From my testing yesterday and today, the RAM usage spikes  don't appear to be caused by Malwarebytes and Windows Security trying to hook into each other.

Does your network lag as well?  If so you are probably getting flooded with nasty packets.  Whatever you do, make sure your computer is venting heat correctly so it doesn't overheat.

Yeah, you get about a year and it's time for an OS install anyway.

@31
I mean, no, that's not true.  *if* you take care of it you can last a lot longer.  I've got a tower that hasn't reinstalled in 2 years (and that reinstall was a motherboard going bad) and a massively underpowered laptop that's fine after 4.

But this does mean not installing a ton of stuff you don't need, going out of your way to never force shutdown, etc etc etc.

@32
No, windows updates are incremental.  They also leave all other installed software in place, including any potential partial uninstalls and so on.

Meh fuck that, it just gets jenky and slow and shitty.

I have clean installed Windows many times, and this hasn't been a problem with Windows 10.  7, yeah, to some extent. This is much more a function of how much stuff you decide to install.  Get a few bad uninstallers that leave a service around or something and, well...  Just only putting what you need on the computer rather than anything that happens to interest you at the time and not playing with advanced settings goes a long way.

Here's an example. After I had opened two word documents that I  was working out of, My physical RAM was at around 20%. After an hour of switching back and forth between the documents as I completed homework, my RAM sat at about 95% usage. When I closed out word, my RAM looked like this:

Physical: 29.81 GB of 31.73 GB used (93.9%). Virtual: 64.90 GB of 74.16 GB used (87.5%).

even when I add processes up, I don't see anything in Task Manager that could be taking 95% of 32 GB of RAM, and I certainly don't see anything that would cause my virtual RAM to be holding at 65 GB. I've checked my antivirus software, I've scanned for malware, I've looked into the services running, I've ensured that fast startup is off, I've checked Windows Update, and I've checked my network. I've held off on disabling sysmain because I don't want to go pulling the plug on random Windows services unless I have a good reason to do so, and sysmain doesn't appear to be causing my problems according to Task Manager. Is this an accurate assessment? Would sysmain show up in Task Manager? Is there anything else that you can suggest short of reinstalling Windows completely?

I think it may be a dell XPS or dell computer specific issue.
I have a dell XPS 13 9300 and have the exact same problem, it's just I have 16GB ram.
My gaming laptop doesn't do it, at idle I'm at 9% of 32GB usage give or take, but with my XPS I'm at 22% when I first boot, and I have more or less the same programs running as you do.
I do notice that when you finish doing things, it doesn't seem to free up ram I.E. if I keep restarting a program, the usage will gradually rise without coming down.
As an earlier poster mentioned, it could be if you have a web browser open for a long period of time.
I was on a site for a couple of hours yesterday, and although I only had 1 browser tab open, by the time I was finished with it my usage was at an unexplainable 90% give or take.
I put it to sleep thinking it might right itself if I left it for a bit, and the next time I came to use it the thing wouldn't even respond to my keyboard presses because it mustn't have had any memory to play with.

Huh. Sounds like a memory leak to me.

This does involve getting a copy of windows through microsoft using the media creation tool, burning it to a stick, wiping your partition on boot into the PE, and installing. Usually it repartitions itself, but in some instances, I have needed to clean the partition using diskpart which you can access through the command prompt using the SHIFT+F10 shortcut.

Unfortunately just reinstalling windows doesn't help.
I downgraded my windows from 1909 to 1709 on my XPS so windows could download everything necessary from scratch, but the problem still persists, and I don't know how to independently wipe the windows partition completely clean and manually reinstall it because it can't be done without assistance.
Dell computers have a few long standing bugs that haven't even been looked at, I know it's a bit OT but I have this issue where my XPS will keep running when I put it in sleep mode and get hot for no reason, forcing me to use hibernate which isn't the best alternative. Either that or disable connected standby in the registry which fixes you the problem in exchange for black screening your display.
I've seen topics all over the place with said issues and they don't seem to get solved, shame on you dell!!!

If this continues, I'm not going to have much of a choice; I'll have to reinstall. If I do reinstall, though, I'm worried that the problem will then become audio drivers. I'm not sure if this is applicable for clean installs, however I did uninstall the Realtek Audio Drivers a while back and found that audio devices would not switch unless I rebooted my machine. I don't want to go through that every time I switch audio devices, but I will if it means I get a machine that isn't going to have memory problems all over the place. Has anyone had experience like this? If so, do you have any recommendations?