Inner hoarder hides in the junk drawer
Marie Kondo has people looking at things anew, including psychology
It was a Tuesday night, and my husband was dutifully folding an undershirt into a neat origami square. “Does this look right?” he asked, holding up the painfully pretty white bundle as soothing music from a YouTube demo filled the room.
I nodded. I couldn’t do much more than that, because I was confronted with all the socks that I own, sitting on my bed, waiting for me to sort them. How could I own so many socks when it always seems like I’m almost out of them?
As you’ve probably gathered, my husband and I have been binge-watching the Netflix series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, in which the Japanese organizing guru cheerfully helps families bring order to their woefully cluttered homes. If you are one of the few people who have missed this frenzy (where have you been all winter?), Kondo is the author of the bestselling book The LifeChanging Magic of Tidying Up, whose KonMari housekeeping philosophy comes down to a simple axiom: If an item sparks joy, keep it. If not, thank it for its service and let it go.
Viewers watch as families spend exhausting weeks sorting through every item in their homes, facing down the sheer volume of their belongings and the strife that stuff often causes.
The end results are modest (in some episodes, it’s not clear that the participants parted with much at all.) Yet the goal is surprisingly ambitious: Give every item a place to call home and you can organize the junk drawer out of existence. Could you even imagine? Open any drawer, like this one at my desk where I am currently seated, and you are likely to find a motley assortment of objects. In this case: lip balm, a hair band, nine pens, three sample bottles of random lotions, a pair of old eyeglasses and some cables that don’t appear to belong to anything in particular. Oh, and a moulded imprint of my infant daughter’s foot, which would be really sweet except that she’s now 8. So why is it still in the drawer?
Anyone who’s moved from a small apartment to a larger one, or better yet, from an apartment to a house, has experienced that feeling of expansive space. So many closets! So much room to spread out! And yet, somewhere in the recesses of your mind, you know that eventually every nook and cranny will be filled. The stuff will come from somewhere — gifts, impulse purchases, office freebies — and take up residence in those empty drawers. But why? “Acquiring things actually feels good,” said Travis L. Osborne, a psychologist who treats hoarding and obsessivecompulsive disorder and is the director of the Anxiety Center at the Evidence Based Treatment Centers of Seattle.
“You get a little dopamine burst in your brain when you go shopping, so that behaviour is reinforcing, you want to do more of it.”
Because we accumulate objects in dribs and drabs over time without really paying much attention, “we can just sort of fill up space,” he said.
Rampant consumerism certainly plays a role in clutter, but it is not the only culprit. It’s also about the mould of my daughter’s footprint. Short of framing and hanging it (which is probably what I intended) it’s not the sort of item that has a natural home.
Without an alternative plan for where to put it, it ends up floating around the back of a drawer with all the other homeless objects. At best, it ends up in a clear plastic bin, tucked away in the attic until my daughter grows up and I can give her the entire bin of childhood memorabilia so she can figure out what to do with it.
“Acquiring things actually feels good. You get a little dopamine burst in your brain when you go shopping.” TRAVIS L. OSBORNE PSYCHOLOGIST