The Art of Tidying Up

I enjoyed the book but agree that it was pretty pedantic and for lots of people that's overkill. That said, I think you missed the two points that I found most useful:

1. When deciding what to keep/discard, keep things that "spark joy in your heart". That is, don't use rules like "If I haven't worn this in X".. The book's explanations around this are pretty helpful. 2. Do the big purge in order of type-of-thing... not room by room. I think the specific order prescribed is something like Clothes, Books, Papers, [I forget, I forget], Keepsakes. Going by type makes it easier to make sound decisions, and the sequence of types warms you up for hard purges (keepsakes, etc) that will otherwise likely hang you up in room #1.

All of that said, I only really got through Clothes, books, and papers... but even just that was massively helpful.

I also read (well, skimmed through) both of her books, and found them to be so vague as to be useless. Would have greatly benefited from having a lot of diagrams and photos to illustrate her points (new book does have a few, though).

I don't think anyone is suggesting that a home filling up with things `just happens' --- most people will readily admit that they have bought or received those things, and that those things are there because of their own action (acquisition or receipt) or inaction (unwillingness/inability to dispose of items).

I also take issue with the implicit suggestion in your comment that most people genuinely think that consumerism will add value to their lives; I see that attitude a lot in `minimalist' blogs and discussions, and I realise that they're selling a narrative and a lifestyle, but it's very condescending.

People end up buying things to try and facilitate change or to bring happiness often because they don't know of any other method, or because other avenues have failed them, or they don't have access to them in the first place. When asked, most people will admit that a new gadget or purse or pair of shoes or a second helping of cake will bring them some kind of joy, perhaps fleeting, but will also admit that family and health and following their passions are more worthwhile goals. It's not either/or dichotomy that it's so often set out to be by `minimalists'.

In my own experience, I know and work with people for whom many of these things are impossible to follow for whatever reason. Some have abusive families and still deal with the fallout of that. Many have passions but simply don't have the money to follow them as much as they'd like, or at all. Some people have chronic health issues which they cannot overcome. I'm certainly not going to harangue them or judge them for buying another DVD, or another book, or another pair of cheap trainers because they can't follow more `worthwhile' paths.

Inversely, I've come across a lot of `minimalists' --- mostly online, but some in real life --- who fetishise their lack of possessions the same way many collectors fetishise their collections. Minimalism-as-less-stuff is just as informed by consumerism as maximalism-as-happiness is; it's simply the opposite side of the same coin.

> we can fill that emptiness that lingers inside

That's quite the generalisation, right there. One thing I learned a long time ago is to (try) not to assume the inside of everyone else's head is the same as mine. We're all wired differently, sometimes slightly and sometimes profoundly.

Most things are not worth taking care of due to planned obsolescence.

I'd be very interested in this type of book. I've been looking for some sort of community or forum discussion or even just the right term to google for ideas on better digital organization, and either I'm using the wrong term or the information isn't really out there.

I've even been tempted to read some books on library science to come up with ideas for organization, taxonomies, etc, but I haven't done it yet.

I have an idea for a small app that would help in sorting digital files easier (kind of like symlinks to a bunch of disparate folders based on context, with drag and drop support), just to make my own sorting process easier, but I haven't really sat down to work on it yet.

Yes. But clearing out your rubbish and learning what it's like to live with your not-rubbish is one good way to do that. This is one of the reasons she says you only need to go through the major tidying process once, ever.

One thing I like about the book is that she didn't write it until after years of experience helping people solve the way-too-much-junk problem, so it's based on what actually worked for a variety people who were failing to solve the problem on their own, unlike many self help books that are written only based on the author's experience of being naturally good at something.

I agree with your sentiment, but what do you do with all of the stuff you already have? Almost nobody reading these books is starting from a position of zero stuff; they're starting from a position of X stuff, with X being an amount higher than they'd like. The real appeal of these books and the philosophy they espouse is that they allow you to whittle down the number of things you already have whilst also learning healthy habits to avoid ending up in the same situation later.

It's important to put her focus on getting rid of stuff into context: Ms. Kondo is a "tidying consultant" whose clients are mostly affluent people that can't even get started on tidying up in any meaningful way because they simply have more stuff than storage. She tells stories of people throwing out 20, 30, 50 bulging full-size garbage bags of excess stuff - these are people with a lot of money and a lot of accumulated clothes and possessions, and who live in homes large enough to contain it but not organize it. They are also affluent enough to be able to err on the side of getting rid of too much stuff during an enthusiastic round of cleaning. Ms. Kondo exhorts her readers not to buy in bulk in order to avoid clutter - it's not like you need to be super-wealthy to pass up the cost benefits of buying in bulk, but her advice is not meant for people who are just scraping by or for whom the tradeoff of space-for-money makes sense.

"Our surroundings have a profound impact on our psyche."

Is this a proven fact?

Statements like these make sense intuitively but I would rather see scientific evidence for this statement than just accept it.

That figure, thrown in without anything to back it up, seems truly insane. I'm British, but have an ongoing battle with keeping stuff I don't really need (and buying in bulk too), and I'm pretty sure even including all of my fianceé's possessions we wouldn't come anywhere close to 300k items. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of American homes don't contain anything like that number of items, unless you count each individual piece of pasta and grain of rice as a thing.

Seems maybe an order of magnitude off, depending on definionion of "thing." I cleaned out my mom's house after she died, and if I counted individual photo prints, 30 years worth of tax returns, canceled checks, paid bills, etc. she had a lot of "things."

> I'd struggle to get to 3,000.

I have that many books plus 500 CDs and 200 vinyl albums. My wife has a couple of hundred handbags and a similar number of coats and jackets.

But books are by far the largest class of thing in my house. I can't imagine having 300k items, even 30k seems rather unlikely in a house where you can see the floor!

Edit: I'm not in the US either so my house is probably smaller than the average US on though possibly larger than the other Brits commenting here; I'm in Norway.

As an American, I must have missed the "thing census" that objectively gathered the data for that average.

The number is clearly an estimate, as getting the real number would be a colossal undertaking for no real benefit.

A rational person does not count the pill bottle as 251 things because it contains 250 pills. But that's the only kind of bloody-mindedness that could ever get you to an "average American home" filled with 300k "things". If you have any LEGO sets, each one of those little one-stud circular pips would have to count as a separate thing. But your dining room table would also be one thing.

We already have cromulent measures for the muchness of one's stuff in terms of kilograms (or pounds) and liters (or cubic feet).

If I plug an old ATA drive into an old chassis, does my thing count decrease by one, because I have the same number of computers but fewer loose hard drives? The volume remains the same, though it is arranged more efficiently. You traded empty space inside the case for empty space outside of it--in theory, you could store baby clothes in there instead of hard drives. The mass also remains constant.

In any case, I would not get that number from an anti-hoarding or de-cluttering consultant. I would objectively measure the change in mass of a moving truck after a household has loaded all their possessions essential enough to move between houses, but not essential enough to keep it under direct supervision. And by assuming that the truck is packed as densely as possible, you can also get a subjective estimate of total volume of possessions.

That would be a really easy way to estimate the median mass of possessions in an American home, without any of the temporary clutter that gets trashed instead of moved. And there would be no thing-equivalence between a dining room chair and a pencil stub, or between a television and one coupon in the junk mail, or between a refrigerator and an ice pack. Mass: x kilograms. Volume: y liters. Numbers where an average actually makes sense.

I think it's more apparent if you have to move and you're forced to pack everything into boxes. If you've stayed at one place for long enough, there'll be enough "trinkets" accumulated such as plates, mugs, spoons, forks, knives, mugs, wine glasses, lunch boxes, peeler, graters, freezer bags, candles, lighters, etc. etc. It's the things that are in the cabinets and drawers that we frequently unaccount for.