One of the most repeated purposes in the lists of the entire planet is to do a general cleaning. It doesn't matter if it's clothes cabinets, watercolor brushes or pans, the important thing is to start the year knowing that we won't die buried by an avalanche of pots and pans when we open any door in our house.
Netflix knows this and that is why it has released the series Let's Tidy Up with Marie Kondo! the same New Year's Day. The platform's new proposal adapts to the star format of the United States' earthly reality - that of radical changes - to transform the homes of families with Diogenes syndrome. To do this, they have the help of the guru of order, best-selling writer with more than 10 million copies sold, and promoter of a successful YouTube channel where she breaks down her Konmari method.
The program has eight episodes in which the Japanese offers brief tricks to the protagonists to discard everything that does not bring them happiness. She also teaches how to fold shirts and socks, how to organize filing cabinets and how to reduce household items by more than half. In case there was anyone left without knowing her after the publication of her book The Magic of Order, in 2014, Netflix has improvised a solution: Marie Kondo is officially the network phenomenon of the first week of the year.
Now, is her method as illuminating as the data suggests? We haven't finished deciding, that's why we dedicate the first duel of the year to her figure. As always, we want to read your opinion in the comments, and don't forget to participate in the final poll.
I've been folding socks for three years without balling them up. This is one of the lessons from Marie Kondo's book so that they don't "suffer" from the elastic, they don't get deformed and take up less space. I've always taken all my clothes out on the bed before deciding what to keep and what not, but since I read your book I do it by "categories", a good way to appreciate that there are too many skirts, too many dresses, too many bags. Ever since I started folding t-shirts awkwardly to store them upright in the drawer, I've been rediscovering them instead of always putting the same two on top of the stack.
These three tricks have made my life better in the daily routine, which is what counts. Unlike most happiness gurus, Marie Kondo's advice is practical, and whether you believe it or not, you already have a tidy closet.
I also thought that this book could have been written by my mother. But no. If a new Japanese who hardly speaks English has sold 10 million copies and has a star show on Netflix, it is because she has achieved two achievements that my mother did not think of: systematizing the process and making it enjoyable thanks to the goal of making you happier. . The criterion to keep or not the mountain of objects that we have around us is not the classic "it's a closet bottom", "just in case" or "for what it cost me". Does it make you happy or not? It sounds corny, but what better criteria can there be?
I haven't yet thanked dresses for her service or done little circles on the floor to introduce myself to a house, but to recognize the emotional connection we have with what we wear every day is to appreciate our surroundings more.
The basic idea of the compulsive order is to face our compulsive consumption, which is probably more serious. It is not enough to donate clothes, whose production is one of the main causes of pollution on the planet: you have to buy less. And choose more.
I only give away or donate repeated or recognized irrelevance books, but the analysis of what is in the library and why is also useful. The supposed ideal of keeping 30 books, in reality, is a caricature of Marie Kondo because her advice is to keep what makes you happy, no matter how many.
The desire to reduce Marie Kondo to a cliché has a lot to do with the stereotype of the tidy and annoying mother that is normalized and that we should update. The latest Netflix star may help to discover that the order is neither feminine nor capricious.
To assume that Marie Kondo could have been our mother, or any of us, is blatantly arrogant. Who has not felt the need to organize t-shirts by shades of Pantone at some time? And who has not been desperate not to find the Tiger Lily color and has thrown them all to the back of the closet? Perhaps we could have been Marie Kondo, but only Marie Kondo is capable of amassing millions by smiling sweetly at Diogenes.
There is no data on the people that the Konmari method has saved from chaos, but of course she has convinced 10 million to buy her book The Magic of Order in forty different countries. Without going into the quality of a self-help manual that combines oriental philosophy and feng shui, the magic of this guru of order is reduced to folding shirts like a burrito and not matching different socks with a similar pattern (a war that Kondo should give up).
These tips may be valuable, but the philosophy of the method revolves around a complex idea: associate objects with happiness. And he doesn't mean that metaphorically. In the Netflix series, Tidying up with Marie Kondo!, the Japanese invites the protagonists to grab things, bring them close to their chests and feel their cells rise when they see them. In English she calls it sparkle joy and she shows it by closing her eyes with a childish expression and letting out the occasional little scream.
The goal is to fill as many garbage bags as possible, taking advantage of the fact that it is difficult to feel sparks of emotion when hugging the last pair of pants we bought on sale. Nobody can deny that, at least in the series, transforming houses that look like landfills into something akin to a minimalist home brings peace. But not even Kondo has much influence in this process. She just goes, she politely tells them they have a lot of crap, she shows them how to make a matryoshka out of boxes, and congratulates them for piling up mountains of garbage bags on the porch at the end of the process.
Where this enormous amount of waste goes next is something that Marie Kondo does not deal with, but that she should take into account. The culture of disposableness is not the answer to extreme consumerism. Neither are donations to charity.
And, going back to sparkle joy, one of the most controversial measures of her method is to keep only 30 books at home. Books and personal documents are perhaps the only objects capable of causing the materialistic binge that Kondo describes, and yet she wants to apply an ERE to them. As they say in The Guardian, literature should not only cause happiness, but also disturbance and discomfort, that's why we need a full and messy bookstore.
It is sadly true that we accumulate countless things that we do not need and that this surplus is damaging the planet. But it's not something Marie Kondo discovered (and to be fair, she doesn't brag about it, either). As in everything, the useful thing would be to apply some advice and not get carried away by phenomena. Because, after all, you are the only one who has to find the Lily of the Tiger T-shirt and be comfortable with a chaotic shelf full of great books.
