The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: Joy to the world
Last year at the Japan Society cultural centre in New York, she mounted a stage in an ivory dress and silver heels, made namaste hands (palms together gesture) at the audience and took her place beneath the display of a PowerPoint presentation.
Now that she has sold nearly six million copies of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and has been on the New York Times best-seller list for well over a year and counting, she was taking the next logical step: a formal training programme for her KonMari method, certifying her acolytes to bring the joy and weightlessness and upward-pointing trajectory of a clutter-free life to others.
The humble hashtag that attended this event was #organizetheworld.
Upon entering the Japan Society, the 93 Konverts in attendance (and me) were given lanyards that contained our information: our names, where we live and an option of either the proud âTidying Completed!â or the shameful âTidying Not Yet Completed!â
To be considered tidy, you must have completed the method outlined in Kondoâs book. It includes something called a âonce-in-a-lifetime tidying marathonâ, which means piling five categories of material possessions â clothing, books, papers, miscellaneous items and sentimental items, including photos, in that order â one at a time, surveying how much of each you have, seeing that itâs way too much and then holding each item to see if it sparks joy in your body.
The ones that spark joy get to stay. The ones that donât get a heartfelt and generous goodbye, via actual verbal communication, and are then sent on their way to their next life.
This is the crux of the KonMari â that soon-to-be-trademarked nickname â and it is detailed in The Life-Changing Magic and her more recent book, Spark Joy, which, as far as I can tell, is a more specific The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up but with folding diagrams.
She is often mistaken for someone who thinks you shouldnât own anything, but thatâs wrong. Rather, she thinks you can own as much or as little as you like, as long as every possession brings you true joy.
Her book was published in the United States in 2014, quietly and to zero fanfare and acclaim. Kondoâs inability to speak English made promotional radio and talk-show appearances hard sells.
But one day, a New York Times Home section reporter happened upon the book and wrote an article discussing her own attempt at KonMari-ing her closets; the book caught fire.
Soon it was the subject of every kind of press: the adoring profile, the womenâs magazine listicle, the feminist takedown, the personal essay, the op-ed of harrumph (âThe Real Reasons Marie Kondoâs Life-Changing Magic Doesnât Work for Parentsâ), the talk show folding demonstration, the joke on The Mindy Project, a parody book called The Life-Changing Magic Of Not Giving A [Expletive],â and another one called The Joy of Leaving Your [expletive] All Over the Place.
By the time her book arrived, we had entered a time of peak stuff but hadnât (and still havenât) learned how to dispose of them.
We were caught between an older generation that bought a phone in 1970 for a few euro that was still working and a generation that bought iPhones worth hundreds, knowing they would have to replace them within two years. We had the old phone and the iPhone, and we couldnât dispose of either. We were burdened by our stuff; we were drowning in it.
People had an unnaturally strong reaction to the arrival of this woman and her promises of life-changing magic.
There were people who had been doing home organising for years by then, and they sniffed at her severe methods. (One professional American organiser sent me a picture of a copy of Kondoâs book, annotated with green sticky notes, marking where she approved of the advice and pink ones where she disapproved. The green numbered 16; the pink numbered more than 50).
But then there were the women who knew that Kondo was speaking directly to them. They called themselves Konverts, and they say their lives have truly changed as a result of using her decluttering methods: They could see their way out of the stuff by aiming upward.
At the Japan Society event, we were split into workshop groups, where we explained to one another what had brought us here and what we had got out of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
Most of the women at the event could not claim âtidying completed!â status; only 27 in the room did, or less than a third. One woman in my group who had finished her tidying, Susan, expressed genuine consternation that a bunch of women who wanted to become KonMari tidying consultants hadnât even âcompleted tidying!â
How were they going to tidy someone elseâs home when they couldnât even get their own in order? How could they possibly know how profoundly life could improve if they hadnât yet completed their tidying?
A woman named Diana, who wore star-and-flower earrings, said that before she tidied, her life was out of control. Her job had been recently eliminated when she found the book.
âItâs a powerful message for women that you should be surrounded by things that make you happy,â she said, and her and everyone elseâs faces engaged in wide-eyed, open-mouthed incredulous agreement, nodding emphatically up and down, skull to spine and chin to chest.
âI found the opposite of happiness is not sadness,â Diana told us. âItâs chaos.â Another woman said she KonMaried a bad boyfriend.
Having tidied everything in her home and finding she still distinctly lacked happiness, she held her boyfriend in her hands, realised he no longer sparked joy and got rid of him.
During her lecture, Marie demonstrated how the body feels when it finds tidying joy. Her right arm pointed upward, her left leg bent in a display of glee or flying or something aerial and upright, her body arranged Iâm-a-little-teacup-style, and a tiny hand gesture accompanied by a noise that sounded like âkyongâ.
Joy isnât just happy; joy is efficient and adorable. A lack of joy, on the other hand, she represented with a different pose, planting both feet and slumping her frame downward with a sudden visible depletion of energy. When Kondo enacted the lack of joy, she appeared grayer and instantly older.
There isnât a specific enough name for the absence of joy; it is every emotion that isnât pure happiness, and maybe it doesnât deserve a name, so quickly must it be expunged from your life. It does, however, have a sound effect: âzmmp.â Joy is the only goal, Kondo said, and the room nodded, yes, yes, in emphatic agreement, heads bobbing and mouths agape in wonder that something so simple needed to be taught to them.
âMy dream is to organise the world,â Kondo said as she wrapped up her talk. The crowd cheered, and Kondo raised her arms into the air like Rocky.
She did not set out to become a superpower in the already booming world of professional organisation. It just sort of happened to her, a natural outgrowth of a lifelong obsession with carefully curating her belongings.
When she was a little girl, she read all of her motherâs homemaking magazines, and as early as elementary school began researching various tidying methods, so disquieted was her brain by her familyâs possessions.
Kondo recalls that the national library of Japan held a large collection of tidying, decluttering and organising books, but it didnât admit anyone under 18. Kondo spent her 18th birthday there.
hen she was 19, her friends began offering her money for her tidying services. At the time, she was enrolled at Tokyo Womanâs Christian University, studying sociology, with a concentration on gender.
She happened upon a book called Women With Attention Deficit Disorder, by Sari Solden, and in it there was a discussion over women who are too distracted to clean their homes. Kondo was disturbed that there was little consideration that a man might pick up the slack in this regard, that a woman with ADD was somehow broken because she couldnât tidy.
But, she conceded, buried in this outrageous notion was a core truth: that women have a closer connection to their surroundings than men do. She realised that the work she was doing as a tidying consultant was far more psychological than it was practical.
Tidying wasnât just a function of your physical space; it was a function of your soul. After college she found work at a staffing agency but continued to take tidying jobs in the early mornings and late evenings, initially charging $100 per five-hour block. Eventually she quit her job, and soon, even working at tidying full time, the wait list for her services reached six months.
When she enters a new home, Kondo says, she sits down in the middle of the floor to greet the space. She says that to fold a shirt the way everyone folds a shirt (a floppy rectangle) instead of the way she thinks you should (a tight mass of dignified envelope-shaped fabric so tensile that it could stand upright) is to deprive that shirt of the dignity it requires to continue its work, i.e. hanging off your shoulders until bedtime.
She would like your socks to rest. She would like your coins to be treated with respect. She thinks your tights are choking when you tie them off in the middle. She would like you to thank your clothes for how hard they work and ensure that they get adequate relaxation between wearings.
Before you throw them out â and hoo boy will you be throwing them out â she wants you to thank them for their service. She wants you to thank that blue dress you never wore, tell it how grateful you are that it taught you how blue wasnât really your colour and that you canât really pull off an empire waist.
She wants you to override the instinct to keep a certain thing because an HGTV show or a home-design magazine or a Pinterest page said it would brighten up your room or make your life better. She wants you to possess your possessions on your own terms, not theirs. (This very simple notion has proved to be incredibly controversial, but more on that later.) She is tiny â just 4-foot-8.
When I interviewed her, not only did her feet not touch the ground when we were sitting, but her knees didnât even bend over the side of the couch. When she speaks, she remains pleasant-faced and smiling; she moves her hands around, framing the air in front of her, as if she were Tom Cruise in Minority Report.
The only visible possessions in her hotel room for a two-week trip from Tokyo were her husbandâs laptop and a small silver suitcase the size of a typical manâs briefcase. She has a long fringe that obscure her eyebrows, and that fact â along with the fact that her mouth never changes from a faint smile â contributes to a sense that she is participating in more of a pageant than an interview, which possibly is what it does feel like when big-boned American interviewers whose gargantuan feet do touch the ground come to your hotel room and start jawing at you through an interpreter.
Her ankles are skinny but her wrists are muscular. When she shows pictures of herself in places she has tidied, before she starts, she looks like a lost sparrow in a tornado. On the other side, in the âafterâ picture, it is hard to believe that such a creature could effect such change.
Her success has taken her by surprise. She never thought someone could become so famous for tidying that it would be hard to walk down the street in Tokyo.
âI feel I am busy all the time and I work all the time,â she said, and she did not seem so happy about this, though her faint smile never wavered. She sticks with speaking and press appearances and relegates her business to her handlers â the team of men who pop out of nowhere to surround any woman with a good idea. She feels as if she never has any free time.
I spent a few days with her accompanied by her entire operation (eight people total). I attended her Rachael Ray TV appearance, where she was pitted against the showâs in-house organiser, Peter Walsh, in what must have been the modern talk showâs least fair fight ever.
Kondo was asked about her philosophies, and she relayed her answers through her interpreter, but when Walsh countered by explaining why an organising solution Kondo offered was nice but didnât quite work in the United States, his response was never translated back to Kondo, so how was she supposed to refute it? She stood to the side, smiling and nodding as he proceeded.
Had she been told what Walsh was saying, she would say to him what she said to me, that yes, America is a little different from Japan, but ultimately itâs all the same. Weâre all the same in that weâre enticed into the false illusion of happiness through material purchase.
Kondo does not feel threatened by different philosophies of organisation. âI think his method is pretty great too,â she told me later.
She leaves room for something that people donât often give her credit for: that the KonMari method might not be your speed. âI think itâs good to have different types of organising methods,â she continued, âbecause my method might not spark joy with some people, but his method might.â
In Japan, there are at least 30 organising associations, whereas in the United States we have just one major group, the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO).
ondo herself has never heard of NAPO, though she did tell me that she knows that the profession exists in the United States. âI havenât had a chance to talk to anyone in particular, but what Iâve heard is that thanks to my book and organising method, now the organising industry in general kind of bloomed and got a spotlight on it,â she said, though I cannot imagine who told her this.
âThey kind of thanked me for how my book or method changed the course of the organising industry in America.â The women (and maybe three or four men) of NAPO would beg to differ. More than 600 of them descended on Atlanta for NAPOâs annual meeting last summer.
They refer to this gathering only as Conference, no article, the way that insiders call the CIA just CIA. I went along, too, to better understand the state of stuff in America, and to study Kondoâs competition.
When you receive your Conference lanyard, you can add sticky ribbons to it that say anything from your level of participation in NAPO (chapter president, former board member, golden circle, NAPO Cares, etc.) to where youâre from (a choice of the 41 states represented) to what your state of mind is (Diva, Lazy, High Maintenance, Happy to Be Here, Really?, Caution: Might Burst Into Show Tunes!). Once you are completely categorised, you can enjoy Conference.
At Conference, I met women who organise basements. I met women who organise digital clutter. I met women who organise photos. I met women who categorised themselves as âsolopreneursâ, which, whatâs that now?
I met a woman who organises thoughts, and please donât move onto the next sentence until youâve truly absorbed that: I met a woman who charges $100 per hour for the organisation of thoughts. I heard the word âdetritusâ pronounced three different ways.
I went to a seminar on closets and pantries that I hoped would be, I donât know, more spiritual than it was, or at the very least address the problem of the cans of beans I keep buying and not using. But the woman droned on and on and on about shelving units, and the pesky corner cabinets and how they misuse valuable space.
Conference was different from the KonMari events that I attended. Whereas Kondo does not believe that you need to buy anything to organise and that storage systems provide only the illusion of tidiness, the women of Conference traded recon on timesaving apps, label makers, the best kind of Sharpie, the best tool they own (âsupersticky notes,â âdrawer dividersâ) and the best practices regarding clients who wouldnât offer their organisation goals in a timely manner.
While NAPO members donât share any standardised method for organising â the group offers certification classes, but each woman I spoke with has her own approach â they are fairly unified in their disdain for this Japanese interloper.
They have waged a war through their fuming blog posts and their generally disgusted conversations, saying that she is a product only of good marketing, that sheâs not doing anything different from what theyâve been doing since she was in diapers. They donât like that thereâs a prescribed order for tidying; they think you have to yield to what your client wants done and has time for.
They donât like the once-in-a-lifetime tidying marathon, which on average is completed in six months; sometimes organising is a many yearsâ effort or an ongoing one. They donât like that she hasnât really addressed what to do with all your kidsâ stuff and how to handle them.
They donât like that you have to get rid of all of your papers, which is actually a misnomer: Kondo just says you should limit them because theyâre incapable of sparking joy, and you should confine them to three folders: needs immediate attention, must be kept for now, must be kept forever.
t the opening night cocktails/trade show, I stood in front of the booth of a man advertising his cleaning service, which can tidy up crime scenes as well as hoardersâ homes, and I asked some women eating spring rolls what they had against Kondo.
The nice ones, struggling for something that wasnât overtly bitchy to say, said they appreciated that the popularity of her book has brought attention to their industry, which still lobbies to be recognised by the government as an official occupation. (Until that happens, the NAPO women will have to continue calling themselves âinterior designersâ or âpersonal assistantsâ; they would prefer âproductivity consultants.â)
But they also feel as if theyâve been doing this for years, that âshe just has one hell of a marketing machine, but sheâs doing nothing thatâs so different from us,â at least three of them said to me.
Yet each organiser I spoke with said that she had the same fundamental plan that Kondo did, that the client should purge (they cry âpurgeâ for what Kondo gently calls âdiscardingâ) what is no longer needed or wanted; somehow the extra step of thanking the object or folding it a little differently enrages them.
This rage hides behind the notion that things are different in America and elsewhere, that our lives are more complicated and our stuff is more burdensome and our decisions are harder to make.
âItâs a book if youâre a 20-something Japanese girl and you live at home and you still have a bunch of your Hello Kitty toys and stuff,â another NAPO member told me, which, while not the only thing a professional organiser told me that was tinged with an aggressive xenophobia and racism, it is the only one that can run in this article.
They even hate Kondoâs verbiage. The word she uses, âtidying,â is annoying and arcane to them. âTidying is what you do before your mother-in-law comes over,â said one woman, while her two friends nodded. In addition, what Kondo offers is limited.
Ellen Faye, the president of NAPO, told me the night before: âYou know, I have a client who got me the book, who said, âHere, Ellen, read the book.â I did page through it. I think her first book is kind of like the grapefruit diet; that thereâs nothing wrong with just eating grapefruit. Itâs not going to get it all done. I mean grapefruitâs great for losing weight, and what she says is great for bringing order to your life, but itâs not the whole picture. Itâs just a narrow slice.â
Ultimately, the women of NAPO said that Kondoâs methods were too draconian and that the clients they knew couldnât live in Kondoâs world. They had jobs and children, and they needed baby steps and hand-holding and maintenance plans. They needed someone to do for them what they couldnât naturally do for themselves.
At the lounge, which included space for mindful coloring, I suggested to the organisers present that maybe the most potent difference between Kondo and the NAPO women is that the NAPO women seek to make a clientâs life good by organising their stuff; Kondo, on the other hand, leads with her spiritual mission, to change their lives through magic.
With her rigid once-in-a-lifetime tidying marathon directive (no baby steps, no âslow and steady wins the raceâ), she is a little like the grapefruit diet: simple and extreme and incredibly hard.
A woman who was colouring heard my theory and rolled her eyes. Her name was Heather Ahern, an organiser in Massachusetts for nearly 13 years, and she deals mostly with a clientele who were surviving something hard: divorce, death, loss â when, for example, their loved ones have no idea how to access any of their online accounts and delete them.
âDo you know how many dead people are on LinkedIn?â she asked me. (The correct answer to this is not: I donât know, all of them?) âFor some of my clients, just making it better is OK,â she said. âThey donât want a perfect house. There is no perfect house.â
But Kondo would agree with that.
âI guess itâs the process,â Ahern said of what bothers her most about Kondo. Ahernâs philosophy is about process as much as about results.
âI see that my clients are just too fragile to do that,â she said. We got up to go back to our rooms to briefly abandon our business-casual for formal in preparation for the Black and White Ball, where the NAPO women would cut loose as much as their personalities would allow them by doing karaoke to Eminem and dancing to âBaby Got Back.â
Jenny Ning was self-conscious about being one of Kondoâs only employees who had not yet finished tidying(!). What could Kondo possibly think of an employee representing KonMari Inc to her American base not having her own house in order?
Weâd been through a lot together, Ning and I. Kondo needed an interpreter to speak with me, so I spent a lot of my reporting time outside our interviews with Ning. We attended the events and meetings, clueless in our non-Japanese-speaking, and I watched as she negotiated decisions about the certification programme, which will cost around $1,500 for a three-day session, and a newsletter they were toying with.
ast year, when Kondo visited San Francisco, she came to Ningâs studio apartment, and Ning said she felt very ashamed when Kondo opened her closet. Kondo would visit San Francisco again to introduce the consultancy and maybe even before, and Ning told me she wanted to tidy and to show Kondo the progress. I asked if I could come along and maybe help Ning complete her tidying.
When Ning was little, she loved to collect things: stamps, stickers, pencils. She was never overwhelmed by her stuff. She thinks of her childhood bedroom as âvery happy.â But as she grew into adulthood, she kept buying clothing: far too much of it.
She went to work in finance, but she found the work empty and meaningless. She would come home and find herself overwhelmed by her stuff. So she began searching for âminimalismâ on the internet almost constantly, happening on Pinterest pages of beautiful, empty bathrooms and kitchens, and she began to imagine that it was her stuff that was weighing her down.
She read philosophy blogs about materialism and the accumulation of objects. âThey just all talked about feeling lighter,â she said, with one leg folded under her and another on the floor as she sat on her bed, which no longer sparks joy and which she would sell in the coming weeks. Ning wanted that lightness.
And here, at this moment in the story, Ning began to cry. âI never knew how to get here from there,â she said. Ning looked around her apartment, which is spare. She loves it here now, but that seemed impossible just a couple of years ago.
She found Kondoâs book, and she felt better immediately, just having read it. She began tidying, and immediately she lost three pounds. She had been trying to lose weight forever, and then suddenly, without effort, three pounds, just gone.
One day, she was texting a friend, saying that she thought she could live her ideal life if only she could work as Kondoâs assistant. It happened that Kondo was in San Francisco and, even better, she was speaking across the street from Ningâs finance job.
After the talk, Ning tried to speak with Kondo, but she walked away with only a KonMari business card from one of Kondoâs associates. She didnât hear anything initially when she wrote to the address.
Undeterred, she quit her job and arranged a trip to Japan. There, she finally talked to associates of Kondoâs who told her of their plans to expand into the United States.
Could Ning help? Could she! Ning worked free for KonMari Inc. for five months, before landing a salaried position. She donated the suits that she wore to her finance job and hung up all of her yoga clothing in her closet, even though, technically, KonMari does not endorse hanging leisure wear, but that is all she wears now, and all Iâve seen her wear, from the yoga class we did together to the professional events we attended.
Ning has thrown away her collections. She has gone to her familyâs home in San Diego and thrown away whatever was left there too. She wiped her tears and leaned in and told me, like a secret, that she has kept one collection: the stickers. She asked me if I wanted to see her album.
She pulled it out from under her bed, pages and pages of Snoopy stickers and stickers of frogs and cupcakes and bunnies in raincoats playing in puddles and Easter baskets. She smiled down at them and touched a few while I thumbed through the pages.
She asked if I wanted to watch her KonMari her pantry, and I said yes, of course I did. I sat next to her shelf full of books with names like Secrets of Self-Healing and Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life and How to Be Idle and The Art of Serenity. We threw away expired gum and some Chinese healing herbs whose purpose Ning could no longer remember.
A week later, I was on another assignment, still using the same notebook from the Kondo story. As I flipped through it, passing through the pages of my notes from my time with Ning, I noticed that a tiny blue butterfly sticker had escaped her collection and landed on a page. When I saw the sticker, I froze and put my finger on it.
I had had a sticker album, too. It had stickers that smelled like candy canes and purple. It had bubbly heart stickers and star stickers and Mork & Mindy stickers and Peanuts stickers, too.
I went abroad for a year to Israel after high school. While I was there, the boiler in my house in Brooklyn exploded and a soot fire destroyed all our possessions.
âEveryone is OK, but there was a fire,â my father said when I called. What happened after I got off the phone still confounds me: I returned to my dorm room, and when my roommate asked me how things were at home, I told her they were fine, and we went to sleep. In the middle of the night, I woke my roommate up, telling her that my house burned down. She told me it was a dream, and I kept telling her I had just forgotten to tell her. She didnât believe me for days.
never saw my sticker album again. I never saw anything again. After the place was cleared out, my mother was able to save a few photo albums, because they were closed when the soot invaded the basement and covered and ruined all the surfaces.
When I look at the pictures, I donât ever notice how young or cute my sisters and I were. I look in the background for the items that lie in the incidental path of my motherâs Canon. I try to remember what they smelled like or why we owned them or where we put them.
I try to think of what my life would have been like if Iâd returned home to what I left behind, the way my friends were able to return to their homes to what theyâd left behind and keep returning, after they finished college and after they got married and after they had kids.
I try to think of who Iâd be if I werenât in the habit of looking at my home before I left it each day and mentally preparing myself for the possibility that nothing I owned would be there when I got home that night. I try to know what feelings my lost objects, which I forget more and more as the years pass, would evoke if I could hold them in my hands, KonMari style, like a new kitten.
Some would bring joy and some would not, but Iâm not someone who thinks that joy is the only valid emotion. I try to remember what I no longer can because, in terms of my possessions, it is as if I was born on my 19th birthday.
The reason I bring this up is to tell you that you could not have any stuff at all, much less too much stuff, and still be totally messed up about it.
The reason I tell you this is so that you know that that tiny butterfly sticker has been the same burden to me as any hoarderâs yield. Nostalgia is a beast, and that is either a good reason to KonMari your life, or a terrible one, depending on how you want to live.
The last time I saw Marie Kondo, we were in a hotel room in Midtown, a different one, and still the only visible objects in it were that metal suitcase and her husbandâs laptop. But one item had been removed from the suitcase: a spray bottle that she keeps around.
She sprays it into the air and the scent signals to her that she is finished working for the day, that her obligations, which seem endless lately, are done.
I told her that, to my observation, a company trying to grow the way hers was trying to grow seemed at odds with the personality of someone who required such extreme measures for peace in the first place.
âI do feel overwhelmed,â she told me, and she gave me one note of a quiet laugh. People demand a lot of her, not really understanding you donât go into a business like tidying if youâre able to handle a normal influx of activity and material. The world really likes her for her quirks. They make for good headlines and certainly sell books, but nobody seems to be able to truly accept and accommodate them.
I think the NAPO women have Kondo wrong. She is not one of them, intent on competing for their market share. She is not part of a breed of alpha-organiser âsolopreneursâ bent on dominating the world, despite her hashtag.
She has more in common with her clients. But when it comes to stuff, we are all the same. Once weâve divided all the drawers and eliminated that which does not bring us joy and categorised ourselves within an inch of our lives, weâll find that the person lying beneath all the stuff was still just plain old us. We are all a mess, even when weâre done tidying.
At least Kondo knows it. âI was always more comfortable talking to objects than people,â she told me. At that moment, I could tell that if she had her way, I would leave the hotel room and she would spray her spray and be left alone, so she could ask the empty room if she could clean it.
