America, Kondo and clutter
>>> First, let’s take a moment to thank the table holding up your newspaper, or the chair you’re sitting in right now. ¶ Your computer and phone and furniture work very hard for you. They’re inanimate objects, yes. But think of how you’d feel if you lost them. ¶ We all have attachments to our things. And if you live in America, you probably have too many of those things. Enter Marie Kondo.
Her book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” first graced us in 2014. And now, she’s also a streaming sensation: Season 1 of “Tidying Up” went live on Netflix on Jan. 1, just in time to catch a nation of well-meaning but hungover resolution-makers.
Marie Kondo drops in on harried L.A.-area families not unlike Mary Poppins, armed in a uniform of spotless snow-white sweaters and floaty skirts and cheerfully bearing an armload of nested boxes. T-shirts are folded, books are tapped, papers and cords are wrangled, the house is thanked. When she departs, she leaves in her wake a beatifically serene family, secure in the knowledge that the carefully folded drawer contents and meticulously organized home will definitely, for sure, always look that way.
The tenets of “Marie Kondoing” your home are simple: Hold every item you own. If it sparks joy, keep it. If not, get rid of it.
If social media is any indication, the message has resonated. Since the show launched, America has collectively emptied its closets onto the bed. More than 94,000 Instagram posts are tagged #mariekondo, and she’s been mentioned on Twitter more than 80,000 times since Jan. 1.
Your clutter is you
It’s not surprising that the show is appealing to people, said Katie Kilroy-Marac, an assistant professor of anthropology at University of Toronto.
“This is a golden age of consumers” in America, said Kilroy-Marac, who studies material culture and ethical consumerism and has done research on hoarding. Collectively, she says, we’ve reached a breaking point: “We’re literally suffocating in our things.”
In America, what we buy is a reflection of who we are. I choose to purchase this book, this shirt, this kitchen gadget, because it is representative of who I am or hope to be. Even the word we use indicates that relationship: belongings. The clutter in your house was chosen by you, and it belongs to you. Your junk is you.
“Products give you a lot of value in different ways,” said Liad Weiss, an assistant professor of marketing and consumer psychology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There is the practical element but also the emotional attachment.”
Emotional attachments to our things make more sense to Americans than to Japanese people like Marie Kondo, said Hazel Rose Markus, a professor of psychology and a cultural scientist at Stanford. Japanese culture has much less of a focus on individuality and choice and much more on interdependence and doing the objectively “right” thing. For a Japanese person, buying something is a more objective experience, she explained. You bought it because it was the correct thing to buy, not because it spoke to your individual sensibilities.
That makes it a lot easier for Japanese people to get rid of their things, she said. If you didn’t choose it — if it does not reflect who you are as a person — it’s a lot easier to thank it and send it on its way.
Mess leads to stress
A not-insignificant part of the appeal of the show, and of the idea of Kondo-ing our own spaces, is the idea that being more organized would make us less stressed. Darby Saxbe, an assistant professor of psychology at USC, worked on the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families study as a graduate student. In it, researchers did observational studies of middleclass families around L.A., not unlike the ones featured in “Tidying Up.”
“One of the things that researchers noted to each other was what a clutter crisis our families seem to have,” Saxbe said.
For instance, almost none of the families surveyed used their garage to park their cars. They were used as extra storage space.
As part of the study, researchers videotaped families walking through their home and describing it. Then they measured the subjects’ cortisol levels, which is a hormone released when you experience stress. Women who used more words associated with clutter to describe their homes had “less optimal profiles of cortisol,” Saxbe said.
In other words: Mess leads to stress.
And it’s not surprising that that effect was noted in women. The house has traditionally been the woman’s domain, and it was the job of a wife and mother to keep it tidy. Now, more women work outside the home than in previous generations, but in many of those homes, the majority of housework and child care still falls to them.
“We traditionally think of the home as kind of a place of respite, a haven from the stress of the outside world,” Saxbe said. “But for many women particularly, the home ends up being its own source of chronic stress.”
So the idea of having someone magically appear in your house and show your husband and kids how to fold and put away their underwear — well, it’s not hard to imagine the appeal.
People are also drawn to the idea of “correcting” ourselves, said Dana Logan, a visiting professor of religious studies at Connecticut College. Think of all the most common New Year’s resolutions we make: Lose weight. Make a budget. Get out of debt. We detox, we cleanse, we become a thin person with a perfect credit score who reads “Infinite Jest” for fun.
So we end up with a kind of cultural whiplash. On one hand, we’re encouraged to buy things. On the other, we love to get rid of them. Think of the show “Hoarders,” of the tiny house movement, of #minimalism and no-spend challenges. We are caught in a cycle of consuming and rejecting. We celebrate both parts of that on social media, where we post photos of ourselves showing off new outfits and then videos of our drawers of freshly decluttered and folded Tshirts.
Belongings with spirit
Decluttering your closet, like any major transformation, can feel like a religious experience. (Ask anyone who’s just dropped seven boxes off at Goodwill how they feel.) Even Marie Kondo’s physical presence feels otherworldy: She’s tiny and she wears the same outfit all the time and she doesn’t speak English — like some kind of “spiritual alternative,” Logan said. On Twitter, someone referred to her as a “good witch” of “household spells and charms.”
Her approach to the house and belongings is also generally unfamiliar to most Americans, starting with thanking the house and including tapping your books to “wake them up” and thanking your things before getting rid of them.
A Guardian writer who took issue with Kondo’s approach to books called those behaviors “woo woo, non-sense territory.” But that kind of anthropomorphism is common in Japan, said Markus, the Stanford cultural scientist. Like America, Japan’s culture has deep roots in religion — Buddhism, Confucianism and Shintoism. They all have aspects of nondualism, which posits that everything has a spirit. In some ways, Markus said, that makes it easier to give away things like books: “Once you have the idea that a book has a spirit and could feel bad, it’s quite appealing” to give it away and let it be read by someone else.
The families are visibly moved in most episodes when Marie Kondo kneels down and thanks the house.
Even if you’re not prepared to embark on a full Kondo-ing, there are lessons to take away. Create an intentional relationship with the things you own. Treat your things with kindness. Be grateful to your belongings for what they do for you.
And don’t forget to thank your furniture.
Two-thirds of the people talking about Marie Kondo on Twitter are female, according to social media analytics