Marie Kondo's Advice Praised by Scientists: “Clutter Is Not a Good Thing”

The restaurant business is high-pressure and low-margin. It's a cutthroat world and if you're not aggressive enough you'll get eaten alive...literally.

In the below, I will use the pronoun 'he' purely for convenience and may swear a bit.

When you're in a brigade, you're called 'a chef', but there's only one chef called 'the chef' and you are cooking his food. If he had 30 arms he'd do it himself, but he doesn't, so he employs 14 wastrels to make up the deficit. Make no mistake: you are an extension of the chef's body, your hands are his hands, your garnishes are his garnishes, and your mistakes are his mistakes. (Indeed, in the trade, you don't say 'I'm going to work at Noma' , you say 'I'm going to cook for Redzepi').

The chef probably sacrificed the best years of his life toiling on his feet for 70 hours a week, saving, learning, forming opinions and dreaming of the day he can cook his own food. Most people cave in, change careers or hit 50 and can't keep up any more. Chef is balancing years of agony and reverie on the improbable fulcrum of his restaurant, which he genuinely believes could come toppling down if his peppers aren't julienned properly. Except he doesn't julienne them. You do.

'What the fuck is this?' 'Peppers, chef.' 'Don't fuck with me. I wrote the menu. Read it. READ IT!' 'Raw scallop and peppers julienne.' 'Well, these are diced, we're behind on checks already, there's no peppers left and now the most important critic in the country is going to think I don't know what a fucking julienne looks like. Get in the prep kitchen and get Robbie on the pass. Fuck sake.' 'Yes, chef.'

What's the first thing that commis is going to do when he gets home, exhausted and aching? Crack open his Larousse and learn his damn cuts.

Chef made it through one of the most brutal industries in the world and is wagering his life savings on the bullshit odds of running a kitchen not for fame, not for money, but for the all-consuming joy of seeing his food, on his plates, being served to his customers. It is pure, beautiful, passionate narcissism. And fuck me if he won't let it all slide way because your sorry ass never learned how to properly julienne a fucking pepper.

Add that to the sincere hell of standing tooth by jowl with your sweaty, tired comrades in immense heat and pressure serving your last grilled octopus at 11:15pm, adrenaline dumping as you put your section back together to get ready for the breakfast shift in 7 hours and, yes, things get a little tense.

Not all kitchens are like this, but it is the default setting in those environments and preventing it takes conscious effort.

On the other hand, some kinds of restaurants—diners, for one—are operated with a different mindset, and don't have much connection to the larger "restaurant industry." Cooks that aren't forced to operate at 100% all the time are genuinely friendly and relaxed people (and also have enough time to both take your order themselves and then make whatever customizations you might ask for.)

https://smile.amazon.com/Everything-Its-Place-Mise-En-Place-...

While I generally find it less desirable than having storage for items, as a habit it's very effective at maintaining order. Once the compulsion develops, the trend is strongly toward order rather than disorder.

I had the right to put any of his loose possessions in his drawer, and he mine. So, of course, that’s where ALL of my stuff ended up. His was mostly empty. :-/ Either way, I knew where my stuff was!

The relevant part is that clutter should not stand in your way, hinder you in your progress. Thus it must stored away and trimmed down from time to time if space is raching it's capacity. But besides that? If you have the space, who cares. As long as it's out of the way it's not a hindrace.

I think it's reasonable to suggest the rule for what things you should keep should be based around what you find good. If you mean utility in the John Stuart Mill way, then joy is the same thing but probably easier for the average person to grasp immediately.

I think the way to think about it is you need to change your relationship with those things that don't spark puppy-dog like joy from but you need. For example, I don't get particularly excited about all the damn weird DVI cables I have stashed in my drawer but I've realized if I toss them, I'll need them in a hurry and it really sucks having to buy new ones.

I.e., people don't intuitively understand what "good" or "useful" is—those terms are mired in tons of prescriptive statements made by ideologues that get you confused. But "awesome" (or in this case, "joyous") isn't really a property people ever insist that something has for political reasons. It's something you've probably only ever heard as a descriptive word referring to things that are genuinely "awesome"/"joyous", and so your intuition on what is "awesome"/"joyous" is likely much more solid and easier to "hear."

I would also argue that "joy" is a pretty useful word in the sense that asking about a thing's utility conjures images of sterile pro/con lists of a thing's immediate usefulness right now; while "joy" might be an acute nostalgia, or the sense of determined hypomania brought on by a clearly-imagined-and-still-enthusiastic plan of what you will be doing with the thing a year from now.

I think utility - as a term - carries more baggage in this context. People tend to easily come up with reasons they could hold on to something. Most things could be useful for one reason or another, but the problem is that, realistically, you've vanishingly likely to actually do something with it.

Joy might describe a situation where the utility meets its need, where it's value to you is especially high. In other words, I think 'joy' was a deliberate and informed choice.

Finally, I'm not at all sold on 'utility' having poor marketability. Maybe not great, but it speaks well to the value-optimizer and many people that are interested in self-help sorts of subjects.

Yeah, I've gone down this path too. The thing about digital is storage is cheap and getting cheaper all the time. There is very little cost to having a lot of "clutter" in your digital world. It doesn't take up physical space and it doesn't really occupy mental space either. Arguably the cost of trying to de-clutter it is higher than the cost of accidentally deleting something you might want in the future, which is why I'm pretty sure I have never bothered. Put another way, decluttering your digital space is a potentially NPV negative affair--the costs of accidental deletion and time spent decluttering outweigh the gains made by having a "decluttered" digital space.

The only thing in the digital world I think I could justify de-cluttering is my photos. I take a lot of duplicate pictures with slightly different variations in lighting and focus. Having 10 slightly different versions of the same scene is clutter -- especially when 8 of them feature people with their eyes closed, not smiling, not looking at the camera, not in focus, etc.

The rest of my digital stuff isn't like that--there is no 10 slightly different copies of the same paper I wrote in college 10 years ago. Just one. Why bother deleting it? An e-book I read once three years ago and will probably never read again only takes up 30 megs of space when pulled down from the cloud. It doesn't occupy physical space in my life. Why delete it? It costs more of my time & energy to nuke it than just let it be.

It's when you have multiple collections, or even 1 collection that's too large, that it's a problem.

I have a lot of hobbies that I do only occasionally, and the stuff from them is a little overwhelming. And when combined with all my wife and I have kept because we might need it some day, the hobby room is a disaster area.

We've even gone over our limit on books. To store more books, we'd have to get rid of other things at this point. And most of those books just sit on shelves and never get read. Some might, but overall they're just not actually being read.

To make it worse, books are one of the things that could be digital instead of physical and they could take no space at all. I even prefer reading on my Kindle over a physical book.

In the end, I just can't agree with him on books. (And I don't think Marie Kondo does, either, based on watching a few episodes of the TV show.)