❧ KonMari ❧
There is a part of me that doesn't want to write about this. Partly because there's still a punk kid in me that does not want to be seen jumping on any kind of bandwagon. If something is a fad, my usual reaction is to treat it with suspicion. I also don't like to shill for people who are already rich, especially those with international multi-media empires.
And yet I will admit, KonMari, the de-cluttering fad/craze that has swept through the industrialized world...sigh, yes, it changed my life, OK? On this page I will talk about my experience with the KonMari method, the parts of it that I do and don't use, and aspects of it that I don't often see discussed.
Kondo Marie's book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, was first published in the United States in 2014. It was followed by more books, TV shows, and an incessant pop culture discussion. The book seemed to provoke strong reactions in people. Some loved it and aspired to live by its principles; others were dismissive and defensive, as if the book by its very existence was judging them. And some, like me, just tried to ignore the whole conversation.
But by 2019, I knew that I needed a big change in my living space. I've never had the amount of clutter that Kondo's more infamous clients do--waist-high piles of books on the floor, dozens of toothbrushes, closets so full of clothes the doors can't shut. But I did have a lot of clutter in my office, which is my main living room. I had a bare area in the center of the floor that was maybe 4 feet wide by 7 feet long. Aside from that, the room was completely surrounded in a ring of clutter on the floors, the furniture, and on top of every available surface. In that small room (probably 9'x12') I had 3 book cases, a full size filing cabinet, a desk, and a CD tower. I hated opening the closet because it was so cluttered. I had a "pile of shame" of stashed yarn shoved in a space between the filing cabinet and one of the closet doors, so you couldn't even open it. At this point, I had been out of my PhD program for four years, but I still had so many books and papers related to it. I wanted to do something different with my life, but I had a lot of stuff that I was dragging with me.
Like many people, I thought that my space was so cluttered because I had failed to organize it. However, my real problem was that I had so much stuff there wasn't a place to put most of it. So I finally broke down and checked a copy of The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up out of the library. As I read it, I realized that a lot of misconceptions about the book floating around in popular culture had contributed to the dim view I had taken of it. For instance, I'd heard that Kondo recommends tearing important pages out of a book to keep and discarding the rest, which sounds insane to even a casual reader. In fact, she doesn't recommend that at all. She tried it herself one time and realized that she was merely trying to assuage her guilt over getting rid of the books by hanging on to a piece of them.
I was willing to give it a shot. And so for the next two weeks, I basically spent all my free time on my KonMari project. I would come home from work in the evenings and start sorting and discarding items, or spend my weekends running items to thrift or consignment stores. By the end of it, I had discarded about 50% of my possessions. More than that, I had actually taken each thing I owned into my two hands, looked at it, and decided whether or not it still needed to be in my life. I think for the first time in my life, I knew exactly every item I owned and had a place to store it. The process changed my relationship with stuff and, as Kondo promises, I haven't rebounded.
Recently I re-read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and its companion book, Spark Joy. If you are thinking about doing a KonMari for the first time, I would recommend reading both of these books together, back to back. Spark Joy is almost like an extended Q&A for The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. She goes into more detail about a number of topics and many of the objections to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up I have heard are addressed in Spark Joy.
Before going any further, I want to be clear that there are all kinds of reasons why someone may not want to declutter. If you grew up in poverty and it’s distressing to give things away, or if you are in poverty, this is probably not what you need to be spending your life on. KonMariing does not necessarily cost money, but it costs a lot of time and energy that not everyone has. It is a system designed to help people with wealth and privilege address a problem caused by wealth and privilege. KonMariing is not a form of justice; it will not save the world. It can bring a great amount of benefit, however, to people who are able to use it. So here we go...
Yes, it's woo-woo
I mean, “magic” is in the book title, so you know this is not going to be an ultra-rationalist undertaking. Indeed, KonMari is an entirely intuitive process. Throughout her books, Kondo contrasts her method to numbers-based decluttering methods, such as putting items in a box and discarding the box if you haven't used it after X amount of time. Or limiting yourself to a certain number of a kind of item you can own. Kondo has a limited set of very strict rules, but outside of those, the process is completely personal and is based on a person's feelings only.
Kondo is not shy about claiming that KonMari is essentially a form of therapy. The whole point is to confront your past and process your feelings about it by going through your stuff. Emotions are often the reason why people hang onto more stuff than they need: anxiety about going through it, guilt for giving things away, regret at having acquired so much. And that doesn’t even get into the specific feelings we have about sentimental items. KonMari is an emotional journey as much as a physical one.
The feelings-based approach is part of why I think people recoil so strongly against the method, but I also think it's the greatest strength. Decluttering from a place of the intellect means it's easy to fall into traps such as, "I don't like this, but _____ gave it to me, so I should hang on to it." or the famous, "I don't need this now, but I might some day." Instead in this method, you take something in your hands and see if it has the quality of tokimeku. This word has been translated as "spark joy" in English, which, while appealing, has been misleading. According to Wikipedia, this word is better translated as "flutter, throb, palpitate." In English, the word "joy" tends to evoke the idea of extreme happiness that can be difficult to sustain across any length of time. I think many people are rightly incredulous at the idea that a pair of shoes or scissors would make them joyous. However, many more people might be incredulous at the idea that they feel an object "flutter" or "palpitate" in their hands.
Perhaps a better way to say, "Does this item spark joy?" would be, "Does this item feel alive to you? Does it feel like it has a place in your life?" As I read through the book for the first time, it struck me that Kondo's perspective must be a Shinto one--and I was right. In her youth, she spent 5 years as a Miko or shrine maiden. I don't know a whole lot about Shintoism, but I understand it as a belief system in which everything is alive, or has energy in it. From that perspective, when Kondo talks about "waking up" items by moving or touching them, she's coming from a fairly literalist place. This perspective might be difficult for a lot of Westerners to accept, but it makes sense to me. When I was a child especially, I treated inanimate objects like sentient beings. For instance, during the summer I would dig Christmas ornaments out of storage in the basement and play with them because I didn't want them to feel lonely. Kondo talks about the feelings of objects in a similar way. To her, it's not about getting rid of unwanted stuff; it's about actively choosing the things that are signaling to us that they want to stay in our lives. I don't think you need to actually believe that your objects have feelings or desires to use the KonMari method, but I do think you have to be willing to suspend disbelief for a while.
But everyone has a different relationship with intuition. On a scale of completely materialist to extreme woo, I think I fall in the middle with a lean toward woo. I don't see ghosts or auras or receive psychic messages, but I do have an intuition about people and situations that's often correct and I am willing to accept messages from parts of myself that are not the intellect. So for me, it was not difficult to adopt Kondo's sorting method.
It's also worth noting that her approach goes beyond the sorting process. She asks that you thank each item for its service as you discard it, and recommends that you greet your home when you return at the end of the day and tell it good night before going to sleep. At the beginning of each session in a client's home, she would kneel and say a silent prayer to the house asking for its blessing. I have not continued with any of these practices, personally, but I understand why they are of a piece with her method.
Discarding, not sorting, takes the most effort
Garbage bags are all over The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Kondo talks about clients who discard dozens of garbage bags of clothes, household goods, media, and sentimental items. At first, I was relieved to feel somewhat normal. I'd had a romanticized view of Japan where everyone lived in serene tatami rooms among tea cups and flower arrangements. It was gratifying, instead, to learn that Japanese people accumulate just as much crap as Americans do. The ubiquity of the junk drawer is something that we share. I understood, then, that accumulation of excess items must take place in any industrialized society.
But where did those garbage bags go? Were these people literally throwing this stuff in the trash? I don't think so, but it became clear to me that the actual discarding of the items is the part of the process that Kondo is probably the least involved with. Once the bags are filled and out of the house, her work is done. But when you look at a KonMari project from beginning to end, the sorting is probably only 25%-30% of the actual effort. This is not something that she clarifies in the books, but I wish I'd known at the start.
When I KonMari'd in 2019, I usually ended up sorting items into 4 piles: trash, recycling, donations, and resale. While trash and recycling could be gotten rid of pretty immediately, donations and resale took a lot more time to coordinate, especially because resalers might reject items that then needed to be donated, or second hand shops might reject items that need to then be thrown in the trash. It was a lot of physical work, because not only was I removing boxes and bags of stuff, but I was removing furniture, too.
So my advice to anyone undertaking this for the first time is to keep going until everything is out of your life. Don't just pile the bags in a garage or car and leave them for weeks. Get everything out of your space into someone else's hands as soon as possible. And also: be careful about your sorting piles. In a few cases, I accidentally got rid of something I had meant to keep because it went into the wrong pile. Nothing life-ending happened because of it, but it's easier than you think to accidentally discard something.
The folding is optional
OK, this might be controversial among KonMari fans, but I think a lot of her storage tips are not necessary to reap the benefit of her method. That's because when you reduce the number of your possessions so that there's ample storage space, how you store them doesn't matter as much. There are storage principles of hers that I still follow. The first is putting your bookshelf in the closet. This was life-changing for me and I will always put a bookshelf in my closet. Another is emptying your bag when you come home at the end of the day, and emptying your luggage immediately after returning home from travel.
But she places a lot of emphasis on clothing storage and it would seem to be a cornerstone of her method. In my house, however, I'm not the person who folds laundry. If I folded my own laundry, I probably would follow her method, but since I'm not the one doing the work, I don't dictate how it's done. Perhaps my drawers are slightly less joyous, but not following her folding method has not broken anything for me. If clothes are your #1 clutter item, it may behoove you to pay more attention to the storage, but clothes clutter has never been an issue for me so it's not essential to store them as carefully. I think it's more important that each possession has a storage space that it fits comfortably into, rather than storing things a certain way.
It's not minimalism
KonMari is generally associated with a minimalist aesthetic, and therefore people think it's a minimalist philosophy. It's not. I define a minimalist lifestyle as living with the smallest number of possessions needed to maintain a certain quality of life. For minimalists, the goal is to own the least amount of stuff possible. If you want to read an actual Japanese take on minimalism, I would recommend Sasaki Fumio's Goodbye, Things: the New Japanese Minimalism.
Instead of being minimalist, KonMari is about getting to the number of possessions that feels right. And that will be different for every person. One person may realize they only need two pairs of shoes. Another person may need 20. What matters is both of them kept only the pairs of shoes that invoke tokimeku. If Kondo had been writing in English, I imagine she would have alluded to Goldilocks: not too much, not too little, but juuuust right. That feeling of things being just right is what Kondo calls the "click point," when a person intuitively realizes they have just the amount of possessions they desire. Kondo recommends that you continue discarding items until you reach that point. For me, it meant getting rid of about half of my possessions, but it in no way meant I had reduced what I owned to a minimalist amount.
The first time is the biggest, but it's not the last time
A successful KonMari is a thrilling feeling. My first in 2019 was an enormous amount of work, but the end was what Kondo promised it would be: I knew every single thing that I owned. I had actively chosen to keep it. I had a place for everything. Cleaning and straightening up were now easy where they had before been painful. I loved the look of my space so much that I kept my closet doors open all the time. (That's a habit I've retained to this day--in my new house, I actually removed the closet doors so that the closet is integrated into the rest of the room.)
However, KonMariing does not mean you will never need to clean or declutter again. Kondo says that people generally don't rebound--meaning that they don't return to the same level of clutter they had before. And in my experience, that's true. But possessions always come into a house no matter what and after a while they need to be dealt with.
Since 2019, I have KonMari'd one or two more times, and I am doing it again this fall. I do it when I start to get an icky feeling about my living space (there's that intuition again.) I can tell that I've just got too much stuff that I don't need or don't want and it's time to go through everything again. None of these times have been as drastic as the first. Instead of getting rid of half my stuff, it's more like skimming 10-15% off the top. Rather than seeing a KonMari as a one-and-done where you will never have to work at decluttering again, it would be better to see it as a watershed moment where your relationship to your living space has changed forever.
KonMari isn't for everyone! Decluttering isn't for everyone! And that's OK
If I tell people I have KonMari'd, they sometimes immediately start talking about how it wouldn't work for them or that they feel guilty because they know they should do it but haven't done it. It's as if by telling them about a choice I had made, I am implying it is a choice they should make, too.
I do think that many people could benefit from living in a less cluttered environment, but not everyone wants or needs to do so. Kondo Marie is very clear that you should not try to declutter for someone, nor should you try to convince them to do it if they don't want to. Many people are perfectly happy surrounded by stuff; many, in fact, prefer it that way. We tend to pathologize people who hang onto a lot of stuff as hoarders, but Obsessive Decluttering gets little attention despite being just as destructive. Decluttering isn't an unqualified, universal good; it's just a choice that works for some people.
And even for those who want to reduce their possessions, KonMari isn't necessarily the best way to do it. It all depends on the resources you have available and what system makes sense to you. Another decluttering book I enjoyed was The Afrominimalist's Guide to Living with Less by Christine Platt. While her method wasn't as effective for me as KonMari, I really appreciated her perspective. It's always worth seeking other ways of decluttering. Another system may work better for you.