Stop what you’re doing. Really. Put down your phone, and before reading any further go through the following flowchart:
- Have you bought Marie Kondo’s book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up? If yes, good. If no, proceed to 2.
- Go to your hamper.
- Pick out the dirtiest, smelliest sock from all the way at the bottom.
- Stuff it into your mouth.
You’ll probably notice that this is extremely gross. Congratulations, you have now been properly punished for not immediately buying this tiny, wonderful book. I honestly don’t know how you expect us to advance as a civilization when people like Marie Kondo take the time to write books like this and we (civilization) don’t adhere to her wisdom.
Admittedly, you probably have heard of her by now. The book has sold something like 50 billion copies, and Marie Kondo now has a Netflix show where she shows people how to tidy up. I’m probably just feeling silly that I didn’t know about this earlier and compensating. But for the tens of people that haven’t heard about her yet, this is for you.
It all sounds quite banal: combing through your possessions, deciding which to keep, and then storing the ones you want to keep in an intelligent way. But this is a case of 1+1=3. The whole is really more than the sum of the parts, here. There is something utterly freeing, enjoyable, and even addictive about her methodology of choosing, discarding, and storing.
Famously, it revolves around the concept of keeping only the objects that “spark joy.” You make a big pile of all your stuff, going through each one and holding it in your hands. It’s refreshingly simple. You make your way through clothes, paper, sentimental items, books, and desk items, carefully gauging your emotional reaction to each one.
First, you experience a pleasant, subtly wistful feeling of time passing, like a deep exhale. You appreciate which clothes have soldiered on since high school, and which ones just won’t make the cut. You comb through old letters, reliving old birthdays and holidays, tracing the connections between the item and the person or place it came from. You also start to realize how much just how much stuff you actually have.
Then the experience really starts blossoming. As you go through each item you enter a flow-state, conducting a meditative tour of yourself via the medium of underwear. You finish one drawer excited for the next one. What missing article of clothing will be buried on the bottom? What item you loathe have you now been given permission to jettison? What thing, once forgotten, will be found?
The feeling of rediscovery spreads. You finish your drawer, and then it’s on to the closet, under the bed, the storage areas, the bathroom. I recently threw out four garbage bags full of utterly unneeded stuff, as well as a fifth one with clothes for goodwill. You find yourself looking at your entire apartment (your life??) differently.
But it goes even beyond that. I started going through my phone, deleting old whatsapp notes and unused apps. I’ve been going to bed earlier, waking up earlier, going to the gym more. I became a sort of evangelical Kondoite, texting pictures of my newly sorted drawers to my wife and tsk-tsk’ing her about a jacket slung over a chair. She was a disbeliever at first. But lo, the awesome cleansing power of the KonMarie method was too much for her to resist. Within hours, she was diving headlong into her drawers, reorganizing her closet, and filling trashbags with unneeded jetsam.
Where does this all lead? I don’t know. I can’t promise that it will enrich you, solve global warming, or help elect a new president. But I think it does do something to tangible you. It’s like a firmware upgrade to your brain. Like the technique itself, the effect on your life is subtle yet persistent. It’s a reminder to fight off the entropy of our daily lives with a bit more vigor. To respect yourself and your surroundings more. To care more.
That all being said, I may just be crazy. In that case, this might not be nearly as rewarding for you as it was for me. Even then, you at least get a set of organized drawers out of it.
Thank you for your time, everyone, you can go about your lives again.
You can take the sock out of your mouth now.