

For example:

• Scissors
• Tape
• Batteries
• Pens and pencils
• Rubber bands
• Small tools
• Chargers

Grouping items into categories makes it much easier to find what you need—and maintain the system over time.

Step 5: Add Drawer Organizers or Dividers

Once you’ve identified your categories, measure your drawer so you can add organizers that fit. Some type of bins or drawer dividers is essential for junk drawer organization. Because these drawers often contain multiple categories, organizers prevent everything from sliding together into one big pile.

Measure the width, depth, and height of the drawer, then find organizers that fit your space and categories. Adjustable dividers, small bins, or modular trays all work well. Think of it like playing a little Tetris until everything fits perfectly.

Step 6: Put Everything Back (and Prep It for Use)

Now comes the satisfying part—putting everything back. Place each category into its designated organizer or section. But before you close the drawer, take it one step further.

This step will be unique to your junk drawer, but consider sharpening pencils, folding the end of the tape over so it’s easy to grab, refilling a lighter, or pairing batteries by size. These small finishing touches make a big difference. Now everything in your junk drawer is ready to be used at a moment’s notice.

What Should Actually Go in a Junk Drawer?

A well-organized junk drawer typically holds small, frequently used household items that don’t have another obvious home.

Some common items include:

• Batteries
• Scissors
• Tape
• Rubber bands
• Pens and pencils
• Flashlight
• Matches or lighters
• Phone chargers
• Small tools like a screwdriver

The key is that every item serves a purpose and belongs to a category within the drawer.

Common Junk Drawer Organization Mistakes

If your junk drawer never seems to stay organized, one of these habits might be the reason.

Treating it like a catch-all.
A junk drawer should not be where random items go to disappear.

Keeping broken items.
Dead batteries, dried-out pens, and tangled cords create clutter quickly.

Not using drawer dividers.
Without organizers, everything slides into one chaotic pile.

Mixing too many categories.
Limiting the drawer to a few simple categories helps keep it functional.

Never editing the drawer.
A quick reset every few months keeps clutter from building up again.

How to Keep Your Junk Drawer Organized

Once your drawer is organized, a little maintenance will go a long way toward keeping it that way. A quick five-minute reset once a month can help prevent clutter from building up—use that time to toss broken items, test pens, or remove anything that’s found its way into the drawer without a real purpose. Try to return items to their designated sections after using them so categories stay intact, and be mindful about what you add back in. If something doesn’t serve a clear purpose, it likely doesn’t need to live there.

A junk drawer doesn’t need to be perfect, but with a simple system in place, it can stay functional, tidy, and easy to use.

Organize Your Junk Drawer With the Help of These Hard-Working Products

Once your drawer is decluttered and categorized, the right organizers make all the difference. Drawer dividers, small bins, and modular trays keep items from shifting around and turning back into one big pile.

The right tools help ensure that every item in your drawer has a home—and stays there.

Junk Drawer Organizers

Neat Method

Acacia Expandable Drawer insert

$40 at Lulu and Georgia

Luxe Acrylic

Luxe Acrylic Drawer Organizer Set

$30 at The Container Store

Line Arc Design

Hand-Painted Metal Nesting Trays

$45 at Etsy

Dial

Multi-Battery Storage Box

$13 at The Container Store

Wrap It

Wrap-It Cinch Straps Set of 4

$9 at The Container Store

Rowan

Acacia Stacking Drawer Organizer

Starting at $5 at The Container Store

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This post was last updated on March 22, 2026, to include new insights.

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