Marie Kondo was never coming for your stuff
Marie Kondo was never coming for your stuff
I don’t know when I decided that I would ride or die for Marie Kondo or where that feeling comes from, but it runs deep. I cannot sleep at night knowing that misinterpretations of her aims, ideas, and intentions circulate freely through this irredeemable world.
For anyone not familiar with the woman or her protocol—The KonMari Method—Kondo is a Japanese tidying expert with several bestselling books and a hit Netflix series. She’s perhaps most known for the idea that all of our possessions should “spark joy” when we see and touch them. You can use the “spark joy” test to decide what items to keep or give/throw away when you’re cleaning, organizing, moving, etc.
Amongst my friends, I’m known for my love of organizing and what appears to be a ruthless attitude to decluttering. My preferred aesthetic is on the minimalist side, although I’m not a true minimalist. I just prefer a lack of clutter and will either organize it to within an inch of its life, or get rid of the offending items. Of course the ultra-neat and systematically-organized Marie Kondo appeals to a person like me.
Her KonMari method offers a template for how, and in what order, to organize your home. It includes clothing, books, sentimental items, paperwork, and finally, everything else. In the Netflix series, we get to see Marie herself visit people’s homes and guide them through the sorting and re-organizing process. Building on the huge success of her first book, Kondo also has a guide to getting organized at work which tackles everything from emails to how to “edit” parts of your job that don’t spark joy.
It all sounds pretty vanilla, doesn’t it? Yet another entry into the library of advice books on getting your stuff in order. One would think this sub-genre of self improvement literature is among the least controversial. Somehow, though, certain elements of Kondo’s technique (and misinterpretations of her advice) have raised a rabid response and sparked intense debate.
Despite my ride or die feelings toward Kondo, it’s funny to me that people get upset over a home organizer’s advice, one way or the other. She’s not telling you what medical treatments to have or where to invest your life savings. There should be nothing easier to ignore than the incredibly low-stakes world of tidying up advice, especially when there are in fact people giving out life-or-death information (or misinformation, as the case may be).
Nonetheless, something hits a collective nerve. The Internet lost its mind when her show revealed that her personal ideal number of books to have at home is 30. You would think she’d marshaled Nazis to collect and burn people’s beloved Nora Roberts paperbacks. I wonder if those same people are just as upset over the actual regimes (Florida, Texas) pulling books off shelves right now? But I digress.
A few weeks ago, Kondo mentioned that her home is a little messier now that she has three very young children, and she’s okay with it. Cue another round of overwrought responses. It’s a curiously similar reaction to when a politician advocates for or puts in place a particular policy or rule, and then changes their mind, reverses it, or reveals that they don’t follow the rule. Except that Marie Kondo has never had the power to “make” anyone do anything. Still, somehow people act as though she forced them to tri-fold all their clothes at great cost while she lounged among piles of rumpled laundry, secretly laughing at us.
I do, of course, have an inkling about the source of at least some of this reaction. Cleanliness and tidiness are not value-neutral and they’re imbued with many layers of meaning that touch on gender, class, and race. The mom who experiences Kondo’s tips as part of the overwhelming pressure to keep a perfect, Instagram-ready home is understandably frustrated. As Kathryn Jezer-Morton puts it, women “carry the moral weight of cleanliness” in the home and are judged harshly if they don’t live up to a high ideal. For white, middle-class moms, mess is a black mark against your social status. For low-income women and women of colour, mess might mean a visit from social services and the possibility of losing your kids.
The explosion of malice toward Kondo, especially over 30BookGate, was also, as Muqing Zhang argued, not-so-subtle racism. Zhang writes:
“In nearly every major publication, white people have repeatedly grabbed at the mic and been given the platform to attack and be the authority on Kondo, a Japanese woman and woman of color. Ultimately, white people's initially voracious viral consumption of and then sudden vilification of Kondo exemplifies the duality of the tropes projected onto Asian women — we are either a fetishized exotic experience or embodiment of a yellow peril threat. Once Kondo was no longer an exoticism's site of pleasure and exploitation for white people to experience their orientalist fantasies, she became the other orientalist trope — the yellow peril threat to white people's insecurity over their destructive capitalist consumption.”
A humane approach to things
One of the things that’s most curious to me about the backlash to Marie Kondo is the notion that she has extreme, hard core, ruthless attitudes to mess and clutter. In reality, I don’t even think her methods rise to the level of “tough love” that you typically see in shows about decluttering. Rather, she’s the gentlest version of a home organizer I’ve ever come across.
Kondo’s approach is a stark contrast to the way things are characterized in most versions of decluttering phase of home organization. In the latter, possessions are seen as junk, mess, garbage, hoarding, baggage, remnants of an old life, pitiful sentimentality, barriers to a new life. But Kondo sees each item as special and holding the potential for joy. Nothing is inherently “junk” or unnecessary. Every single thing in your home deserves its own moment of consideration.
That moment is when you tap into the feeling (or lack of feeling) you have when you touch each item. This process is important to Kondo. You have to really see and touch everything, so all the clothes have to come out of the closet and drawers, and every book comes off the shelf. There’s no tossing a whole pile of things at once. You listen to each thing, just for a second or two, but you actually have to listen.
It’s a very delicate, emotional process. It’s not cold and calculating, as some have portrayed it, or assumed it to be, based on their limited understanding. Unlike other decluttering methods, which ask you to assess how often you wear or use something, whether it works, whether you have space for it, or whether you need it, Marie Kondo just asks how it makes you feel. That’s the only criterion you need to make your decision.
With books, there’s an added step. Kondo suggests that the dormant energy of a book stuck on a shelf needs to be released before you decide to keep it or give it away. You give each book a sharp tap or two to wake it up before you connect with how it makes you feel. In Kondo’s philosophy, things aren’t inanimate. They have a “life” of their own.
Things that no longer have an active use, but spark joy, have their own category in the KonMari method: sentimental objects. Again making space for the emotional life of things, Kondo suggests finding a place of honour or care for such pieces. This might mean putting them on display, or simply storing them carefully in good quality boxes so that they can easily be accessed and treasured.
An important part of the process happens when you decide to let something go. Kondo encourages you to say “thank you” to the garment or item before placing it in a box or a bag, recognizing its service to you and the fact that maybe at one time, it did bring you joy, even if it no longer does so.
As a person who can be somewhat ruthless when it comes to clearing out stuff, Kondo’s philosophy made me reconsider my relationship to my possessions. I still like decluttering, but I give thanks to any item on its way out. For the things that I keep, Kondo’s teachings remind me to treat them with care. Take clothing, for example. People have mocked the seemingly fussy way she folds and stacks everything from t-shirts to socks. But it’s not just about making a drawer look nice on social media. It’s a way of smoothing the wrinkles out of the fabric. The upright stacks mean nothing is crushed. Each item can be seen and therefore, worn.
As you touch and fold and carefully hang clothing, Kondo says, you’re showing care and respect for it. I think of this whenever I put away my laundry. I make sure the shirts are even on the hanger. I don’t let things stretch out. It takes a few extra seconds but it prolongs the life and quality of each garment.
Kondo’s respect for things extends to the house itself. In the Netflix series, we see Kondo asking the people she’s meeting if she can take a moment to greet their home. Kneeling on the floor, she whispers some words in Japanese, while the American hosts look on in awe. Establishing this connection with the home she’s about to get to know very intimately is a key piece of the process.
Watching Kondo perform this ritual gave me a different perspective on my own home. As an old house with a leaky basement, it was often a source of frustration and anxiety for me. Despite its problems, though, it was trying to be a good home. It was warm (if not 100% dry), attractive, and had space for everything I needed. Instead of cursing my house, now I regularly offer it thanks. Oh, and I fixed the leaky basement, too. You’re welcome, house!
Value what you have
Marie Kondo doesn’t tell people they need to have less stuff. Rather, her advice is all about making sure you value the things that you own. Sometimes this means changing its location in the home, storing it properly, repairing it, using it more, using it less, displaying it, caring for it better, or passing it on to someone else in your household.
Her process is much more meditative and contemplative than other organizers, who tend to favour a fast and furious approach to deciding what to keep and what to toss. This also runs counter to the ethos of consumer capitalism, with its “easy come, easy go” attitude to disposable things. Perhaps asking people to spend a moment considering their relationship to those things is also triggering for some folks.
Marie Kondo may not be for everyone, and that’s fine. As I said, no one’s under any obligation to listen to home organizers. What’s worth thinking about is what makes it so easy for people to get angry at Kondo and not hundreds of other eager tidiers with shiny social media profiles.
I wish Kondo well in this messier phase of her life, even though I suspect that what passes for mess in her home would still feel like an oasis of calm to the rest of us.
Next self improvement book on my list: How to Make Good Things Happen: Know Your Brain, Enhance Your Life, by Marian Rojas Estapé.
What I’m watching: The 6th season of Outlander, which, to be honest, I’m almost hate-watching at this point. I miss the grimy days of the Jacobite rebellion. Ah well!
Something that made me righteously annoyed: Time’s piece on The Secret Tax on Women’s Time, of which the pressure to keep a tidy home could be considered a part:
“There is also an unaddressed pink tax on women’s time: A global epidemic of women lacking time to conduct the activities of their everyday lives that men simply do not experience.”