ARE you suddenly folding your socks into thirds?
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Are you arranging your bras into small boxes according to their Pantone colour and cup type?
Are you thanking your clothes for hanging around all of this time before stuffing them into plastic bags to give away to charity?
You’ve been Marie Kondo-ed!
On New Year's Day, Netflix released the series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, a minimalist home/life improvement show based on the popular 2014 book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and starring the book's author, Japanese organisation expert Marie Kondo.
In January I always try to do a pantry stocktake, pack away my daughters’ keepsake school work into cardboard boxes and go through their clothes/shoes for summer and the first school term.
In the interests of learning a better way to do it, I messily binged Tidying Up over three nights last week.
According to the Kondo method, you divide all of the stuff in your house into several categories, and then examine each item to see if it sparks joy. If it does, you keep that item. If it doesn't, you simply thank it, and kiss it goodbye.
It’s not rocket science, yet it is revolutionary to the people featured in the US-based series.
Kondo is a cleaning queen.
The last time I saw this type of TV adoration was in the early-noughties when Martha Stewart got a standing ovation for neatly folding a queen-sized fitted sheet down to almost nothing on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
How I willed those people to get back in their seats! It was embarrassing!!
When my daughters got wind of the KonMari regime to declutter they were happy to report that they were already across the folding methodology thanks to YouTube.
They roll their own clothes into suitcases whenever we go away for weekends and they laugh at my old-fashioned packing. I travel light though and I don’t need to create any extra space, I argue.
The last time I saw this type of TV adoration was in the early-noughties when Martha Stewart got a standing ovation for neatly folding a queen-sized fitted sheet down to almost nothing on The Oprah Winfrey Show. How I willed those people to get back in their seats!
My daughters decided they wanted to sort through their own clothes using the “Spark Joy” approach.
The eldest did her wardrobe with minimal fuss but she let go of a couple of Country Road items, which sparked less joy in me.
She proudly revealed four drawers with her remaining clothes; now in neat rows of origami rectangles. I told her there were two types of people in the world – folders and scrunchers – and I was the latter.
Later I overheard the eldest overseeing the youngest’s Kondo clean-out.
“Does this spark joy for you?” she said.
The youngest replied: “I really love that so, so, so, so, so much.
“But it actually doesn’t spark joy for me!”
When I went in her room to make sure the youngest fully appreciated the joy concept, I quickly got the short-shrift.
“I love that black top on you,” I said.
The youngest replied: “Me too. I’ll keep it.”
It obviously didn’t spark joy for the eldest, however, because that black top was back on the bottom of the out-pile when I last looked.
I have yet to tackle my wardrobe or even the pantry this summer, but I did clean out our vintage roll-top writing desk, which had become a dumping ground for random business cards and bric-a-brac.
I found spare house keys and, worse still, a recently-expired $50 Lowes voucher.
The Tidying Up series has sparked debate in the media and online about the value of this approach to decluttering.
A Kiwi columnist wrote that it was designed to appeal to rich people with OCD.
There’s probably an element of truth to that but hopefully it can motivate some people to streamline their worldly goods to reveal the bigger picture.
If people can learn to live with less stuff in their lives because they can actually see what they own in the first place, then that’s got to be a good thing.
If, however, people are purging huge amounts of stuff to simply replace it with huge amounts of different stuff (albeit neatly folded like paper cranes), then that’s a fat lot of good to them and the planet.
That sparks no joy in me at all!