Marie Kondo and the War on Stuff (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Marie Kondo and the War on Stuff (2016)

nytimes.com

57 pointsiiv46 comments

I don't think there's a "war on stuff" so much as there is a tendency among many people to accumulate and tend to way too much stuff: http://paulgraham.com/stuff.html. And I'd include myself in that group. And the price of stuff is not just in the original acquisition cost (which may be zero); it's also in real estate needed to hold stuff and the time needed to search and sort it.

I've got a loose rule: if I've not used it or worn it in the last six months, it should go, no matter how much it originally cost. Some seasonal clothes and and a few tools are exempt. For books, I ask if I'm likely to re-read it, and if the answer is no, it goes. In the post-Amazon world, books are very rarely hard to re-acquire. In short, "The Possessions Exercise" is useful: https://jakeseliger.com/2010/02/13/the-possessions-exercise-....

America had entered a time of peak stuff, when we had accumulated a mountain of disposable goods

Right.

It's strange to read the article and not see "cost" and "trade offs" mentioned. My guess is that we're psychologically wired for a world of limited and scarce stuff, but many of us no longer live in that world. A similar problem can be seen in our predilection for refined sugar.

Why is it strange that "cost" and "trade offs" aren't mentioned?

Personally, I never even expect to find these words in any text unless the author is either an economist or writing about something ostensibly associated with economics.

> writing about something ostensibly associated with economics.

Which literally applies to the topic of "stuff".

According to Wikipedia:

> Economics is "a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services".[1]

I'd say (loosely) "goods" == "stuff".

So according to your expectation defined, you should've expected to see "cost" and "trade offs" mentioned.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics

Hey, don't tell me about my own priors!

> if I've not used it or worn it in the last six months, it should go

I would live by a similar rule if I didn't already live in Chicago.

> if I've not used it or worn it in the last six months, it should go

When did you last 'use' the pictures on your walls?

> For books, I ask if I'm likely to re-read it, and if the answer is no, it goes

Why is a full bookshelf different?

If your goal is to be pedantic, you 'use' a picture every time you look at it, so probably more often then every 6 months.

> If your goal is to be pedantic,

No, my goal is to suggest that there's more value in many thing than their primary use.

> you 'use' a picture every time you look at it

In which case you also 'use' a bookshelf full of books every time you look at it; so the books need not be discarded either.

I don't know about OP, but I don't keep any pictures on my walls.

> I've got a loose rule: if I've not used it or worn it in the last six months, it should go, no matter how much it originally cost.

My issue isn't cost; it's the emotional investment. Everything has a memory attached.

Of the items I possess for merely sentimental value (emotional attachment/memories/inherited possession from loved ones), there are very few that I actually use. Most exist solely due to the emotional attachment.

A tip for getting rid of sentimental items if you need the space: take a photo before getting rid of it. The photo can bring back the memories as well as the original item.

I have a photo of a well-used no-longer-non-stick saucepan. The pan was the only physical item I inherited from an uncle and my only physical connection to a lost family member and for years I couldn't get rid of the pan despite it's uselessness. The photo helps.

You're right about the cost to acquire, the resources to hold (in space, which translates to cost via rent, mortgage payments or land tax), but you miss the cost to dispose of it (mostly emotional costs, but paying to recycle heavy metals properly is going to cost money).

Interestingly, acquisition is often pleasurable, disposal is a relief but the actual day-to-day owning is the painful bit that weighs on you.

We humans seems to be wired to be loss averse. When tested we will pick a lower payout even if the chance of a loss is incredibly remote.

I mostly agree with you. Except when it comes to books. Some books one uses for reference. Some are pretty objects in their own right so you'd hang on to them as one would a painting (apologies for mixing pronouns). But also there's tsundoku[0] – acquiring more books than one can/will read, a disease I'm afflicted by. The article even mentions Marie Kondo :)

[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/theres-a-japanese-word-f...

Umberto Eco would agree with your penchant: "Eco's library contained 30,000 books and tended to separate visitors into two categories: 'those who react with 'Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?' and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones." [0]

[0] http://www.openculture.com/2017/03/watch-umberto-eco-walk-th...

This link also contains a video of Eco walking through his library at home. It is sort of breathtaking!

Oh thank you thank you thank you. I love me some Umberto.

At first I thought Marie Kondo hated stuff, and wanted me to be minimalist. That is absolutely wrong.

She doesn't mind of you have stuff. She wants you to only have stuff you enjoy. All those extra things that are like a load on you, weighing you down, get rid of those.

> only have stuff you enjoy

In this case I'd have no clothes then. Maybe I'm weird, but I just see clothes as a utility, not as something that gives me joy.

It's obviously a simplification of what Kondo said. If everything could be condensed into a sentence she wouldn't have written an entire book.

Maybe she just did it for the money.

And a book about spam filtering could be reduced to the sentence, "Just make sure users only get the email they actually want." Since the filtering of both email and personal possessions is rather more complicated than that, we end up with entire books written on the subject.

For email you might use a combination of DKIM+DMARC, whitelisting, blacklisting, graylisting, string matching, and bayesian filtering based on word corpus. I guess nowadays you might be using more sophisticated ML techniques but I'm not really familiar with email.

For personal possessions, Kondo recommends sorting items by category before discarding things, she has a bunch of tips on how to store things (don't get a bunch of boxes, don't store stuff in a pile so you never see whatever is at the bottom), and a bunch of tips for how to sort through each category of item.

Common sense applies… I heard somewhere in this thread that someone throws anything out they haven't used in six months, but if I did that, I'd have to buy a winter jacket every year (and an air conditioner, camping gear, etc.). That doesn't mean the rule is bad, it just means it wasn't written like a computer program.

Actually, I think most of the book could fit on a page, there really isn't that much in there.

Maybe she should get rid of the extra stuff in her book.

Maybe that should be restated as "only have stuff that induces a net positive of joy" so that having no clothes would presumably lead to a negative joy due to walking around naked and all the consequences of that.

Maybe you can think of a new approach to clothing. You might be happier!

If you read the book, you'll notice that first and foremost it is a book of philosophy. The technique is really secondary.

I would go further: it has a very strong religious/spiritual aspect. A manifestation of 神道 practice.

George Carlin has a pretty great comedy routine on our relationship with "stuff". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12049350

There is an interesting interplay between stuff and space. I'm married and have two children (3 and 18 months) and we live in a two bedroom apartment. Whether I'm justified in wanting more space or not, I really, really do want it. My wife and I talk all the time about how having more space would be nice.

I'm interviewing for jobs (finishing phd) and our income/cost ratio will hopefully increase, and I think we'll end up in a place with more space. But I don't have the experience to have calibrated to the exact amount of space I'll need. We'll probably overreact and be gluttons for space. Then we'll fill up the excess with stuff.

I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. It just feels like you want space, then you get it, then you fill it with stuff you don't want.

PSA: Those who have useful stuff they want to get rid of can give it away on freecyle.org.

Even craigslist, your local community board (real or virtual) or just your curb can be enough. Just be sure to clearly define what is free, lest you accidentally donate your mailbox, puppy and fountain.

If she hasn't she should set-up a subsidiary recycling co. Which takes the rejected items and in turn reconditions them and cycles them back into useful items for other people, either as nonprofit or even for profit.

So true. My fantasy company (please anyone start it) is "reverse-Amazon-prime"-- Remove anything from your house in 2 days. Then you have all the connections to a) sell and share the money back with me, b) donate it, or c) dispose of it responsibly. This would be so awesome done right with solid research into the best ways to do all of the above for a huge variety of stuff.

It exists and is called Craigslist.

The general amount of bs can be very high dealing on CL, even giving stuff away. From scammers and spammers, to the usual suspect who no shows after you rushed home from work to meet them in your free hour that day.

...and it funds journalism by sending drones to the Waffle House to workshop my ephemeral stuff while doing some mending and meeting other drones to trade, to share litecoin, or to fix up their rides; sometimes even tell whether a carrot is seeding true. They do mad backbeats and end up with tips.

This is basically removalists, yes?

The last time I moved house, I paid a removalist to get rid of a bunch of my stuff. Paid them by volume of removed material; they did all the work to take the stuff away. (I basically said "take everything in that room over there"). Took a couple hours, and it was done.

They disposed of everything responsibly, and would try to sell things which were reusable or salvageable. The cost to me was dead cheap, because most of their profit (I assume) came from reselling the stuff that could be salvaged.

This was a thing about 10 years ago, maybe longer. Lots of stores started up that would list your stuff on eBay for a percentage of the price. That lasted for a year or so and all those stores closed up shop.

It's too bad because that seemed like a reasonable system: people would get to be proficient at pricing, describing and listing items on eBay and the sales price at a public auction seemed like a pretty accurate value for what something was "really worth".

My wife used to take things that our kids outgrew to resale shops. She still is able to take some things that we no longer use but was easier with kid stuff.

I assume it didn't really work for more or less the same reason it doesn't work for you or me to do it personally--the transaction cost in time and money is more than you can get for the item. Someone who specializes in that sort of thing can be better at it but it's still hard to make money selling a $10 item.

Mostly I just donate things these days to the Salvation Army or whatever. Unfortunately, not everything is really amenable to that. I have some items that I'm sure are worth something to someone but they're not worth my effort to sell on ebay and Craigslist is pretty thin out where I live.

I so wish it was easier to sell stuff :( ebay is a PITA, feels like everybody is trying to scam you. Wish there was ebay with like minded technical customers so I could drop battery cycles and hard drive smart status along with detailed product images (while running) and not have to deal with the "MY DAUGHTER IS GOING TO COLLEGE AND I'M PREPARED TO GIVE YOU 200% THE VALUE OF THING IF YOU SEND ME INVOICE AND MAIL TO A DIFFERENT ADDRESS"

You're imagining people giving you perfectly fine things that just need to be dusted, and then someone would love to own them.

You'd get a load of garbage that people are too lazy to sell on Ebay, and too sentimental to throw out.

I dunno about that. If went thru everything I had took those things I didn't use in the last six months credo, I would have some perfectly good things left over. Camera lenses and other, camping equip, tools, non-seasonal clothes, etc.

I don't tend to keep useless things around as it is. I imagine there are quite a few people like that. I imagine at least in some strata of tech workers, who are into the latest and greatest, there are quite a few who'd have pretty decent things to recycle.

I've worked with people who just have too much disposable income as either singles or DINKs and buy/consume "accordingly."

I have way too much stuff that I really don't care much about. For a good while it was a feeling in the back of my mind, but packing and hauling all this stuff in a recent move has made this a very clear thought.

Currently 'at war' ensuring the next move will require far less effort and stress.

(2016)

Thanks, added.

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