The most important thing everyone needs to know is that the only thing that should measure your worth as a person is how you treat other living beings. I start with this because too often the failure to keep one’s house perfectly clean and minimally decorated is used as a whip – by ourselves and others. I don’t care how you keep your house. I care that you treat yourself and others with respect and compassion.
Second, Marie Kondo is amazing and you should read her book, no matter your interest in decluttering. Her interest in cleaning and organizing started when she was very young, and she practiced on her family and schoolmates whether they wanted her to or not. I kept picturing her as an adorable Louise Belcher, doing what was best for those around her, probably right, but definitely pissing everyone off. She is ruthlessly joyful and unsentimental. Her rejection of nostalgia and complete lack of sympathy for excuses to keep things delighted me. Also, her assessment of storage experts is dead on.
Storage experts are hoarders.
I listened to the audio version read by the same woman who read Unfuck Your Habitat, Emily Woo Zeller. I was surprised by how much I agreed with the KonMari method, while at the same time I see issues with it.
My philosophy is that the way you live in your home should work for you and should make you feel comfortable and comforted. As long as you have not created an unsafe/unhealthy environment for yourself or those who live with you, you’re fine. I love this quote from the twitterfeed of @physicistlisa so much, I made it into a meme.
I do think that there is value in considering how other people deal with their clutter and messes. Other perspectives are of value, but your house should always be the place you feel safe and supported, not the place where you judge yourself by other people’s standards.
From the moment you start tidying, you will be compelled to reset your life. As a result, your life will start to change. That’s why the task of putting your house in order should be done quickly. It allows you to confront the issues that are really important. Tidying is just a tool, not the final destination. The true goal should be to establish the lifestyle you want most once your house has been put in order.
If you only watch the Netflix series, you miss some key elements to the KonMari method. Most importantly, it’s not a book about being tidy, or cleaning, or developing good habits. It’s a radical reimagining of your life and the stuff with which you surround yourself. Before they begin discarding possessions, she asks her clients to visualize concretely what they want out of the process, and how they see their life after. And then she asks them to ask themselves why they want that vision. After that she asks them to follow up those answers with more “why?”s. It’s a much deeper and more complicated thing than wanting a better organized space. On the show, it appears that the transformations happen over a week, in the book, Kondo talks about the importance of moving quickly, but by quickly she means 6 months.
The question of what you want to own is actually the question of how you want to live your life
A lot has been said about Kondo’s insistence that the things you keep “spark joy.” Out of context it sounds facile. In the context of the book, it is deeply personal and individual. First she asks you to imagine what you want your life to be, and then she asks you to choose from the items you have the things that make you feel happy.
Imagine what it would be like to have a bookshelf filled only with books that you really love. Isn’t that image spellbinding? For someone who loves books, what greater happiness could there be?
The “spark joy” requirement as yardstick is revolutionary because it relies entirely on your internal compass. It eschews practicality and the judgement of others. Marie Kondo may not think I need 17 baking books, but if I pick up each one and tell her it brings me joy, she will agree that I need to keep all 17 of those baking books. It is reasonable to her that someone might have a wall of baking books and only one pair of shoes.
We should be choosing what we want to keep, not what we want to get rid of.
When you have an intentional relationship with your belongings and your surroundings, you are exerting control over your life and taking responsibility. Because it centers on what sparks joy for you, you can only take responsibility for your stuff and your life. You cannot take charge of another’s possessions. You cannot slide your possessions over to someone else. This idea that each person must be responsible for their own stuff goes directly against any ideas that a wife/mother should be responsible for everyone’s stuff. I’m not sure Marie Kondo would necessarily agree that she is challenging gender roles, but she is, in fact, challenging gender roles.
The process of assessing how you feel about the things you own, identifying those that have fulfilled their purpose, expressing your gratitude, and bidding them farewell, is really about examining your inner self, a rite of passage to a new life.
Marie Kondo promises that if you follow her method, your life will be changed forever, with no backsliding. I believe her, and I think if you are interested in radically transforming your life in this way you should follow her plan exactly. As she explains it, it makes complete sense. That said, there are details that I have issues with, and some of those issues are because of our different cultural perspectives. My first issue is basically what I said at the top and what I always say about life changing ways of cleaning and tidying – nothing works for everyone and ultimately you have to be who you are. Kondo says several times that if you follow her directions you will never be cluttered again, but she’s looking at a self-selecting population. There is a certain economic privilege in being able to get rid of everything you don’t love with the attitude that you can replace what you need later when you need it. As an actual poor person, I don’t do that because I may not have the money to buy what I need later. I have a lot of things that are fine, but don’t necessarily spark joy, because they are the things that were available when I had the money to buy a thing I needed. For me, this is fine. I have a life that I am mostly happy with and I guarantee that KonMariing my house isn’t going to fix my economic problems. However, it was pointed out to me that the economics of storing unneeded items is different in Japan than in the United States.
Marie Kondo also works form a tradition informed by Shinto. I know only what the googles tell me about Shinto, so I can only say that coming from a different culture, I am less likely to be concerned about the comfort of my inanimate possessions. She also makes a number of comments about femininity, and why wearing sweatpants in the home is a bad idea. I think these are words of wisdom you can leave aside. I don’t know enough about Japanese culture to understand where Marie Kondo is coming from.
There’s a lot of interesting ideas in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I’m glad I finally read it. If you found the show interesting, or find yourself in a stable rut and want to shake up your life, you should give it a read. I found it deeper and more interesting than I suspected.