What I liked about the show is the positivity and the willingness to adapt her method to people’s specific needs.
Decluttering shows usually go like this: phase 1: shaming: “you’re messy hoarders, get rid of everything! Here’s a pile of stuff, only keep 20% of it!”
Phase 2: let’s bring in an entire team of cleaners and movers to empty this house. If it’s one of the fancier shows, they’ll also recarpet and repaint and get you all new furniture.
Phase 3: wow, your house is new so now your dad loves your mom again; we totes saved their marriage! Bye.
Marie Kindo’s show is different. It’s done with a lot of positivity.
There’s no shaming people over the state of their homes; there’s attention brought to why they need help with their homes (one lady was getting rid of her deceased husband’s things, a family had recently moved into a smaller place, a newly wed lesbian couple was trying to figure out how to combine their separate sets of possessions into one home, etc. - And by the way the show is inclusive. There are families of all colours, ages and same sex couples).
There’s no team of cleaners, movers or carpenters, you do the work by yourself. She just shows you tips on how to do it. That means it’s something i can reasonably apply to my own house.
And the focus is not so much on getting rid of things, but on what people decide to keep. If your husband loves this old Metallica t-shirt full of holes, he can keep it, she’ll show him a space to keep it in a way he can actually enjoy it rather than at the bottom of a drawer. There are very few shots of what people throw away. Most shows like this will bring in a big truck or even rent a warehouse with the stuff the family is throwing away: look at all that shit you had! In this, when there are shots of the things being taken out, it’s usually focused on the person and their feelings or lack thereof for the objects they’re throwing out. And the things are normally donated to charities.
In a way that show is not about minimalism, but about becoming more aware of our relationship with things. Why do we hang on to things that no longer have any use or that we never needed or liked? Do we still need to hang on to them? Do we want to? And if you do hang on to them, that’s fine in this show! You don’t want to get rid of all the half-used pens because you can’t really afford to buy new ones whenever you need? That’s fine, just have fun arranging them by colour! Give them a dedicated spot so you always know where they are!
There’s also a recognition that the whole process is hard work and takes time. The show compresses it to fit in an hour, but there are mentions of weeks passing, so you know it wasn’t done in a day. There’s an encouragement to have fun with it and understanding of the emotional aspect that means someone might need to do things differently or take more time ( the episode with the widow for example, where she advised to wait until the end to sort out the husband’s clothes, but the lady felt that was looming over her and she needed to do it now, so Marie said to do that if that’s how she feels about it. Other shows would have insisted on sticking to the rules and endeavoured to prove it was better to do it their way.).
And there’s no false promise. Tidying is an act of self-care, albeit a difficult time consuming one. The Kondo method encourages people to rethink their relationship to objects; and the show very subtly asks why it all falls on mom and makes you redistribute equitably (everyone is responsible for their own things and spaces). And these things have positive effects on how people live their lives and deal with each other. But she’s not promising it will cure your depression or save your marriage. What it will do is ensure your home doesn’t add to all the stress you’re already under. That’s all.
It’s strange to see all the hot takes on why Marie Kondo’s method is the worst. I haven’t seen a convincing argument on that. It all seems based on preconceived ideas of what these shows are normally like, and little attention is given to how this one is actually different (one article just said it’s different in a new agey sort of way; and there was a very vague sexist and racist implication in the way that argument was laid out. Like it’s not really quite serious because it came from a Japanese woman).
Shortly after I watched this, Netflix recommended I watched a show about how to live without a mortgage. In episode 1, the first person to show off her amazing mortgage free home was a lady who after explaining all the clever ways she dropped the price to build her house, very casually replied she only started with 70,000£ in her bank account. Please feel free to write all the hot takes you want about that one.
amandla
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