Marie Kondo has big plans for us to tidy not
just our homes, but our entire lives. But when many have spent the past two
years on a relentless shopping spree, filling homes with Peloton bikes, fire
pits, and bread machines, are they still in the mood for Kondo’s minimalist
brand of tidying?
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The
Japanese decluttering guru certainly thinks so. She sees this moment as one to expand
her reach into office cubicles and even personal bathing routines. Last summer,
on “Sparking Joy with Marie Kondo,” a three-episode series that aired on
Netflix, viewers watched as Kondo persuaded small-business owners to embrace
the central tenet of her tidying method: keep the stuff that brings you joy and
toss the rest. She is now gearing up for the November release of her latest
book, “Marie Kondo’s Kurashi at Home,” which shows readers how to apply her
methods to every aspect of their lives. Among her suggestions: Practice
“joy-spotting,” an exercise that loosely translates to “stop and smell the
roses,” and one she urges for her 4 million Instagram followers.
“As we return to
the office or develop new ways of working in a hybrid model, there is no better
time than now to reflect on what sparks joy,” Kondo told me in an email
interview.
Kondo entered
the American consciousness with her 2014 book, “
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” a runaway success that transformed her name into a verb: “Kondo”
your sock drawer and get a handle on your life. In 2016, the year she released
“Spark Joy,” an illustrated guide on how to fold shirts and find your personal
“power spot,” Kondo proclaimed that Americans had reached peak stuff.
She may have
spoken too soon. The past two years have shown that we are nowhere near the
peak of the consumerist mountain. When the
pandemic hit, many promptly turned
their extended isolation into an opportunity to buy stuff for their homes. Even
a breakdown in the global supply chain, rising gas prices, and inflation could
not slow our drive to spend. We took shipping delays and supply shortages as
challenges that turned shopping into a marathon sport. An eight-month wait for
a sofa? No problem. Spending on home renovations hit a four-year high this
year, according to a Houzz survey.
During the
height of the pandemic, when social lives and activities were limited, shopping
“was probably one of the few things that a lot of people could do that actually
felt good,” said Travis Osborne, director of the Anxiety Center at the Evidence
Based Treatment Centers of
Seattle. “Shopping and consuming are reinforcing
behaviors. At a brain level, neurochemicals that are related to feeling good
get released when we buy things.”
And so we did it
with gusto. But now that we’re returning to a life lived outside our homes,
Kondo is here to remind us that all those Instant Pots and inflatable pools
might not bring us much joy anymore, if they ever did.
Cue the great
pandemic purge. Last month,
Martha Stewart held a two-day tag sale at her farm
in Bedford, New York, where she sold her own stuff — lawn furniture, wicker
baskets, Christmas ornaments, and, according to a Curbed reporter, $40
ornamental concrete leaves. Tickets to the event started at $250.
Homeowners
looking for guidance on where to put all the stuff they’ve acquired can now
turn to the second season of “Get Organized with the Home Edit,” which Netflix
released April 1, and where the perky home-organizing duo of Clea Shearer and
Joanna Teplin spin overstuffed kitchen pantries into Instagram-worthy displays.
As much as we
like to shop, we might also like to purge. We do not enjoy a decluttered home
so much as we enjoy the act of decluttering it, according to Dr Tal Ben-Shahar,
the director of the new masters in happiness studies graduate program at
Centenary University in
New Jersey, who points out that people derive happiness
from experiences, not objects. “Once it’s done, once it’s over, we adapt very
quickly,” he said. “But it’s the process that yielded the joy, not the
outcome.”
Shopping gives
us new stuff to purge, but decluttering also gives us opportunities to shop —
as Kondo knows well.
She sells a line
of baskets, boxes, and bins at the Container Store, with options like a
serenity jewelry box insert for $14.99 or a calm file box for $49.99.
Decluttering hopefuls
can also shop directly from Kondo’s website. The $55 Indigo Shibori Dye Kit,
for instance, is marketed as an opportunity to find joy. What’s more joyful
than learning a traditional tie-dyeing method? But it serves another purpose:
When you are all done tie-dyeing those tea towels, and they no longer spark
joy, you have got new material to toss.
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