What the Marie Kondo show is missing
Embrace your guilt — it’s telling you something
Like many of you, Marie Kondo’s Tidying Up show struck a nerve for me. I, too, have plans to KonMari the heck out of my cluttered house this year. The simple fact though is that — like losing weight — many of us will put the pounds of clutter right back on unless we change our relationship to things and consumption.
Kondo has great advice she uses to allay the mounting anxiety her clients feel when they consider getting rid of their piles of stuff: It’s not about what to discard, it’s about what to keep. While this may be a helpful mantra for decluttering, I would add another: It’s not just about what to discard, it’s about what not to buy in the first place.
One thing I struggle with in the KonMari method is the premise that we should let go of guilt when tidying and discarding. If we express gratitude for our things, Kondo advises, then it is ok to discard them. Yet I think that guilt is actually an important emotion we should pay more attention to, because it is connected to the empathy we feel for the people and environment that suffer to produce our things. Instead, we should hold on to that guilt and let it inform us the next time we think about buying something new.
That’s why I highly recommend checking out the documentary The True Cost (also on Netflix) alongside your Tidying Up binge fest. The documentary shines a light on the consequences of fast fashion. To some extent it highlights what most of us already know by now: the fashion industry and cheap, unsustainable clothing has a devastating effect on people and the environment. But even if we are aware, it is powerful to see and hear the suffering and ecological consequences instead of just reading or hearing about it.
It’s not just about consuming either; it’s also about discarding. What happens when we follow the KonMari method, bag up our clothes, and send them to Goodwill or other donation centers? For a look at what happens when you donate to Goodwill specifically, check out this report. Something like only 20% of our thrift store donations even get sold at the thrift store.
The story of where our leftovers head next is complicated. Because many of our clothes are made from mixed fabrics (e.g. poly blends of cotton and polyester) it can be hard to separate the fabrics and recycle them. Clothing may end up in landfills, or be sent to recycling centers and landfills in developing regions, countries where cheap clothing undermines local textile markets, killing livelihoods. Because some of this clothing is not biodegradable, it can end up polluting waterways as well.
Most of us know these things are happening, but we ignore them. I have often chosen to ignore my guilt to justify purchasing a cheaper or more convenient purchase, or to satisfy an impulse buy.
But that guilt was my conscious self, telling me to slow down, to consider where I got my things from and whether I really needed them. That’s why I am trying now to embrace it and reconnect to my empathy with the people and environments that helped make my stuff… and that store it when I’m done with it.
Given all of this, here are a few tips that can guide your decluttering and shopping habits moving forward:
- Embrace the guilt you feel before you donate or throw away your old things — don’t suppress it or spark-joy your way out of it. It is the part of us that knows that we are consuming more than we need, and likely adding to landfills when we throw our stuff away. Sit with it for a moment and then use that guilt to temper your future consumption.
- Consider purging slowly. I’m itching to get rid of all the clutter in our house. But I also know that one giant, quick purge would mean I wouldn’t carefully get rid of things. Instead, I committed six months to do the purge instead of a couple weeks, and am tackling one room per month.
- Repair things if you can. Just because Marie Kondo thinks that if a button falls off, it’s a sign that the blouse or shirt has “been well worn or loved and has now reached the end of its life” (p. 129)— does not mean this is true! Get a small sewing kit and sew your buttons back on/get new buttons and extend the life of that shirt.
- Try to find a more nuanced set of donation sites for your stuff so it doesn’t all go to Goodwill. Do a little research into other consignment stores like the non-profit Salvation Army (Goodwill is a for-profit). Try clothing swaps with friends, or contact local homeless shelters, refugee centers, and animal shelters to see what they need/will accept. For your nice clothes and shoes, consider ThredUp. For shoes you can donate, check out Soles for Shoes. If you have a Half-Price Books or something similar, check them out or donate to your local library. Places like Best Buy can help recycle e-waste. By spreading your donations to around, they have a better chance of actually getting reused.
- Take a shopping fast. For New Year’s I committed to not buying things for myself for six months. No clothes, no shoes, no books (unless required by work — and even then I need to try to buy them used). It’s forcing me to come face-to-face with my own impulsive buying habits and see how shopping has become addictive. I want to be really mindful moving forward.
- Think about bringing stuff into your home as gaining weight. When you have too much stuff, your life feels bloated and stressful. Not to mention, once something’s in your home, it’s so hard to get rid of it. Remember that expression: A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips? Maybe it’s time we come up with an equivalent expression for shopping like: “A momentary thrill…lifetimes in a landfill.” Create an anti-shopping mantra to help counter your impulse shopping.
By sitting with the guilt/empathy we feel as we consider our things, we can hopefully use that feeling to limit future consumption, buy from ethical brands as often as possible, and carefully discard the things we don’t need so they have a high chance of getting reused. This way, our “tidying up” processes can be not just about having a sense of gratitude and reverence towards our homes and our things — but also towards the people and planet that brought them to us in the first place.
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