The Backlash Against KonMari And Decluttering Is Stupid

[summer]

jezebel.com/the-backlash-against-konmari-and-de-cluttering-is-stupi-1708264043

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?”



Maybe because a lot of those things are bullshit? It goes on to express excitement at the thrill of leaving all these things to children, which Kondo would call not leaving, but victimizing or burdening, and with which I would agree. Who needs every copy of Us Weekly in existence and 60 pallets of soup. One woman’s Ming vase is an offspring’s heavy breakable. Though Browning may be right that each of us has a set point of stuff to which we invariably return no matter how much we discard, and some of us just like stuff and that is fine, leave us alone, still, that is not the point of Marie Kondo’s book, either. In fact, I’m not sure any of these critiques understand the real message here. It’s not the tightly rolled t-shirts or the nightly purse appreciation.



I finally read the book. In a way, this backlash was the tipping point, in large part because I had to know if I would be just as enthralled or just as irritated by it. I admit I imagined a chirpy call to arms that wouldn’t affect me in the slightest—I would see right through this evangelism as just another self-help trend thing that I didn’t really need, either. But I was wrong. Turns out that Marie Kondo is one slippery, convincing, brilliant little fish. The woman is a genius.



To be clear, I still haven’t de-cluttered a single thing since reading it, and I’m not even sure I will, but I come here to tell you that what Kondo has said is good and true and correct. Yes, she asks you to consider whether the items you own “spark joy” and yes she asks you to thank the things you possess for their function, but what lies beneath these rituals is so much more.



If you take away nothing else from her eagerness to help you put your house in order, glean this: You buy things for a reason, and if you took the time to figure out why you buy what you buy, and why you think you need it, and why you form such an attachment to it, even when it serves virtually no purpose and brings you no pleasure, you would quite possibly have a deeper understanding of yourself, your choices, and your existence that probably would affect the way you make choices—all manner of choices—going forward.



This is not just therapy for things; it is therapy for life. In the same way Kondo asks that you examine each thing you own and figure out its usefulness, when you go into therapy, you take out your feelings and choices, turn them over, figure out what the hell they mean, and see what happens when they are exposed to oxygen and daylight and scrutiny.



And moreover, you get the same result: You realize what the thing means to you, or you realize what the thing does not mean. If it means nothing, you let it go. If it means something, it gets filed back in with the rest. If you rewrote The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up into The Life-Changing Magic of Actually Thinking About Your Feelings, you could just control-find-replace throughout and presto-chango and also sell three million copies I bet. Either way, what is so satisfying about the book is that it presents a framework for tackling literally anything: All at once, bit by bit. That is a way to go through life, friend. And the result of this understanding is objectively better than whatever else you’re doing.



Kondo writes: “Although not large, the space I live in is graced only with those things that speak to my heart. My lifestyle brings me joy. Wouldn’t you like to live this way, too?”



Are you dead? Did you die when you read this? Because I did. Or maybe you didn’t. But you really should have.



Back in the real world, I met a de-cluttering expert recently at a party. Much like Kondo, she goes into homes and helps the helpless sort through closets and drawers until they figure out what matters to them and why they don’t need 36 vintage scarves they never ever wear. I asked her about the success of Kondo’s method. She told me she was thrilled with the awareness it brings to the issue of de-cluttering, though she “didn’t care in the slightest about whether your things bring you personal joy.” But as we talked, she confirmed that what really mattered to her was precisely what mattered to Kondo: helping people see that they are clinging to things they have absolutely no use for, that they chose for no good reason, that they need to let go of, that they will be better off for having gotten out.



You may not feel like getting rid of anything, but deep down inside, buried far underneath your 60 pallets of soup, or 36 vintage scarves, you know that is a true thing.

[summer]

I read the first two chapters of her book so far. It translates a bit weird, or maybe the writing itself is different from what I'm used to, but so far it has inspired the heck out of me. I just put out about 4 boxes of stuff and still want to do more. My drawers and shelves have never looked better.

[pitterwoo]

I put a hold on this book at my library. I'm interested to see if it can really help me reform. I'm always interested in decluttering and organizing, but not super successful. The waiting list is long though. I'm #280 or something, but they have several copies, so probably 25 people ahead.

[josieposy]

We've been decluttering lately, and in the process I found my birth certificate. I thought it was in my parents' safe at their house. Oops.

[heliocentric]

I haven't read it or even heard of it before, but I'm a bit intrigued. It sounds like it could be helpful for a lot of people, but I'm not really sure where I would fall. I hang on to a lot of stuff, but it's organized. I know what I have and where to find it and it's not overwhelming my space. For instance I way more pairs of underwear than I actually need, but they are folded neatly and arranged in drawer dividers by color. I wonder if that's considered clutter or not?

[ttt]

Does everything really have to be a controversy???

[summer]

Jun 5, 2015 8:03:42 GMT -5 ttt said:

Does everything really have to be a controversy???

YES!!!!!  I'm righter than EVERYONE!!!!! 

[bugandbibs]

I haven't read it, but I follow the hashtag on IG

I feel like I am in a constant battle to declutter. With 5 people in our house there is a lot of stuff. I sleep better and am calmer when I see bare surfaces and less visual clutter. It's not natural for me, I want to keep everything, but I also don't want to be embarrassed if people drop by.

[heyjude]

So there's something called konmarie.

And then there's backlash to it.

And backlash to the backlash.

Seems like I need to find out what the hell konmarie is!

But if it's just organizing and de cluttering tips? Um. Yawn? Is everyone brand new? Has no one heard of house blogs? YHL? Apartment Therapy? I Heart Organizing? Or the millions of other home related sites that make you hyper conscious of your house and the things in it? No? Have you been in a coma since 2006 and are just waking up? Have you never met @majorwife? Is this like that time feng shui had a moment back in the late 90s/early aughts? Is konmarie to home as paleo is to food? Is konmarie organizing the cavewoman way?

I personally love organizing and streamlining and I hate clutter. But so help me god if being my normal self becomes a "thing" with a trendy name I'm going to ... Do something!

[2doxies]

I just finished reading this book, perfect timing! Various parts struck me as: insightful, batshit crazy, culturally different, and/or poorly translated. I took a lot away from it, mainly that you control what your surroundings are like and to choose what you want to keep in your home rather than choosing what to get rid of. Also, being mindful of what we own and recognizing that it may not have s place in our lives any longer without feeling guilty about that.

However, there is no way I'm wiping down and putting away my shampoo bottles after each shower. Or hanging my kitchen sponge outside to dry after each use. No.

[ttt]

Jun 5, 2015 8:12:19 GMT -5 heyjude said:

So there's something called konmarie.

And then there's backlash to it.

And backlash to the backlash.

Seems like I need to find out what the hell konmarie is!

But if it's just organizing and de cluttering tips? Um. Yawn? Is everyone brand new? Has no one heard of house blogs? YHL? Apartment Therapy? I Heart Organizing? Or the millions of other home related sites that make you hyper conscious of your house and the things in it? No? Have you been in a coma since 2006 and are just waking up? Have you never met @majorwife? Is this like that time feng shui had a moment back in the late 90s/early aughts? Is konmarie to home as paleo is to food? Is konmarie organizing the cavewoman way?

I personally love organizing and streamlining and I hate clutter. But so help me god if being my normal self becomes a "thing" with a trendy name I'm going to ... Do something!

Well I personally am looking forward to Désencombrement: Organizing Your Home the French Way. 

[meshaliuknits]

The first person who touches my yarn looses their fingers.

[IIOY]

It gives me chest pain to think of anyone criticizing a trend toward organization.  ::sob::

[msmerymac]

Isn't decluttering, like, normal? Even people who are not great at organization get the big to spring clean every few years, right?

I've gotten better as I get older about being less sentimental about things and just not wanting to store a lot or display a lot (which attracts dust).

But I do like SOME stuff. Nice decor and a few items that are sentimental to me give me comfort. I shudder at the thought of becoming a minimalist... but if this isn't minimalism, then we're talking about how most people manage to function while living in a house, right?

[meshaliuknits]

Jun 5, 2015 9:29:02 GMT -5 msmerymac said:

Isn't decluttering, like, normal? Even people who are not great at organization get the big to spring clean every few years, right?

No.

[tacosforlife]

Anyone who is against decluttering obviously has not moved recently.

FUCK WHY DO WE HAVE ALL THIS STUFF???

[pixy0stix]

Jun 5, 2015 9:17:23 GMT -5 meshaliuknits said:

The first person who touches my yarn looses their fingers.

I just donated 2 huge trash bags of yarn. I'm never going to touch that acrylic stuff that I had hoarded.

[chittybangbang]

The batshit crazy parts were the parts where you had to treat all your possessions as if they were alive and thank them for what they did for you during the day.

I read this yesterday and found myself really agreeing with the first couple of parts and then it veered into straight up insane land. I will use it for the decluttering tips but I'm not talking to my purse for fucks sake.

[orangeblossom]

Jun 5, 2015 7:58:43 GMT -5 mryrcn said:

I love decluttering especially if it's other people's shit that I get to throw away.

Please come to the mountains then. I promise to feed you.

[orangeblossom]

Jun 5, 2015 9:38:41 GMT -5 tacosforlife said:

Anyone who is against decluttering obviously has not moved recently.

FUCK WHY DO WE HAVE ALL THIS STUFF???

QFT

[meshaliuknits]

Jun 5, 2015 9:40:30 GMT -5 pixy0stix said:

Jun 5, 2015 9:17:23 GMT -5 meshaliuknits said:

The first person who touches my yarn looses their fingers.

I just donated 2 huge trash bags of yarn. I'm never going to touch that acrylic stuff that I had hoarded.

I hang onto that stuff to for bullshit like "I want to tape yarn to this empty tissue box." I don't have that much. Enough to get them old enough to realize I give them crap yarn.

[2curlydogs]

This is a thing?

Or is this like "pinterest guilt" where it's an invented thing to gin up clicks?

Whatever. I love decluttering. I declutter, like, 6 times a year. I will happily help anyone else declutter. Just pay me in excellent food and local booze.

[heyjude]

I think what's going on here is the publisher is creating backlash to fuel anti backlash to fuel sales of this damn book.

[2curlydogs]

Jun 5, 2015 10:41:55 GMT -5 @littlemoxie said:

Can we do a Houston GTG where you all come de-clutter my house and I take you on a neighborhood food and booze tour?

Done and done.

[omgzombies]

I think we need to arrange a roving CEP decluttering guild, they can travel all over and declutter houses by day and eat/drink/hijinks (yes, I used it as a verb) by night.

[Deleted]

I've never read this book, but organization has been pretty life changing for me. I can't knock it. We lived in a 1300 sq. ft. house with a large garage and basement. We had so much stuff that was out of sight and out of mind. When we moved to another town we could only find one house for rent that was okay with our cats. We moved into an old house with no built in storage areas, 795 square feet, and no basement or garage. We had no idea how much stuff we had until we had moved everything in and it was literally piled throughout the house and that was after we had already filled a storage unit. I spent weeks going through stuff, dividing it into shiny new clear storage containers, trash bags for Goodwill, and stuff to sell.

I have yet to miss anything. It was weirdly emotional getting rid of some of it. I hope it never gets to that point again. I love that we never have to really search for anything because we don't have much stuff. I'm still a work in progress and catch myself letting random things pile up.

[omgzombies]

My biggest problem is toys, books, and board games. H and I love to game despite not being able to do it as much as we would like. So we have cabinets full of board games, it's bad. The books I don't feel guilty about, we have a room that we use as a dedicated library. It's the dream, and makes me insanely happy. The last is all the stupid kids toys. I am constantly donating, and I just cannot keep up. I also feel bad getting rid of some of their stuff, because most of what we do have the kids do play with on occasion, even if it's not an every day or every week sort of thing.

[sparkythelawyer]

Jun 5, 2015 7:46:44 GMT -5 incogneato said:

I absolutely feel that de-cluttering and organizing are good for mental health. I think its annoying as hell though when organized people are super-judgmental about those of us who will never be super organized. I'm TRYING here, people! Seriously, it's my eternal quest to streamline my home/car/wallet but it's not natural or easy for me and DH is sabotaging me with his hoarder tendencies. So I get aggravated at some of the passive-aggressive "I just WISH I could be that laid back- I'm just TOO organized! Tee hee!" comments I've heard from IRL people. I'm looking at you, random gym acquaintance who told me that my key chain full of store cards was "stressing her out just looking at it." Maybe stop looking, mmmmkay?

Yes.

Organized people don't bother me.

The motherfuckers that engage in the bolded?  DO.

[pixy0stix]

I keep thinking I'll pay to fly MW out to organize my house.

Now I'm moving and thrown so much stuff away or donated it. I'll save my pennies to fly her out in a couple of years.

[earlgreyhot]

I haven't read the book (or the the entire article posted). But I do love a good purge and caught a few of her tips online and I am converted on a few...using old boxes lying around to organize drawers, and organizing clothes vertically in a drawer so you can see them all. I've actually been able to keep that system longer than anything I've every tried before.

But that's only for my shirts/pants. Folding underwear sounds like the stupidest idea ever. However, if you like your panties rolled then KOKO!