The Joy of Minimalism at Home Will Drastically Simplify Your Days

Buy me a coffee. If you haven’t communed with your socks lately, thanked your shoes for their hard work, or bowed (at least mentally)…

If you haven’t communed with your socks lately, thanked your shoes for their hard work, or bowed (at least mentally) to your home in appreciation, maybe it’s time to consider doing so.

“It is very natural for me to say thank you to the goods that support us,” says Marie Kondo, whose method of lovingly connecting with belongings that “spark joy” and bidding a fond but firm farewell to the rest is popular in Japan and is now catching on elsewhere.

Kondo’s book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing is an international bestseller. She has been the subject of a movie in Japan and the waiting list for her services, once three months long, is now so extensive she has temporarily stopped accepting more clients.

Her “KonMarie method”, as she calls it in the miniature and illustration-free volume, encourages a rapid, dramatic, and transformative one-time organizing event completed methodically and lovingly in no more than six months. It is not an ongoing battle against clutter. Kondo sees tidying as a cheerful conversation in which anything that doesn’t “spark joy” is to be touched, thanked, and ceremonially sent towards a better life elsewhere, where it can discover a more appreciative owner.

The results can be life-changing, she says. Clients suddenly find themselves surrounded entirely by things that provide clarity, unencumbered by belongings that carry baggage (unwanted gifts, clothes that no longer fit) or anxieties about the future. Even her book, she says, should be quickly discarded when it’s no longer needed.

Part of what makes her method unusually speedy is that instead of decluttering room by room, she tackles belongings by subject, starting with what is most accessible to part with. So, she tackles all the clothes, books, documents, collections, and, last and most difficult, photos and mementos.

She says the focus should be on what to keep instead of deciding what to get rid of, which few things spark sufficient joy or are truly necessary.

But how do you contend with family members who are unready to join in the celebratory purge? If possible, carry the bags out of the house yourself.

“There’s no need to let your family know the details of what you throw out or donate,” she writes, although she advises against secretly disposing of other people’s things. “You can leave communal spaces to the end. The first step is to confront your stuff.”

After joyfully relegating mountains of unneeded or unloved belongings to charity or the bin, she turns to organize what is left. The key, she says, is storing things mostly in drawers, arranged so everything can be seen at a glance and nothing is stacked, a practice decidedly unkind to items at the bottom.

So T-shirts and socks (the ones you’ve kept because they make you happy) are rolled and arranged beautifully, like sushi in a bento box. Cupboards are meticulously reorganized to fit everything from electric fans (at the bottom) to spare blankets (on top).

Papers and documents—there won’t be many since few are truly necessary and they generally hold little joy—are likewise filed rather than stacked.

Kondo says she has been obsessed with tidying since she was five, opting to arrange shoes and pencils while other kids played outside. After years of work at a Shinto shrine, she began communing with her belongings in high school. She realized her calling as a professional consultant in attaining the joy of minimalism.

“The inside of a house or apartment after decluttering has much in common with a Shinto shrine … a place where there are no unnecessary things, and our thoughts become clear,” she says.

“It is the place where we appreciate all the things that support us. It is where we review and rethink ourselves.” Minimalism Tips.