I heard about it on podcasts, from coworkers and in-laws, saw it mentioned in magazines and online. If you have somehow managed to avoid The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, I congratulate you. It has sold eight million copies. I did not avoid it. I bought it and read it whole.
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I don’t take issue with Kondo herself. She’s not the source of my visceral rage and disgust, which have not dimmed with time. She seems delightful, charismatic, and smart. Kondo aficionados talk with reverence about her innovative tidying techniques, such as “vertical storage” and “handbag nesting.” It goes without saying that non–independently wealthy people do not have time to do the “KonMari method” on their homes, but I accept that this is a book for the leisure class, the Eat, Pray, Love conglomerate.
My problem is with the book’s effect on the American mind.
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Surround yourself only with what sparks joy. This is the foundation of Kondo’s method. How do you determine what sparks joy? She gives careful instructions: Make a tremendous pile of all your possessions, one category at a time—first all your clothes, then all your books, and so on. Take an item from the pile, hold it, and ask yourself, Does this spark joy? If the answer is not an immediate, spontaneous, rousing YES!!!, toss it. Go through every single one of your possessions this way. The entire process should be done “quickly,” in “about half a year.” When at last you rise like a long-winged heron from the wreckage, your consumer goods will have shrunk down to almost nothing, and each one will fill you with happiness.
Sounds inoffensive enough. Hey, if you want to spend six months sitting in piles of your stuff, that’s your business.
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I have stuff. I have so much stuff that I have an entire house with closets and drawers and bookshelves to put it. I have additional safety deposit boxes for my stuff: an office at work, a car with a glove box and trunk. There’s my invisible stuff, too, in my checking account and 401(k), which we all choose to agree “exists.” And—does this count as stuff?—I have all my “bookmarks” and “friends” and “followers” and “carts.” I am the target audience.
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At first glance this invitation to purge, this celebration of household minimalism, feels by its nature antimaterialistic. Get rid of all that crap! But it’s the opposite. The KonMarie method is no renunciation of worldly goods, no vow of poverty, no practice of detachment. There’s nothing in the book about the worthiness of living an ascetic or austere lifestyle in order to focus on good deeds, humility, deep thought, or anything we historically associate with purges of possessions, other than her weak platitudes in the final chapter about how “life truly begins after you have put your house in order.” No, the ambition is to walk through your rooms and be illumed by your possessions. It’s about becoming the best consumer you can be. It’s about consuming deeply, moving closer to enlightenment by choosing your consumer goods with care. “I can think of no greater happiness than to be surrounded only by the things I love. How about you?”
I think people like this book because it is pleasant and easy to sit around looking at your belongings, deciding which ones you like best, telling them so, and tenderly arranging them in places of honor. It is infantilizing, like telling us to line up our dolls or race cars and choose our favorites. It’s a three-year-old’s game. Sharing takes longer to learn. I think Americans like this book because it fits right into a Western tradition going back to the Renaissance, when rich people, “patrons,” would pay artists to paint them surrounded by all their favorite status-bearing stuff “to confirm their possession of all that was beautiful and desirable in the world” (to quote John Berger quoting Lévi-Strauss), including the painting itself.
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Of course, Kondo takes it a step further when she talks about our products’ feelings. If your possessions make you happy, Kondo says, they will be happy back because “all the things you own share the desire to be of use to you.” Think of this as metaphorical if you like (though she’s not), but you can’t dismiss it out of hand. Her insistence on this point is not incidental to the book. It overwhelms the text—pages and pages about unballing your socks so they can rest, stroking your off-season clothes and promising you’ll be back, thanking your necklaces for making you beautiful. By the end of the book she is extolling our possessions’ desire to serve us in long baroque passages.
Kondo worked as a Shinto shrine maiden in college, selling charms at a kiosk and keeping order for the shrine elder. She says she “didn’t practice Shintoism deeply” but it did influence the development of her method (animism often figures in discussions of Shinto). I respect this belief system, and I accept Kondo’s sincerity. But why is it that if I say cows don’t like having their babies forcibly taken away so humans can have cheese and ice cream, people tell me I’m anthropomorphizing, and yet these same people hold that saying your socks are sad because they don’t serve you is harmless or even helpful? I’ll tell you why: one is morally challenging, the other morally self-serving.
In the first case, when we imagine how animals feel, we attempt empathy, see them as agents separate from us, with their own desires that should be considered, desires that might not be specifically about pleasing us. We have cues to go on, such as fighting for their lives, howling, struggling to get away, and so on. In fact when we examine animal behavior, we often come to the uncomfortable conclusion that the vast majority—just about every bird, reptile, fish, mammal, and insect that ever lived—specifically desire not to be of use to us. (No, dogs are not an exception. Dogs want to be an important part of the pack, to be the top dog’s right-hand dog, as it were, not to be “of use” to humans.)
Meanwhile Kondo’s personifying of consumer goods is all about us. Objects are turned into subjects. With no proof whatsoever she decides that these subjects want to be our subjects, to be subjected to us. But even if you grant subjective natures to inanimate objects, all of our experiences with animate beings show that they don’t want to serve us, so why should we assume that inanimate objects would?
I ask you, is there any image more gross than an upper-middle-class American standing over their possessions and imagining that everything in view wants to serve them? That’s some evil shit. The United States was born, raged, and has wrestled with such an image. We have failed and continue to fail when it comes to our relationships to living beings, human and nonhuman. It is dangerous to pretend, even metaphorically, like your consumer products are happy when they serve you.
While I don’t fault Kondo for her spiritual tradition, I do fault her for hiding these important moral questions behind a cutesy curtain of phrases like “tidying up.”
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Americans are the greatest consumers the planet has ever seen. We are perfecting the art of consumerism, transforming our bodies and minds into products—what, with our ridiculous tracking devices (how much and what kind of sleep am I getting? did I take the right number of steps today? what is my heart rate right now? I must, must know!) and our meditation American-style: listen to the breath, look inward so that you will one day be able to look outward. (But looking inward is a lifelong project! We may never look outward, so busy will we be counting our breaths, measuring them on our devices, trying to decide if we have the right amount of joy.) Kondo’s book is merely another twig on the sprawling tree of twenty-first-century radical self-obsession: Do I love this item? Does it spark joy? Yes or no?
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Yes or no. The flattening and dulling of the mind and the heart and the landscape. Pick a side on the great widening divide.
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Friends, the solution to a cluttered mind and a cluttered home is not to hold your products close and whisper to them. Why not instead pick up every rock, hold it, feel joy, put it back? (Don’t decide which rock is best, they are all just fine. And don’t take them home.) Why not instead feel joy at every birdsong? Say to the birdsong: You spark joy, but also sadness because we hear fewer of you every year, and our great-grandchildren may hear none at all. (Our world is getting darker, not brighter.) Look at animals you would normally eat and note their gracefulness and independence. Sit in the airport and look at strangers, one by one, and ask yourself: Can I be sparked by joy when I look at this person? What is their specialness, their singular dignity? How are they part of my web and what responsibility do I have to them?
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There is one thing I do admire about Kondo’s method. She doesn’t ask us why a thing sparks joy. She appeals to the mystery in each of us, she understands our hearts are unique and private, full of ambiguity and nuance and complexity. But she points us in the wrong direction, aligns consumerism and spirituality, values human happiness over all else.
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To emphasize joy as the most important emotion is dangerous. And to seek to derive it from your belongings is dangerous. It is orienting yourself toward your living space as a consumer. (You deserve joy. Didn’t you pay for it?) And to spend an entire day—no, an entire week, no, six months—holding and asking each shoe and book and towel, Are you serving me quite how I want you to?, you bet it will magically transform you. It will make you worse.
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My hope for you: I hope your consumer products do not spark joy. Joy doesn’t come from a dress or any other object. It comes from being whole, from having deep connections with living beings, hard work that inspires you, artistic or philosophical revelations. Joy contains grief.
Kondo’s method will leave you deadened. There you’ll be: surrounded by all your beautiful carefully chosen products, with no more empathy than when you started. Meanwhile, outside your silent apartment, people suffer and the Earth dies all around—all the fish, all the frogs, all the elephants, and birds. Millions of people are locked in concrete warehouses on barren landscapes and left there. The world is warming by degrees. But joyful you! You are looking into your trim closet. One word pounds in your tidy mind like a heartbeat. Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of five books.