And Now, for Something Entirely Different (and Radical) in Decluttering

Just when you thought the decluttering craze was overcrowded with experts, in comes another contender. This time, it’s a young Japanese woman who has taken social media by storm. Her name is Marie Kondo and though she appears to weigh about 100 pounds, she is a heavy hitter, with a successful business, a Netflix show, and a book, to her name.

She is Marie Kondo, and she has become an instant star with a large following in the field of decluttering. She can be found on YouTube, where excerpts of her show outline the basic elements of her decluttering philosophy, which she calls the KondoMari method:

Her strategy differs radically from other popular schemes which suggest organizing your storage spaces first, in order to have room to store things you are not using instead of discarding them, or organizing space by space, kitchen first, bedroom next, and so on.

It’s shouldn’t be about merely putting things out of sight, Marie Kondo believes—that doesn’t address the underlying problem, and doesn’t change your attitude about accumulating stuff.

You must discard, she says, not merely reorganize your thousands of possessions. This requires that you change your mind about the things you own, visualizing the life you want to live, and how you will spend your time once you have your things in order. Unlike other systems which focus on what you want to get rid of, KondoMari, is centered on what you wish to keep, and whether or not it “brings joy” into your life.

It asks you to choose what to keep, not what to throw away. Marie suggests holding each item you possess in your hands, ask yourself if it “sparks joy.” Yes? Keep it. No? Discard it. This way, you only keep items that have meaning to you, and enrich your life.

She treats decluttering as a special event, accomplishing a complete decluttering all at once, not as a weekly or monthly purge Johnna Kaplan writing for the Spruce (01/25/19) says of Marie’s method:

“It has a mystical or spiritual component. Kondo believes not only that decluttering can change your life, but that it can result in clearer skin or weight loss. She also says items you are discarding should be “launched” on a “new journey” with a parting ceremony, and that you should “carry on a dialogue with your home while tidying.”

The next step, organizing, involves sorting by category, no matter where the items are scattered throughout your space, not sorting room by room, a strategy many organizers use.

It follows a particular order, beginning with clothes, books, papers, miscellany, mementos, then breaking down each category into smaller parts, in clothing, you might have tops, bottoms, jackets, socks etc.

Kondo advocates disposing of almost all papers and documents and keeping only the smallest collection of those items. This may sound extreme, since our emotions are frequently intertwined with these possessions. Her approach of ‘dialoguing’, of ‘looking for the joy,  in your things allows you to examine why you want to keep something. And that is, after all, the basis of our relationship with our possessions, and the underlying effects of hoarding, which is becoming a serious problem in our acquisitive culture.

Kondos’ method is not the only one which encourages us to look deeper at the reasons we buy and keep so many things. Most decluttering experts recommend that we examine why we value an item so much that we keep it in our space for years, even though they have long ago lost their usefulness.

Joshua Becker, who was one of the first on the scene of the now burgeoning movement of minimalism suggests these may be some of the reasons we buy more than we actually need:

• We believe possessions will make us more secure
• We think possessions will make us happy
• We are envious of others who own more
• We are trying to compensate for our deficiencies.
• We mistakenly look for confidence in the clothes we wear or the car we drive. We seek to recover from loss, loneliness, or heartache by purchasing unnecessary items.
• We seek to satisfy our discontent with material things.

These pursuits will never fully satisfy our needs and deficiencies, he says, since most of the time, they just keep us from ever even addressing them. To me, that rings true, since it seems, we can become so busy shopping for products, buying them, maintaining them, finding space for them, that we never take the time to consider and wrestle with why we buy more stuff than we need. He urges us to take a close look at the impulses which drive us, saying:

“Excess material possessions do not enrich our lives. In fact, buying things we don’t need keeps us from experiencing life-giving and life-freeing benefits. We would be wise to realize the cause and become vigilant in overcoming it. ”

A more troubling and persistent condition, related to the practise of excessively accumulating articles just for the sake of it is classified by American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, (DSM-5) as hoarding disorder, in which people become overwhelmed by their attachment to stuff. The language Hoarders use, “But I might need it someday!” is familiar to anyone who has a friend or a loved one who appears to be drowning in their stuff. The Association according to Johnna Kaplan, in another article for Spruce, classifies this difficult disorder with Obsessive Compulsive and Attention Deficit disorders, claiming:

“Because it is a chronic condition, hoarding disorder is often very difficult to treat. One common treatment option is psychotherapy, particularly Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, in which a patient learns to make decisions about objects and confront the emotions they feel about them”

Concern about the impact of over consumption and hoarding is increasing. Voices are finally being raised questioning the buying habits. of people living in affluent societies.Year after year, millions of tons of garbage is dumped into the ocean and landfills. Since the garbage mainly consists of plastics, it is largely indissoluble and accumulates in the ocean, causing suffocation and starvation of any unfortunate animal that mistakenly ingests it.

Pollution is the number one threat to all aquatic life and is a lead cause of reduced biodiversity. This is really sad given that water and water life-forms are some of the most important natural resources at our disposal.

Environmentalists, and all of us actually, need to be concerned about our over consumption, and the corporations that feed it. When we become serious about the problem, and radically limit our consumption, trust me, there will be no need for decluttering.