![]() ![]() ![]() Several more books and two Netflix series later, Kondo has succeeded in commercializing a movement whose underlying philosophy is anti-commercialism. Go through your house, she famously counseled, and keep things only if they “spark joy.” As if anyone should aspire to emulate somebody who recollects in her book: “At school, while other kids were playing dodgeball or skipping, I’d slip away to rearrange the bookshelves in our classroom.” “When you’ve finished putting your house in order, your life will change dramatically … You’ll feel your whole world brighten.” This was Marie Kondo’s promise in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, the 2010 book that launched her career-more than 8 million copies sold!-as the decluttering movement’s secular saint. The claims made for decluttering are lavish indeed. I recognize that I’m in the minority here. “People rarely take ownership for their own foibles,” Ferrari tsk-tsked. I confided that after the annual visits to my sister-in-law’s lovely house, with its gleaming tabletops, my wife is prone to suggest that we cancel our newspaper and magazine subscriptions. It can also put stress on relationships if you’re sharing a home with someone who has a different tolerance for mess.Ĭan’t knock a psychology professor for being perceptive. It’s expensive-the average American household, he said, contains $7,000 of unused stuff. It causes stress, by impinging on living space. “Do you need 15 pairs of blue pants?” he thundered. He is a psychology professor at DePaul University, a specialist in chronic procrastination, who co-authored a paper called “Having Less,” which the Journal of Consumer Affairs recently published. Ferrari shouted into his cellphone one evening in the run-up to Christmas, outside a store in Chicago where his wife was making an exchange. I stand against the zeitgeist, believing from personal experience that clutter can contribute to the warmth of hearth and home.Īs we stumble to the end of another holiday shopping season, I asked experts in the growing field of decluttering: Doesn’t clutter have an upside? Trendy are homes with minimalist furnishings and stark, cold surfaces-places I find, well, cold. Clutter, it seems, is now evidence of a character flaw. Read: The pandemic has made a mockery of minimalism ![]() I do not make the claim that having a messy desk implies being a genius, à la Edison or Einstein or Steve Jobs. It’s not too fanciful to suggest that the clutter on my desk sketches pretty accurately who I am. Possibly I could part with a flashlight, the coins, and the smaller Tibetan bowl, and yet I can’t. In addition to a computer, two telephones, and a TV remote, my desk at home is strewn with notebooks, folders, loose papers, birchbark, a modem, scraps of paper with notes to myself, photos of my wife and kids, flash drives, nail clippers, pens, coins, a stapler, a thesaurus, shopping receipts, a hand-grip strengthener, a blood-pressure cuff, two- and three-dimensional likenesses of Abraham Lincoln, four baseballs, three baseball caps, two 1909 baseball cards, two flashlights, a pair of AirPods, a miniature boxing glove my father gave me before I can remember, one Pokémon card, and two Tibetan bowls.īlame my childhood, if you like, in a small suburban house that was tidy verging on sterile, but I find it cozy and comforting to be surrounded by stuff. The horizontal surfaces in my family room are covered with newspapers, magazines, books I’ve started, books I intend to read, books I want to read but never will, erasable pens, a sweatshirt or two, a soccer ball, a bucket of toy cars, and wayward Legos that gouge my stockinged feet. ![]()
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