“If you think it’s a pain to fold your clothes, you haven’t discovered the true impact of folding.”
There’s a point, almost halfway through Marie Kondo’s bestselling book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying, where she politely invites the reader to chuck it in the bin. This is the call of the clutter therapist. Get rid, purge, clear, toss, abandon, and with relish, too. This is the message of the fastest growing self-help sub-genre, itself the world’s bestselling genre. And it’s one that has arrived at exactly the right time. Two thirds of us think we would be better off if we lived “more simply”. Many of us “feel weighed down by our own excess”. Women who struggle with too much stuff in their homes are more likely to feel stressed, tired and depressed and have a higher mortality rate. In his (also bestselling) book, trend forecaster James Wallman calls the problem “Stuffocation”, and defines it as the material equivalent of the obesity epidemic. There are so many books being published about clutter that if you placed them end to end, you could easily fill a small one-bedroom flat, and have enough left for a precarious pile right by the loo.
Why, then, are we suddenly so desperate to learn how to live minimally? Every expert has an answer. Wallman breaks them down into the environmental argument (we’re worried we’re using more resources than the planet can sustain), the political argument (without having to worry about basic material needs we have become “post-materialists”), the social scientist’s argument (we’ve learned that possessions don’t make us happy), and the economic argument (we simply can’t afford not to). I asked Alain de Botton for the philosophical argument. “The more chaotic, abundant and junk-filled a society,” he explains, “the more its tastes in interiors will incline towards the minimalist, the austere and the tidy.” At a personal level, he adds: “The more turbulent someone’s inner life is, the more tidiness appeals. It isn’t tidy minds that go for tidy exteriors. It’s chaotic minds.” Chaotic minds gather on Twitter, where they boast of “Kondo-ing” their bookshelves while waiting for the toast to pop, and perform social warfare on Facebook, where before and after wardrobe photos are a currency.
“When your room is clean and uncluttered, you have no choice but to examine your inner state.”
The first thing you’ll notice when, like the 2m people before you (many of whom have gathered glassy-eyed on your social media to evangelise), you begin reading TLCMOT, is that it is pleasingly short. In just over 200 pages, it promises, you will be cured of this malady, this virus. Cured of the shelves packed three books deep, of the drawer of old phone chargers, of the socks and the cardigans and the drying felt-tips. The second thing you’ll notice is that it doesn’t tell you off. The tone is sensitive, the sentences clutter-free. Unlike more traditional books about purging your possessions, where it’s all about pain and numbers – fill one rubbish bag, give away an item a day, use a timer, be ruthless, it will hurt but it will work – Kondo has just one simple solution… But we’ll come to that.
I started, as Kondo recommends, with my clothes, and from there to books, papers, “komono” (miscellaneous items) and finally things with sentimental value. My clothes are their own private island, like Necker, or one that’s suffered less fire damage. It is a task, plonking every last garment on the floor. Mainly because I first have to clear a space on the floor. But as I work through them (in silence – Kondo asks that you turn all music off) I feel something. I quickly fill two big Ikea bags with vintage dresses that make me look like Grayson Perry, lingerie that still has its tags on, shoes that made me walk home from the station barefoot. Books were even easier. “If you haven’t read it by now,” writes Kondo, “the book’s purpose was to teach you that you didn’t need it.” And lo, a heaving box for the charity shop. “It’s starting!” I think, sitting on the floor in a bra and pair of tights. “I’m becoming a better person!” And then my mum calls.
Parents and family are a recurring theme in TLCMOT. Not only does Kondo advise against passing on any clothes you want to get rid of to your siblings, or asking your mother to store a pile of NMEs for you in her attic (hi), she insists you tidy without telling them. The volume of what you’re getting rid of, she says, will make them anxious about how you’ll survive on what’s left. She talks about her clients, often women in their 60s, who store their daughters’ old toys and T-shirts, and how “their affection for the daughter becomes a burden”. Things that you no longer need must be thanked, individually, for their service, then binned (or recycled), pronto. So I sit alone, and begin on my papers.
“By handling each sentimental item and deciding what to discard, you process your past.”
The psychology of stuff is rich, sad and complicated. Overturn somebody’s pile of old magazines and painful shoes, therapists claim, and you’ll uncover their memories, hopes and fears. While hoarders are at one extreme end of the scale (I’m reminded of an episode of the documentary series Hoarders about a house that was rotting and its owner who found a cat in her cupboard, partially liquified in a freezer bag) almost everybody has something they find hard to throw away. So all over the world, people like Marie Kondo are making fine careers helping others tidy up their lives.
In Los Angeles, Fay Wolf is an actor, singer and professional organiser. While Marie Kondo spent five years working at a Shinto shrine and, in her signature white dress, has the pristine look of someone who never quite left, Wolf, in a shlubby plaid shirt, looks like someone who would never judge you for the state of your bathroom. She was surprised to find how happy she could make people by showing them how to properly tidy their closets. “I help creative folks dig through inner and outer clutter,” she explains, “and then get shit done.”
Her message is about fun and freedom, rather than healing and fixing. If Kondo’s clients are housewives in their 50s, Wolf’s fans are surely their art-school daughters, people who might begin a declutter project in the same way they might take up knitting, and make a subversive blanket for their puppy. Wolf’s book will be published early next year, and it will sell. It will sell well.
One of the objects discarded by many of the people boasting of their Kondoed new lives on Twitter is a juicer. As I begin decluttering, I realise this was an icon of a type of lifestyle religion, an answer to a question none of us were quite aware we were asking. How to be better? How to be happier? Juice! It seemed so simple. Until, one day, the sight of this dusty hunk of wellmeaning-ness represents nothing more than another thing we failed at. Which is where the “KonMari method” comes in. It is a juicer for people who are ready to juice their juicers.
“You will never use spare buttons.”
I threw every paper away. Every bank statement, every birthday card, every sketch and magazine and letter. And some of it was hard to lose, but most of it was easy. I felt lighter, but scared. Every time, though, I held the thing in my hand like a paper grenade, and asked myself the question that Kondo says is the key, the secret, to the life-changing magic of tidying: “Does this spark joy?” After following the KonMari method, asking if each thing in her life sparked joy, one of Kondo’s clients got rid of her husband. I started smaller. A Moschino dress that I’ve been meaning to get altered for 10 years – does this spark joy? A charity shop Patricia Highsmith – does this spark joy? A pair of over-washed pyjamas – joy. A plate in the shape of a cabbage leaf – extreme joy. And so my flat began to empty. Except, as I got deeper into the days, the days spent surrounded by my dwindling things, it felt like instead of getting bigger, airier, my home was deflating.
“The meaning of a photo lies in the joy you feel when taking them. The prints developed afterwards have already outlived their purpose.”
I was reminded of a bit in Miranda July’s novel The First Bad Man where the middle-aged protagonist Cheryl, who lives by herself, describes her “smoother living” system of housekeeping, where she keeps only one set of dishes to avoid letting the mess make her sad. “After days and days alone,” she says, “it gets silky to the point where I can’t even feel myself any more.” Is that the aim of the cult of decluttering, that we are able to move so smoothly through our lives that nothing will touch us, soil us? Cheryl is not a happy person. And reading Kondo’s book with her in mind, it can seem at times like a memoir of madness, this pursuit of cleanliness, this talking to socks.
I could have got rid of more, but I’d stopped wanting to. Perhaps the process had made me appreciate the value of stuff, of my chosen stuff. Perhaps I’d answered all the questions Kondo forces you to ask yourself, about why you want to live the way you want to live. Perhaps I was bored. The minimalist home is a style choice, I realised. The things Kondo calls clutter, I call my lovely pictures, my funny shoes, my pieces of a life.
The aim of decluttering, it turns out, should not in fact be to purge your belongings, to live in that white nothingness. The aim should not be to wake up in a flat of echoes, to a kitchen with a single plate. It should be to enjoy the objects you’ve chosen to live with, and to continue to choose only things you’ll love. Holding each one in my hand, as Kondo urges, and realising how many of them do “spark joy” was a pleasure, a reminder of who I am. Clutter kills, says Stuffocation’s Wallman, like a talking cigarette warning. But like dirt, clutter is just matter out of place. Holding your stuff in your hand – the best thing Kondo can teach you – made me realise that the only thing I needed to bin was the book.
To order a copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying by Marie Kondo for £8.79, go to bookshop.theguardian.com
