Tidying Up With Marie Kondo: Organizational Psychology

Honestly, I had no desire to watch Tidying Up With Marie Kondo. I am not a big fan of reality programming, and as someone who is generally quite organized, I didn't think there was anything I would get out of watching this show. But then, as always happens, I was bored, decided to watch Episode 1, thought it was OK and hit Play Next Episode, and suddenly the weekend was over and I had bingewatched all eight episodes. Oh Netflix, I'm such a sucker for you.

For the uninitiated, Marie Kondo is a Japanese organizational consultant who has spent years teaching her clients how to de-clutter their homes. Her books are bestsellers, so it only made sense for Netflix to cash in and give her a show where she visits different families in California and teaches them her patented KonMari method to get rid of clutter and then organize what's left. It's a soothing show that could turn into something predictable and rote, but the variety of families keeps things engaging. For someone like me, the fun of the show is watching how different people acclimate to the KonMari process, and suddenly discover items that spark joy.

"Sparking joy" is the central tenet of the KonMari philosophy. She doesn't want you to throw out everything in your house. Instead, she wants you to identify the items that spark joy for you and ensure you hang on to those. By eliminating the joyless artefacts in your home, you are now bathed in the glow of only joy-sparking items that you wish to take ahead with you in your life. The 5-stage process begins with clothes, then books, paper, Komono (aka, kitchen, bathroom, garage, toys, pet supplies, etc.: a miscellaneous catch-all depending on your living situation), and finally sentimental items. Sentiment is the final stage because at that point your joy-meter is fully tuned and you'll be able to select items that truly have meaning as opposed to junk you're hanging on to for less joyful reasons.

Each stage involves grabbing every single one of those items that are in the house and piling them up into a mountain in one place. This lets you see the wealth of stuff you've accumulated, and basically shames you. Then you start to sift through, donate the majority of things to charity, and figure out ways to tidily organize what's left. I am not currently concerned about clutter - I recently moved and was perfectly adept at donating everything that did not spark joy to Goodwill. But I did enjoy watching Kondo's approach to organization. For some reason, all of the families seemed to have a lot of drawers. I don't know about you, but my apartment is completely bereft of drawers, I have always lived out of shelves. As such, I didn't find much use in the KonMari method, unless I were to buy a ton of storage boxes to stack on my shelves. However, her folding method is strangely soothing, and you can bet that all my towels are now neatly rolled up, my fitted sheets are tamed into submission, and my unmentionables have been tucked onto my shelves in the optimal fashion, sans boxes.

What struck me is how so many of these families had never learned how to organize themselves from childhood, and as such they were taking these habits into adulthood and disrupting relationships with their partners and children. Episode 3 was my favorite, with a family of four that was wholly reliant on the mother to keep them organized. Marie Kondo is such a sweet and tiny lady, and yet over the course of that episode, she miraculously whipped that family into shape. She doesn't personally seem to do much, though behind-the-scenes it seems like she was supplying a ton of boxes and organizational advice that didn't make it to the screen. But the art of her method is that it forces the people themselves to figure out their own organizational system. She only supplies the tools - they have to do the heavy lifting. By the end of that episode, the kids knew how to keep their rooms clean, the dad was helping out around the home more, and mom felt less like a guilty witch who kept pestering her family to get the house in order.

If anything, this show is a brilliant sociological petri dish, showcasing how we live now, and the ever-pervasive gender roles that exist in the most enlightened households. Over the course of eight episodes we meet families of different races, classes, and sexual orientations, and yet they all are refreshingly alike in their desperation to de-clutter, get organized, and live joyful lives. If ever there was a show designed to reveal how all human beings are the same, Tidying Up With Marie Kondo is it. Turns out, no matter who you are, you cannot stand living in a messy home.