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Lighten Up
Agnes R. Howard Says, Marie Kondo Does Not Spark My Joy
Japanese de-cluttering expert Marie Kondo, avatar of the neatly packed suitcase and the well-folded shirt, refreshes Americans’ resolutions for a better life with her Netflix series, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. In the show, the heroine knocks on doors of personages drowning in stuff and helps them to banish it. By mid-January, thrift shops were reporting themselves drowned in donations inspired by Kondo’s clean-outs. Yet despite her whimsy and cheer, Kondo has never appealed to me. I am not immune to the charms of the organized life, but living fruitfully with a loose hand on worldly goods calls for a different sort of approach.
To be fair, in the show Kondo is respectful of the neatness-needy persons she assists. She doesn’t just fling everything in the trash. She recognizes the complex status of possessions as carriers of emotion and memory. And she is right that some things deserve to be cherished, mostly because of the associations they carry with beloved people or pivotal experiences.
But that is both the weak and the strong point of her system. Her method has other parts—a sequence for the emptying of closets, a process for sorting utensils—but the crux of it is the well-known joy test. People are supposed to pick up each object they own and ask, Does this thing spark joy? If it does, they should keep it (neatly, as the thing deserves), and if it does not, they should let it go. But closet cleaning-out is too weak a weapon against the acquisitive instinct and the junk it generates. A better corrective stems accumulation, fosters a lighter rather than a tighter bond to the things we own, and respects utility.
Kondo appears a little like Mary Poppins, alighting on the doorstep to bring order and happiness to distemper and squalor. But unlike nanny-rescue shows with stern Anglo matrons making Americans shipshape, the cultural contrasts might make us wince: the petite fairy creature from the east flitting in, exotic, among the clodhoppers.
When I’m in the kind of mood that may prompt others to watch Kondo, I pick up Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century, a provocative book by UCLA anthropologist Elinor Ochs and her colleagues. The authors illustrate the disordered relationship with work and ownership typical of Americans of some means. Ochs and colleagues show people working hard to afford to buy stuff that they hardly have time to enjoy, let alone clean up after. Kondo encounters this dysfunction in her show. Maybe we, with our jammed closets and garages, are beyond prevention and can only consume cure.
Sorting Appetites Instead of Stuff
Yet surely the reason Kondo’s show appeals is its preventative element: you can have a better relationship with stuff before it is too late. For decluttering, prevention is better than cure. Help may be found in ascetic and religious traditions. Jesus warned against laying up treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy. But even people who stock no religious tradition can find some other relevant tool in the drawer: minimalism, traveling light through life, treading softly, leaving no trace.
Frugality and moderation may sound like unglamorous virtues, but Aristotle tagged temperance as a must-have for living well. Temperance is not timid abstention. One who is temperate is not always finger-wagging or quashing lusts, but has trained preferences to want what is worth wanting but not too much of it. Instead of sorting possessions by seeking joy in them, we can sort our appetites to level them out.
Loving things less, rather than loving things more, is an obvious way to reduce clutter. But we still should keep things because they are useful: wooden spoons and leaf rakes, hats and gloves, Band-Aids and blankets. They are equipment. That is a perfectly respectable reason why some of us have more stuff in our junk drawers than do others. Kondo does have a loophole for utility, admitting that some things need to be retained even though they deliver service rather than joy. We may live whole lives in that loophole. You need a different kind of knife to cut bread than to cut meat, a different size screwdriver to repair your glasses than your chair. If I got rid of everything that didn’t give me joy, I would compromise my doing of things worth doing.
Having things but holding them lightly also can fuel generosity. I have a friend, much more neat-living than I, on whose bookshelf I discovered four copies of a novel we both love. When I teased her about it—“You can’t love it any more by having four copies!”—she explained that when she recommends the book to friends, she likes to have one to give away to them.
Agnes R. Howard is adjunct assistant professor of humanities in Christ College, Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana, and author of Showing: What Pregnancy Tells Us about Being Human (Eerdmans, 2020).
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