Many of you have heard of Marie Kondo and about her KonMari method of organizing your home, so you may already know that you’ve gone about it wrong. It isn’t that you need to improve your systems for storing and arranging stuff. It’s that you need to throw your things away. If they don’t bring you joy, yes, joy, they have no place in your life. Old paperwork – joyless – chuck it. Extra buttons – joyless and useless (according to Kondo!). Toss ’em. Clothes you don’t wear – allow them to illuminate your abhorrence of them. Then say goodbye.
Don’t read this book if you are interested in keeping your things. Do read it if you’re curious about your relationship to things, like socks for instance. Keep them if they make you happy, and if they don’t, then don’t have socks.
I’m joking. Sort of. A phenomenal success, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up is telling us something important about our habits of endless consumption, and readers all over the world are giving it their attention.