OMG you are so organized!
That’s what a French colleague said a few years ago, when she saw my Oyster Card. We were doing a project for a client in London, so occassionally we traveled there and we always used the underground to get around. The first thing we would do when we arrived in London was to check the balance on our Oyster Cards and top them up if needed.
Except for me. I knew my card had enough balance for a few days, simply by looking at it. How? Well, on our previous visit to London, I knew I would want to know my balance the next time. So right after our last checkout, I had written the remaining balance on a post-it note (which I always carried around in my bag), torn the written part off the note and put it on my card like a sticker. When my colleague saw that, she was amazed.
It made me wonder: being this organized, is it my personality? Is it because I’m a designer? Or is it because I’m Dutch? Because being organized is very much part of our culture. We love it when things are structured and planned. I think The Netherlands might be the world’s most organized country. You could even say: the world’s most designed country. We have shaped every square inch of our little country to fit a certain purpose and plan. If The Netherlands were a house, it would be a tiny house: if you live in it, you are more or less forced to be very organized.
Just look at our roads, our flower fields, our (non-metaphorical) houses. Many of us, including myself, live in rijtjeshuizen: endless rows of almost identical houses sitting next to each other. It might not be the most attractive way to build homes, but it sure is efficient! It’s not just the exteriors that look alike, it’s also the interiors. If you browse through Funda.nl, our most popular site for finding a house to buy or rent, you will notice that most interiors have pretty much the same floor plan, the same layout and the same kind of furniture. You will also see this if you watch our home-makeover TV shows: every home in every episode looks alike, with only minor variations. Of course the residents are always amazed at their new interior, but if you’ve seen dozens (hundreds?) of these episodes like me, you can’t help but see a pattern of uniformity and predictability.
Not surprisingly, our unofficial national motto is “Just act normal, that’s crazy enough already”. Being this organized, structured and planned has a lot of benefits of course. Reliable infrastructure, good healthcare, appointments always starting on time. But all this organization is also really boring, and can be suffocating even. Where is the true creativity and spontaneity? Thinking back of my colleague, perhaps we should be more like the French, with their motto: “Laissez faire”. Or as we would say in Dutch: “laat maar gaan”.