We don’t need Marie Kondo, we need self-control

You don’t need a reality show to get rid of your crap, you just need to move house a few times, writes Katy Hall. Nothing makes you declutter faster than knowing you’re paying someone to move it.

If there’s one thing the housing crisis is good for, it’s turning people into minimalists.

Where once my cupboard, chest of drawers, vacuum storage bags pushed under the bed and plastic tubs stacked in the garage ranneth over with clothing items from another time and body size, I am now positively at one with owning very little.

I want to say it’s thanks to Marie Kondo, the Japanese decluttering guru currently taking the world by storm thanks to her new Netflix series, her best-selling guide book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and her decluttering technique known as the KonMarie method, but really, it just comes down to having moved homes 13 times over the space of a decade (thanks, shaky rental market).

If you ask Kondo, the secret to purging yourself of all unnecessary worldly goods is to categorise everything before holding items to your chest and asking yourself whether or not they “spark joy”. Things like your wedding dress or your favourite pair of sneakers, for example, probably will. A pair of jeans you can no longer fit into and don’t remember buying in the first place, probably not so much. How you assess the joy of something like, say, a spatula, I’m not quite sure.

Tidying up with Marie Kondo has been a worldwide success for Netflix. Picture: supplied

For years people have been figuring out ways to surround themselves with less junk.

Skincare mogul Zoe Foster-Blake says she adheres to a “one in, one out” policy when it comes to adding new items to her wardrobe.

Another decluttering guru recommends placing all newly purchased items out of sight for a week. If, after seven days you are yearning for the purchase, it stays. If it doesn’t, it gets returned.

In order to curb my own terrible impulse shopping habit years ago, I introduced a self-imposed rule of waiting 24 hours before purchasing something that I’d seen and liked. Nine times out of ten I’d forgotten about it by the next day or it sold out, which my bank account considered ‘a sign’ that it was never meant to be.

In theory, this tidy and organised 2.0 environment, filled only with joy-sparking items, will change everything and help you live your best, decluttered life. And in practice, it holds relatively true.

When I moved house at the end of last year, the things I’ve held on to throughout the past decade — set lists from concerts, photos from overseas holidays, a novelty T-shirt that reads ‘Texas, it’s bigger than France’ — do bring me joy. And luckily, these things don’t take up much space.

Zoe Foster Blake has said she uses a “one in one out” rule to keep her wardrobe under control. Picture: supplied

But what if we were to skip Kondo’s process altogether and simply learn to stop buying so many things in the first place?

As anyone who has ever moved house will attest (AKA everyone), there’s a level of soul-destroying exhaustion that comes from packing boxes upon boxes of miscellaneous junk at one residence only to reverse the process at another days later. Or, in other words, the more times you repack and unpack things, the less you care about them — something Kondo and her followers don’t touch on.

Like diets, relationships and better health, everybody wants to know ‘the secret’ when it comes to feeling in control of the space in which we live. And for many, Marie Kondo and her organisation skills hold the answer. She offers reassurance that, despite having no self-control at the shopping mall, these messes of our own making can be rectified if we just work through the mayhem and master the ancient art of folding clothes and placing them where they belong. But what if there is no ‘secret’? What if tidying up isn’t a ‘magic art’? What if one day you just stop buying as much as you used to because you can’t face the prospect of one day having to pack it up?

Well, that’s probably for the next lifestyle guru to figure out.

Katy Hall is a RendezView writer and producer.

@katyhallway