‘Rid your life of anything that does not spark joy’. I’m starting with Marie Kondo

It is an act of radical social disobedience to criticise the cult of Marie Kondo. The Japanese “professional organiser” has a totalitarian hold on the global middle-class mind. More than 13 million copies of her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up are at large in at least 44 countries, with 150,000 sold in Australia alone. Kondo has Netflix shows and was one of Time‘s most influential people in 2015 (alongside Kanye West, Elizabeth Holmes and Vladimir Putin – not Time’s most glorious year).

Like Marcus Aurelius, Dale Carnegie and Mrs Beeton before her, Marie Kondo gives people a list telling them how to live. If the KonMari™ method has one unifying principle, it is to rid your life of anything that does not “spark joy”.

Illustration: Dionne Gain. Credit:

This is not the only rule. There is Rule 2: “Imagine Your Ideal Lifestyle”. Rule 5: “Follow The Right Order”. Rule 7: “Who Controls the Past Controls the Future”. (Actually, that last one is from George Orwell’s 1984. KonMari™ has only six rules.)

To make room for neo-Kondo franchises such as The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning to Lighten Up!, bookstores and streaming services dedicate whole sections (tastefully spread out) to the moral benefits of purging your life of any excess baggage.

Conversely, it’s hard to find titles like The Joy of Clutter or Heavy Up! which, if they existed, would be in the overflowing mess of the self-published Satanic worship section. Cluttering gets a bad rap today. Hoarding endangers health just like obesity. In societies where de-cluttering is both a dominant aesthetic and a sign of moral soundness, to accumulate is heresy. Such a pity that we all do it.

KonMari™ applies to every corner of life but particularly for those moving from a larger to a smaller home, something I’ve been doing lately. I might be speaking for a rebel minority here, but the first thing I noticed about KonMari™ was its doublethink: holding “two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them”.

Moving house, I’ve tried to cull possessions. “Ask yourself if it sparks joy,” Marie purrs through my headphones. OK then. I get no joy from clothing, cutlery, crockery, bathroom items, medications. Little joy from furniture other than an ancient beanbag and bed.

On the other hand, I get a great deal of joy – “a little thrill, as if the cells in your body are slowly rising”, as Marie defines it – from all the things Kondo and the prophets of purgation tell us to get rid of. I get joy from books, keepsakes, diaries, dusty old gifts from friends or family, photos, cards from my children, orders of funeral services, childhood memorabilia, all the material that sticks to us as we roll through life like balls of lint.

If I really followed KonMari™ and kept only what sparks joy, I would be naked, in a beanbag, eating takeaway while wallowing in photos from decades ago, aerograms from my grandparents, childhood picture books and my 1978 collection of Scanlens footy cards. My cells slowly rise at the idea of drowning in so much clutter.

As for books, Marie says you must keep no more than 30. “Discard anything you haven’t used in two years,” she intones. Only keep those you constantly refer to, such as The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Or, as it was put in 1984: “The best books are those that tell you what you know already.”

The KonMari method dictates that you strive to only keep objects that “spark joy” and then organise them according to her strict system, with clothes folded into neat rectangles and stored vertically.Credit: iStock

KonMari™ is a big problem when the books that spark the most joy are the ones you’ve accumulated over your lifetime, which may come into emergency use at any moment. Anyway, there are thousands of them in this house, so with respect, KonMari™, you can fold your gear into a rectangle and roll that rectangle into a cylinder and don’t let the door hit you on your way out.

It will be no surprise that Kondo’s six rules are supplemented by paid courses in tidying, services to hire a tidying consultant, courses to train yourself to become a tidying consultant, and a vast retail organisation where you can buy an infinity of new clutter: candles, cookware, cosmetics, knickknacks, accessories, even bookends for those 30 books you’re permitted to keep. But don’t worry about holding “two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them”. KonMari™ resolves its doublethink with the rule of “for every piece of crap you buy, throw a piece of crap out” (I paraphrase). Or as Orwell put it, “It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another.”

Instead of purification, which is what it looks like, KonMari™ creates a perfect little consumerist squirrel wheel to make you keep on buying until, like the Swedes, you die in a house with only new things in it.

“Imagine your ideal lifestyle,” Kondo whispers. Imagine being a billionaire. “I don’t want all this shit!” protests Logan Roy in Succession, speaking for the billionairish desire to de-clutter.

Today’s billionaires only clutter their lives with unnecessary investments and extra homes that can sit empty during a housing shortage.

Domestically, they are like monks. Household accumulation – overstacked bookshelves, disorganised sock drawers, jumpers spilling out of your woollies cupboard – is a povvo thing, like overeating fast food.

“Fatness used to be a symbol of wealth and lack of need – and therefore desirable – whereas thinness was associated with poverty – and therefore undesirable. In contemporary times some trends have flipped,” Maxine Woolhouse, a senior lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Beckett University, told Dazed magazine for a recent article titled “Why don’t rich people eat anymore?” The article went on to list tech billionaires like Jack Dorsey and Bryan Johnson, as well as celebrities such as Bella Hadid, who had more or less given up eating.

Ozempic, the billionaire’s preferred weight-loss drug, is time-efficient because it eliminates all that wasteful eating time. Assuming that the habits of billionaires set a cultural tone – hello, marrying at 93 in your sneakers! – the pure air marketed by KonMari™ and the de-cluttering industry sell you a billionaire lifestyle at a fraction of the cost. You can even buy empty second houses just like them.

As well as motivate you to keep spending, the cult of minimalism orders you (there’s a reason it’s called putting your life in “order”) to stop remembering. KonMari™ insists you throw out your old photos with a Japanese purification ritual, kissing them and thanking them for what they have given you before tossing them into landfill, where magically they don’t take up space any more.

Alternatively, you could disobey orders and follow a different rule: just keep them.

The cult also has a political dimension. Governments are clutter. We remove them not based on their effectiveness but because we get sick of the sight of them. In a time of decreasing attention spans, the government that is given its turn until it is time to give the other lot a turn now has a KonMari™ lifespan: about two years, judging by the polls.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for tidying up and getting organised, in theory anyway. But the clutter from our past can save us from losing our minds to the all-consuming swirl of the memory-sucking present. Living in the past, living with objects from your past surrounding you, is not a categorical evil. Clutter is another word for connection – to our past, to our minorities of one.

A member of our family prepared for the move by rounding up everything in his room and heaving it into a garbage bag. Why? He had to be somewhere right now. He was too busy. The present day had him where it wanted him. “Who controls the present controls the past,” says Big Brother. Coincidentally, a copy of 1984 had to be fished out of that bag.

Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and regular columnist.