18 Jun 2018 - Graham
previously: barista theory
Mari Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up is a holy text. What I mean is, it is a rather long elaboration on a relatively simple set of ethics. And it inspires a religious type devotion.
As a convert, each time she counts the 45L trash bags a client discarded (which is very often) I am filled with new praise: “Yes, that person is saved from stuff! I too am saved!”
If you are anything like Erica C. or Kate D., you want nothing to do with this. They like stuff. But here’s the crazy thing, if they only read Kondo they would totally agree with her. Unlike some other minimalists, Kondo loves stuff. She thanks her shoes for carrying her around all day and she never stacks sweaters because she is concerned about the one on the bottom.
This resonates deeply with me. Like Kondo I find stuff to be animate - my possessions have feelings and make demands on me. As a child, I felt deeply guilty when my stuffed animals didn’t get equal cuddle time. And as an adult I lie to the t-shirt that I wear only when all the others are dirty, telling it that I do really care for it just as much as the others. Stuff exerts such a powerful influence on me that my jaw literally aches when something is the wrong color or in the wrong place.
Kondo’s method promises a way to exercise some choice about what stuff I will be obligated to. That is, to let me choose what I want to need. I want, for example, to need my bicycle, but I don’t want to need a car. I want to need books, but not bad ones. And another thing is, I don’t want to live as if the apocalypse is coming. I’m not going to hoard buttons because I want to live as if I will be able to continue to cheaply purchase them forever.
In addition to not providing for the end times, Kondo’s method does not provide a useful guide for life in public spaces. As she rightly advises, you should never discard other people’s stuff. And she advises discarding things in secret to avoid people around you taking those things out of a sense of guilt about the waste. Kondo also often tells us how tidying comforted her as a painfully shy child, but she doesn’t theoretically explain the relationship between tidying and being alone.
I posit that her method must be anti-social because our sense of what stuff we need is a function of social circumstance. When most people own cell phones we will also feel that cell phones are a necessity. In our unequal, unstable, and consumer-focused moment the list of things we need is apparently endless. Thus, to discard anything, we need some distance from other people and their implicit expectations.
Kondo’s emphasis on the individual and on getting rid of stuff reminds me of our relatively frequent contributor, Thoreau. When Thoreau went to the woods he said he went to find the true necessaries of life. But like Kondo, like me, probably like you, he wasn’t able or willing to free himself entirely from social life. His sisters, for example, did his laundry. For most readers who don’t simply ignore this, it is a damning fault. And Thoreau invites this criticism by his strong language about necessity and the fools still caught up in the contemporary social whirl. But it’s possible that we take Thoreau more seriously than he took himself. His radical acts and strong language may be more for his own benefit than his readers: a way dig in his feet against the strong tide of the status quo.
Like Thoreau’s not-so-isolated cabin at Walden, Kondo’s purely internal “what sparks joy?” test may be a way to find whatever space we can from a toxic expectations. Or perhaps her vague test is just as likely to reproduce those expectations, except now unacknowledged and hidden even deeper in our soul. Hard to tell which one it is, but for now I’m a believer.
next post: try psychedelics. not too much. mostly in a therapeutic setting