April 21st, 2019

Rose-coloured reviews The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up

I occasionally read self-help books. I don’t often have the patience but once in a while something crosses my radar and sounds intriguing. I do like to run a lean operation at home, but find myself tripped up by extra stuff time and again, so this book sounded useful. Couple that with the inane hot takes you read in the media–angry people sounding off in reputable newspapers about a book they clearly hadn’t read just because they don’t want to take advice no one said they had too. I always like to be able to counter that sort of BS with an informed opinion. So I read the Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo.

The first thing about this book, which you probably know unless you live in a cave, is that isn’t really about tidying up–it’s about throwing things away. So although my home is, like the one I grew up in, a relatively tidying place with a lot of stuff neatly organized, Marie Kondo disapproves. And so really do I. I have a lot of things I don’t need to have–old papers, books I’m never going to read again, clothes I don’t want to wear. Even though I have, for the moment, sufficient space for them and am able to keep them tidy, I would have more space and less dusting to do if I just got rid of them all. And then I’d have an easier time finding my remaining, actually desirable, stuff. I would also have room for more better stuff or just flexibility to downsize, should it ever come to that.

That’s the point of Kondo’s book, more or less, but she loses track of it a few times, such is her fiery certainty that it is inherently bad to have excess stuff, and that purging for purging’s sake is worthwhile. She compares un-Kondo-fied homes to “storage sheds” a number of times and is dismissive of just not wanting to take the time to sort through all your sh*t and get rid of the excess. I can think of half a dozen things I should toss right now, if I had the energy to go hunt them down, assemble them, and find the correct method of disposal. But I am not going to do that–i’m going write this post. And my day–and my life–are going to be totally fine.

Kondo’s life-changing method of getting rid of stuff is a good one–I totally agree with her that if you’re going to purge your stuff, you should actually take the clothes out of the closet or the books off the shelves, and look at each individual item one by one and decide: stay or go. Her description of this process is looking for a “thrill of joy” that will tell you you should keep the item–otherwise, trash it. She’s gotten a lot of mockery for that phrase, because no one feels a thrill at a dictionary or a bottle of cough syrup, and yet we should probably keep both. I also read an article that said the phrase was mistranslated from the Japanese, but basically I think those that harp on it are being willfully obtuse–I think that we all know Kondo is asking us to find a reason to keep EACH fun run t-shirt and novel about a troubled marriage. No categorical imperatives, no laziness. And humans are lazy! If the books are on the shelf, and effort would only be expended if we found one that had to go and had to remove it into the giveaway box, of course our brains would contrive to keep as many as possible. It’s only when everything’s on the floor and we move every book, either into the stay or keep pile, that the brain’s laziness can’t win out. Kondo isn’t stupid.

She does appear to work mainly with wealthy people, or the non-working partners of wealthy people, though. She says to properly execute her method on an entire family home would take about six months of hard work, and I believe her. I can live with a little extraneous matter in order not to spend six month living in chaos and devoting my energies to staring at old t-shirts. It’s not that I don’t think it’s worth doing–it’s just that so many other things are MORE worth doing, and I need to earn a living and cook dinner and write a book.

She doesn’t appear to comprehend that viewpoint. All the anecdotes included in the book to apparently make the author “relatable”–tales of how she started getting to home organization at age 5, how she spent every afternoon and evening after school throughout elementary and high school attempting to organize and purge items from her home, how she was an ignored middle child and she thought all this “tidying” would earn her parents’ notice and approval–made me really uncomfortable. She has obviously found great success with this book, so a lot of people must have actually read and liked it–I read the thing cover to cover, and found it kind of creepy and grim.

Also, for a book about getting organized, Magic is quite disorganized. Tonnes on how to choose a box, nothing about furniture. Endless pages devoted to books and especially clothes, but almost nothing about organizing a kitchen or a home office, the two areas that I don’t find necessarily intuitive to organize but are frustrating if they are aren’t set up well (clothes go in a bureau or in a closet, books go on a shelf, what else is there to say??) There is a very verbose description of how to fold clothes that I couldn’t make heads or tails of when a couple diagrams would have solved the problem in seconds–there are no illustrations in the entire book for some reason (I wound up getting the folding thing explained on Kondo’s TV show’s first episode). There isn’t really any acknowledgement that it’s 2019 and fewer and fewer people keep photo albums, or any physical form of music or movies, or even books–but they might need some help organizing their digital manifestation of these things. The section on organizing documents is almost entirely devoted to product warranties and instruction manuals–does no one pay taxes or sign contracts in Japan? It’s all very odd.

In the end, I would compare Magic to Gary Chapman’s self-help book The Five Love Languages. The core idea of each book is very insightful, and it would do most of us a lot of good to think it over in detail, but neither Kondo nor Chapman is a writer, whatever other qualifications they have in their respective fields, and their books are weird and annoying to read (Chapman’s, which I also read in full, is written in a old-school Christian framework for marriage and loaded with example couples where the man is “a good provider” and the wife “a good homemaker” though there are a few sops to dual income and even same sex couples–Chapman’s ideas could would used extremely productively by anyone, but he can’t quite make himself write that convincingly).

So spend ten minutes reading an article about The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (honestly I think this blog post might almost have covered it) and decide if you want and need to do the work to purge your home of excess. I have no doubt it would be a good thing to do, though I probably won’t.