Tidy up but don’t mess up your mind
At the end of 2014, I bought 10 copies of Marie Kondo’s smash hit The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying and gave them to all my friends for Christmas. Half responded with delight and gleefully started throwing out most of their worldly goods, sending me photos of half-empty sock drawers containing a single neat row of rolled pairs.
The other half considered the thesis — which says you must only keep what gives you joy — and thought: tosh. What gave them joy was living in a muddle of cheerful clutter.
Either way, all my friends should have thrown their copy away by now, just as I have thrown mine. Every Kondo disciple knows that as soon as the book has done its job, it must be thanked and sent on its way.
The whole point of tidying Kondo-style is that you only do it once. This is a strength of the method but is a downer from a publishing point of view, as there is nothing left to say in a sequel. Indeed, ‘Spark Joy’ sparked in me nothing save mild boredom — and a worry that so much tidying had gone to Kondo’s head. She proudly declares that she has thrown out her speakers as she has worked out that if she turns up the volume on her headphones loud enough she can hear the noise they emit on the other side of the room.
Somewhere between the two books, Kondo has gone from enthusiast to fanatic. And like most fanatics she is dangerous, even to herself. At one point she lets slip that she is so keen on tidying that sometimes she forgets to eat for days at a stretch.
One of the best tips in the first book is to fold up your clothes small so you can see everything you have every time you open the drawer. I quickly learnt how to do it and am still doing a year later. The second volume builds on this with page upon page of diagrams on how to fold every different item in your wardrobe — as well as the instruction that folding must be done not with fingers but with the palm as it “emanates a warm ‘hand power’, which causes the fibres of the garment to stand up”.
A weakness of the first volume was Kondo’s approach to books, which she takes a dim view of altogether. The second volume hints at why she has so little time for them: she doesn’t know what they are for. “You can check whether or not they spark joy by putting your arms around the pile as though hugging it.”
This is a most unfair test in which to put a book. Books aren’t good at hugging — they are hard and dusty. There is one part of Spark Joy that is of genuine use and which received only a brief treatment in the earlier volume. This concerns the effect that being a Kondo convert has on the rest of your family.
During the past 12 months I have discovered that although faith in tidiness has made it easier picking which trousers to wear in the morning, it has made it harder living with other people. Kondo suggests two coping mechanisms. The first is to touch other people’s clutter. This, she thinks, will give you tolerance and understanding of it. The second is to do a lot of cleaning in order to distract your mind from your family’s piles of belongings. “Before you know it, you will be feeling calm and relieved.” On both counts she is mad. If I touch the broken skateboards, the yellowing piles of ancient newspapers, I get even crosser. And as for cleaning, far from feeling relieved it makes me feel so resentful that I usually end up chucking out a few things that don’t belong to me, just to calm myself.
There is only one way to live happily with people who have not been converted to the Kondo faith. It is to calm down and remind yourself people matter more than belongings.
The wrongness at the heart of the Kondo philosophy that it takes no account of this.
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