Book review: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo

The thirty-fourth book I read in 2015 is The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo.  I have a long history with various decluttering schemes because I have always come from a house with clutter, a fact I attribute to a father who remembers the Depression and war rationing, a mother who grew up poor, and what I firmly believe to be a genetic predisposition to hoarding via my maternal grandmother's family.  Will this book make a difference in my life that its predecessors haven't?  Time will tell.

To begin with, Marie Kondo comes at the problem from the point of view of traditional Japanese Shintoism.  She preaches that clutter and unwanted/disused items have an actual negative energy that interferes with one's home and life and that clearing them out can directly affect one's health, career, and relationships.  I can't go there.  However, I know exactly what she's talking about when she writes that having items in our home that we don't really want negatively affects our mood and energy. There are things in my house that make me feel guilty when I look at them: I don't like them, but I am loathe to get rid of them because: someone gave it to me / I spent good money on it / what if I got rid of it and then found I needed it (after literal years of never touching it)?  Would my life and home be happier if I didn't have things I shut away, avert my eyes from, or try to avoid?  Yes, absolutely.

The heart of Kondo's system is picking up every item you own and asking yourself, "Does this spark joy?"  In a less precious wording, "Do I really love this, or is it just here because of inertia?" Life is too short (or, more to the point, one's available storage space is too small) to keep things one doesn't really love.  If you don't love it, toss it.

By this point, you've probably picked up on the catch.  Kondo's program is clearly pointed at single people in small apartments, a pretty good demographic in Japan.  But if you're a family of four in a suburban house, the biggest problem is going to be finding the time to touch every item you own and ask yourself the question.  (On the flip side, once you've successfully completed the system, having too much stuff shouldn't be a problem anymore.)

The problem is exacerbated by her insistence on decluttering by subject rather than by room, i.e., get every book in the house together and sort through them at once rather than running across as you move through.  This actually makes a great deal of sense: as she points out, it gives you an idea exactly how much of everything you have (and how much you need to keep/discard), and it also allows you to store all items in a single category together rather than scattered throughout the house. It also, of course, makes getting started a larger hurdle.

Another hurdle is her instruction not to let anyone else watch.  Again, this makes perfect sense.  The whole point is not to feel guilty about getting rid of what you don't want; someone saying, "But I like that. But I gave you that. But you can still use that," is counterproductive.  But for someone with a family, it limits when you can actually get anything done.

Although I haven't yet had the chance to begin her system by the book, due to the aforementioned hurdles, just reading the book inspired me enough to go through my closet and drawers and sort out a sizeable stack of things I don't really like wearing but have been keeping because it seems wasteful to give away perfectly good clothing.  I'm not sure I'm ever actually going to get a chance to do it her way, at least until I have an empty nest, but perhaps doing a bit in fits and starts will result in, if not "life-changing magic," at least less stuff in the house that makes me feel bad.