You have too much stuff. A lot of it is dumb. You’re being lazy about it. Hey, if you don’t want to get rid of it, pile it higher, crowd it in, live your monster life. But if you do de-clutter, it’s probably a good thing. Can we just agree on that? Because this is a fact: De-cluttering is an unassailably good idea.
Before we get into why, let me just say I have no stake in you de-cluttering your life! I couldn’t give any fewer fucks than there are possible to not give about whether you still have your prom dress, your favorite jeans from sophomore year, or six free book fair tote bags. My shit isn’t even in order! I’m sitting across the room from a bookshelf full of pointless, often embarrassing half-read books, just up a stretch from a utility drawer that has broken from the weight of the sheer volume of old lighters, half-used batteries, and cat-hair-covered Stitch Witchery rolls from a cat I had six years ago. I’m round the corner from boxes of old papers from college, which include a copy of an Utne Reader from 1999 I thought was cool once. Pretty sure I still have the mesh underwear in my drawer I wore after giving birth in 2010, too. Shall I stop?
But I don’t have to de-clutter my life to see as plain as the pile of cheap broken sunglasses in a bowl by the door (art?) that there is a better life out there with about half as much of this shit in it, and that anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is just selling you cynicism, plain and simple. Clutter is bad. You’re bad. We are all bad. We should feel bad and get rid of a lot of our shit. People who don’t want to deal with their stuff are people who don’t want to deal with their Other Stuff. You know, their feelings.
And no, I’m not talking about minimalism. You should just probably cut the amount of stuff you have in half, you don’t have to buy a gleaming new Mac desktop and single vase of orange flowers to prove anything afterward. Here’s what this is about: Recently Marie Kondo, a 30-year-old tidying freak whose book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, was recently translated from Japanese into English and sold stateside, has entered the American consciousness and gone over like gangbusters. She brings a simple, streamlined, wildly popular idea with her—basically, that you need to get rid of some of your stuff, that there’s a better way to do it (her way), and that the result is real-life magic.
I was skeptical, too. I hate new ideas, especially if they are popular. First, one friend told me about how good the book was and how satisfying it was to roll her underwear into tiny little tubes so tight they looked retail ready. Soon another friend, and another, and another, mentioned how satisfying tidying in this way could be, how good it felt, how addictive it was. They are all female. All are intelligent, reasonable people who I would not characterize as trend-susceptible as a general rule, nor are they hoarders. They just have too much stuff and don’t know how to get rid of it all.
I saw numerous features on Kondo’s method, “KonMari,” also called “Kondoing,” but before I even got around to reading the book, the backlash had started. Over at New York magazine, Maureen O’Connor wrote a begrudgingly appreciative/critical piece called “De-Cluttering is the New Juice Cleanse (and Equally Annoying).” In it, she lobbed the first grenade when she explained that Kondo and her “Konverts” were driving the author insane. O’Connor writes:
…since the English translation of Tidying Up hit shelves last fall, there has been no way to avoid the exuberant exhortations of Kondo acolytes at every brunch, happy hour, and dinner party; on Twitter, Instagram, and your college roommate’s Facebook wall; at baby showers, bridal showers, and Mother’s Day teas. The “KonMari method” for cleanliness is the new juice fast, the new SoulCycle, the new organic food. Which is to say: It is a method for self-improvement that inspires cultlike evangelism — and passive-aggressive social warfare masquerading as cultlike evangelism. Once upon a time, your cruelest frenemies would watch you snacking on Tostitos, then announce how much weight they lost by giving up gluten. Now, they arch an eyebrow as you dig through the junk at the bottom of your purse, and pointedly ask whether you read that amazing book, the one about tidiness?
She concedes that Kondo-ites have good intentions, that anti-messiness is “both laudable and necessary,” and positions the whole trend in the midst of a recovering economy wherein having less and general neatness have measurable benefits, including weight loss. O’Connor adds:
Correlating health with cleanliness plays into a broader tendency to associate material excess with addiction. It’s no coincidence that Hoarders and Intervention started on the same TV network. Meanwhile, five months after Tidying Up arrived Stateside, American cleaning guru Peter Walsh released his latest self-help guide: Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight: The Six-Week Total-Life Slim Down. So it’s no surprise that the same social forces that animate healthy-living movements — and backlashes against them — are now animating the way we talk about clutter.
And yet, she just can’t get into it. It’s too precious; she is admittedly stubborn. But I must note here that there is no real critique of the method other than that it’s annoying. That is a perfectly valid critique, far weightier than many of my own of equally good endeavors, I might add, but it misses the point. O’Connor’s criticism mainly includes an eye-roll at the fact that Kondo asks tidiers to consider whether each item in their life “sparks joy” or not. Other critiques poke fun at this standout part of the book also, arguing that items should be able to be perfectly “useful” rather than joyful, and that the definition of useful should be very, very elastic and, by the way, should include being “useless.”
In a recent op-ed in the New York Times called “Let’s Celebrate the Art of Clutter,” Dominique Browning also defends doing nothing with your stuff but keeping it, even suggesting adding more stuff to the pile, because “we forage, root and rummage around in our stuff, because that is part of what it means to be human. We treasure. Why on earth would we get rid of our wonderful things?”