{"id":7523,"date":"2016-08-21T05:45:30","date_gmt":"2016-08-21T09:45:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newvinegrowing.wordpress.com\/?p=7523"},"modified":"2019-06-07T13:38:02","modified_gmt":"2019-06-07T17:38:02","slug":"decluttering-is-next-to-godliness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.communify.me\/newvinegrowing\/decluttering-is-next-to-godliness\/","title":{"rendered":"Decluttering is next to Godliness?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Marie Kondo has sold about 6 million copies of “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.”<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nAre you a Konvert?
\nMarie Kondo<\/a> is the author of the cultishly popular book\u00a0\u201cThe Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,\u201d<\/a> which has sold nearly 6\u00a0million copies and\u00a0seems to have taken on an even larger\u00a0cultural footprint. Even people who haven’t read the book have raved about Kondo’s guiding principle: Keep only those belongings that bring you joy, cast off the rest.
\nThe massive popularity of Kondo-izing comes in spite of — or maybe because of — our\u00a0equally massive consumer culture.
\nUCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families studied\u00a0contemporary suburban America with a book titled “Life at Home in the 21st Century.”<\/a>
\nA UCLA story about the center’s work<\/a> said:<\/p>\n

“The American workplace is intense and demanding; when we come home, we want material rewards, like people all around the globe,” linguistic anthropologist Elinor Ochs, director of UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families<\/a>,\u00a0says. “What distinguishes us is the normative expectation of hyperconsumerism. American middle-class houses, especially in Los Angeles, are capacious; refrigerators are larger than elsewhere on the planet. Even so, we find food, toys and other purchases exceeding the confines of the home and overflowing into garages, piled up to the rafters with stockpiled extra ‘stuff.’ “<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In\u00a0one telling\u00a0example, the study\u00a0notes<\/a> that\u00a0“cars have been banished from 75 percent of garages to make way for rejected furniture and cascading bins and boxes of mostly forgotten household goods.”
\nA lengthy feature about Kondo in the New York Times Magazine this summer<\/a>\u00a0pointed to\u00a0this difficulty in managing our\u00a0ever-expanding clutter as a reason we were so ready for Kondo’s\u00a0way to deal with it.<\/p>\n

By the time her book arrived, America had entered a time of peak stuff, when we had accumulated a mountain of disposable goods \u2014 from Costco toilet paper to Isaac Mizrahi swimwear by Target \u2014 but hadn\u2019t (and still haven\u2019t) learned how to dispose of them. We were caught between an older generation that bought a princess phone in 1970 for $25 that was still working and a generation that bought $600 iPhones, knowing they would have to replace them within two years. We had the princess phone and the iPhone, and we couldn\u2019t dispose of either. We were burdened by our stuff; we were drowning in it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Did we really own all that stuff? This is our driveway in Ann Arbor during our great downsizing garage sale.<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nJohn and I sold the vast majority of our belongings<\/a> when we downsized from a three-bedroom Midwestern house to move into a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment. We got rid of\u00a0entire rooms of furnishings\u00a0and all our yard equipment, then sent some carefully selected\u00a0belongings, including art and furniture with sentimental value, to live with friends on indefinite loan.
\nEven so, when I cast an eye around our modest apartment and ask myself “Does it bring me joy?” I see things I’m pretty sure I could live without, things that I don’t mind having around but are somewhere down from joy.
\nShrinking our living space has helped me keep pretty constantly vigilant about what I acquire — there’s no “just put it in the basement” in our New York lifestyle — and so has living in other cities for long stays<\/a>.
\nI need to decide what I’ll haul\u00a0with me for a month, and it’s astonishing that our apartment still looks totally full when I lock\u00a0my\u00a0suitcase shut. You’d never know I’d taken all the clothes I’ll wear for a month from my still-loaded closet. Coming back to all manner of things I didn’t miss and maybe forgot about entirely makes it easier to send items to the giveaway pile.
\nI guess George Carlin is right and that we’re constantly making tighter and smaller edits of what stuff we\u00a0care most about.
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