Gratitude - Tidying Up With Marie Kondo (2019)
I know people make a lot of fun of Marie Kondo, but I felt like her book was the first organizational guide I’ve ever read that acknowledged people having an emotional attachment to possessions as natural and healthy, instead of telling you you’re an awful person for feeling sad over objects.
Once again a reminder that many of the objections and bitching and mocking of Marie Kondo was rooted deeply in racism.
Marie Kondo is a genuinely good individual who the US absolutely did not deserve. Thank you Marie Kondo, you spark joy in me.
The only real problem I had with her methods was that some of them assume you have money.
If you don’t use an item just throw it away and if you need it later you’ll get another one. If someone is living paycheck to paycheck or in poverty that’s just not good advice. No matter how much junk they have stuffed in their space.
It also feels potentially very wasteful because not every item is something you can donate or sell so it would create unnecessary waste when you could have waited and used the one you already had.
If you actually read her book she still says that you need to readjust your concept of spark joy to include things that give you the security of owning it, even if they don’t make you happy or whatever. So if you’re holding onto something, evaluate if you can see yourself actually using it in the future, enjoy the security of having there as a back up or just, in general, actually seeing yourself having a use for it rather than holding onto it from a vague sense of guilt.
It’s the whole point of being thankful to your possessions. If you’re holding onto them because they will be there when you need it (even if you don’t gain joy from the item itself), it’s a form of gratitude you can bring forward to the things you keep in your life.
If you read her book, you see her specific example of how she got rid of her screwdriver because she thought she never used it, then eventually realized that she did indeed use it, if only rarely, and there was nothing else that would work as well for the job as a screwdriver, and that is what specifically inspired her to think of things in terms of usefulness in the future, even if they don’t seem useful or joyful in the moment.
Konmari is not about getting rid of things, it’s about figuring out what to keep, and, as shown above, thanking the rest for helping you understand your needs more clearly.
Sorry, if you don’t understand “screwdrivers have uses” I’m not sure why I should listen to you.
She understood that “screwdrivers have uses” but she could not remember the last time she had personally used a screwdriver, so she concluded that having a screwdriver taking space in her possessions was not important to her. There’s a difference. Including that anecdote was her admitting that she made a mistake and learned from it, and I am not the kind of person who would criticize someone for that.
Ultimately, she also acknowledges that her approach is not for everyone, so, yes, there is absolutely no reason for you to listen to her, and that’s fine.
(I’m not even a Konmari True Believer. Her book helped me solidify approaches I was already intuitively kinda doing, especially after dealing with my parents’ possessions and how that made me feel about my own things. I do think some of her approaches are silly, and, yeah, years ago I absolutely would have rolled my eyes at it–now, I just ignore those parts.) (Incidentally, learning to ignore the parts I think are silly is the only way I’ve finally started exercising, because if I only accepted a YouTube exercise channel that aligned with my mindset 100%, I’d never find anything. Sometimes compromise means ignoring the ridiculous stuff.)
In particular, pretty much all of the stuff she says that comes off as woo is from her religion. It’s fine to ignore stuff from a religion you don’t follow! It’s fine if religiousness is a total dealbreaker for you and you don’t want to use her method! It’s fine if you’re tired of authors telling you what to do with your life in general! But the hatred of Marie Kondo was bullying - an American on Twitter set her up as outrage bait and people pack bonded over hating her.
