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Tidying Up Mantra

I received a copy of Marie Kondo's book as a gift and enjoyed reading it as a matter of curiosity. I live very sparsely and habitually organize things as a means of stress relief. After I am done, I often misremember what was bothering me in the first place - which is very therapeutic. So, I am not really in need of intervention to tidy up. Nevertheless, it was interesting to read Kondo's perspective on the topic. It did inspire me to clean up my closet in a big way. 

Being forced to think about why I am hanging on to clothes that are decades old, no longer wear and do not bring me any "joy" was instructive. It forced me to think about the real reasons for not letting go. In my case, a key driver was effort spent into finding the outfit. Clothes shopping does not come easily to me so everything I own took time to find. Tossing it into a discard pile made me think about the wasted hours that could have gone something more useful and permanent. 

There is some sense of failure associated with the act of discarding - if the job was done right, this would not be needed. If the item of clothing was of real value it would never need tossing out. In addition,  inertia and unwillingness to think about stuff we own is a cause of clutter. It is a lot easier to do nothing than to take some decisive action about stuff that is just sitting around and not causing you active distress. Despite the benefits of her ideas, this article on what is wrong with the current Kondo-mania in the West is exactly right. The author gets to the heart of the problem:

Both the urge to improve ourselves and the curiosity to look beyond our own boundaries seem salutary. The problem, though, is when doing so looks like one more iteration of what started our troubles in the first place. The distracted impulse to acquire the new and shiny, as well as the desperate hope that novelty might alleviate anhedonic consumerist malaise – these are why Kondo’s clients have houses overwhelmed with stuff. We have homes joylessly cluttered by the artefacts of a fruitless search for joy, or at least a reprieve from bathetic numbness.

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