The United Nations of Spring Cleaning: How I learned to say "no" to Kondo.
Stay in your lane, Martha Stewart. Check yourselves, Instagram Pantry Influencers.
A diminutive new Goddess of Domesticity is ascendant in the form of porcelain-doll-faced, anti-clutter evangelist Marie Kondo. Perhaps because of her new Netflix show (that I’m afraid to watch), she’s trendy enough to have made a sequined red-carpet appearance at the Oscars. Her pop culture status is secured with myriad social media hashtags and the energetic “verbing” of her name, as in, “We need to Kondo these kitchen cabinets today!”
I purchased the KonMari method books a couple of years ago and only recently dared to crack them open. What I’ve read so far about the “life-changing magic” of her cleverly branded (and franchised via certified consultants) decluttering approach is enough to stop me in my tracks. That’s probably all you need to know about me right there.
It’s possible that I have a Princess Bride-ish “you keep using that word” issue with the meaning of “tidying.” It’s such a cute little word. “Tidying up” connotes putting away a few stray shoes or maybe clearing the kitchen table in order to have a civilized meal on a horizontal surface. It definitely does not connote evaluating and categorizing every item in the house to assess what stays and what goes where. That’s called an archeological dig, Marie. And touching each item to determine if it “sparks joy”? Not without latex gloves, or maybe hazmat gear for the basement. I will concede that her vertical folding/storage technique makes it easier to find the jeans I’m looking for but I don’t see myself being able to emulate Marie’s rapturous facial expression when I’m squinting into a junk drawer.
After my foray into Marie’s methodology, I now realize that Japanese interior design aesthetics do not elicit predictable feelings of serenity in my being. Not even close. Those sparsely furnished monochromatic rooms with their Shoji screen walls and woven mat floors make me uneasy. At the sight of a space set with zafus and zabutons for meditation I immediately imagine the sound of my knees crackling as I lower myself to my cushions, the noise causing everyone to turn and frown at me for literally disturbing the peace.
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My hesitation to follow the decluttering masses is by no means limited to Japanese minimalism à la KonMari method. I would go so far as to say there’s a multinational control-your-clutter-change-your-life conspiracy at work with the deceptively benign Nordic countries leading the field. Where to begin? Sweden.
Let’s start with “döstädning,” as discussed in The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. It’s a morbid title for such a cheery-looking little book but the content is pragmatic—even humorous—as the author guides her readers through the fraught topic of getting rid of all the junk your kids absolutely do not want (nor deserve) to deal with. I can attest to the merits of the döstädning concept based on the still-unopened boxes of stuff I saved from my mother’s house, bless her heart. She was a prolific packrat and now I have doomed myself to dispose of photos of people I can’t possibly identify, among sundry other things.
The neighboring Finns are all about tapping into the power of something they call “sisu,” which is a particular combination of courage, happiness, and wellness, if we are to be persuaded by The Finnish Way. I’m guessing that’s how they summon the strength and determination to go ice swimming—which is supposed to bring a euphoric rush of endorphins. Thank you, no. Iced tea? Yes. Iced coffee? Any time. Ice swimming? Not a chance. Author Katja Pantzar does promote other activities to live happily in a very cold place; among them she recommends daily walking or bicycling, healthy eating (duh), and “forest therapy.” I already have enough trouble making myself go outdoors when it’s too humid so that probably nixes a prospective visit to Finland.
Fortunately, there’s the less intimidating Danish concept of “hygge” (pronounced hoo-ga), whereby one can find tranquility with a combination of warm blankets and hot beverages, scented candles, and enjoying simple pleasures with people who don’t get on your nerves. I’m okay with the Danes’ idea because they are generally reported to be among the happiest people on the planet and they’re not telling me to throw everything away. The nearby Dutch have a similar term for this cozy setup: gezelligheid. And you just know the Germans have a word for it because there’s a German word for everything: gemütlichkeit.
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As the Kondo phenomenon grows here in the U.S., we have the incongruous first-world option to watch multiple television programs about the life-changing hazards of hoarding. We can choose from Hoarders, Hoarding: Buried Alive, Clean House, Clean Sweep, even the British version called The Hoarder Next Door. It’s ridiculous. It’s voyeuristic and nauseating. It’s also undeniable that hoarding programs provide us with a self-congratulatory, “at least my house doesn’t look that bad,” sigh of relief. The German word for that feeling: schadenfreude.
Maybe our species’ penchant for collecting stuff evolved from a deeply primal hunting/gathering thing; if true, then my excuse for buying too many books—and shoes—is akin to a squirrel’s need to pack away a food supply for winter. And what about an artist like Joseph Cornell? He collected the most unlikely objects and turned them into marvelous, eccentric collages. Google him. He was a fascinating man.
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Meanwhile, Marie Kondo recently found herself in the middle of a huge publicity mess when rumors spread about her KonMari limit of thirty books per home. That’s crazy talk and many people (ahem, book hoarders) were MAD about it. Social media posts were flying and opinion writers were ranting as it blew up in her face. Through her translator, she claimed it was all a misunderstanding and that it’s okay to keep more than thirty books in your house.
The damage is done, Marie, and now the world is inadvertently a better place for all the delightful, persuasive articles and other posts generated in opposition to your “alleged” book-purging dictum. I especially enjoyed Ron Charles’ contribution: “Keep your tidy, spark-joy hands off my book piles, Marie Kondo.” (He’s the Washington Post book critic and target of my verbiage about his 2018 anti-banned-books-week article but now I’m not mad at him anymore.)
If you decide to read Kondo’s original life-changing-anti-clutter title, take note of her extensive rationale for keeping so few books. It’s baffling to me that she has such a surgical mindset about the reasons we read and why we love having books in our surroundings. I’m curious to know what she thinks about the Japanese word for all those piles of books: “tsundoku,” which to me looks like an etymological relative of “tsunami” which, in turn, is what my stacks and stacks of books often look like.
Maybe you have thirty books or a thousand books, but it’s doubtful anyone else could have amassed 300,000 books like the recently-departed fashion designer, Karl Lagerfeld. How do I know this? From reading one of those exuberant anti-Kondo articles, specifically Emily Temple’s “10 Famous Book Hoarders” post at lithub.com. (FYI George Lucas has 27,000 while Ernest Hemingway had a mere 9,000.) The number is not so important, but a person’s attitude toward books is a big deal.
Here’s where it gets ugly: I simply cannot get over Kondo’s account of how she arrived at a process for de-cluttering her own books. It was a given that she’d dispose of them. Her problem was figuring out how to preserve her favorite quotes. First, she tried copying them into a notebook but she soon decided that was “far too much work.” Then she thought it would be a good idea to photocopy her favorite passages and paste those into a notebook. Alas, “it was even more work.” Her solution: She “decided to rip the relevant page out of the book,” but pasting those pages was “also a pain.” Marie finally opted to put the torn pages into a file, a process she claims took her only five minutes per book and allowed her “to get rid of forty books and keep the words that [she] liked.” WHO DOES THAT?!
If you’re squeamish I’d advise you to pretty please skip this side note about my reaction to that passage:
Upon reading about these acts of biblio-vandalism, my brain made an immediate and visceral comparison with the practice of shark finning, whereby fishermen cut off the fins and sell them to restaurants for making shark fin soup, a delicacy. The mortally incapacitated sharks are thrown back into the water to die. Barbaric. Unthinkable. So yes, now I can see all of my vertically folded scarves in a single drawer at a glance, but at what cost, Marie?!
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After an appropriate cooling-off period, I put aside the Kondo books and their Nordic companions. In their place I picked up two tiny, bleep-worthy KonMari parodies from author Sarah Knight. Her approach is a complete departure from dealing with physical clutter as she describes the ways our daily choices create unnecessary emotional burdens and mental clutter. Knight’s response to the KonMari Method is the NotSorry Method. Instead of looking for things that “spark joy,” she advises us to ask, “Does it annoy?” If yes, then we should walk away from whatever it is as briskly as possible.
It’s good stuff.
10/10 would recommend the NotSorry strategy over KonMari any day.
And now I should go dust something but, as fate would have it, my Swiffer does not spark joy.