The discover of “Tidying up” with Marie Kondo
We have watched more series and films during this period of lockdown for the Coronavirus crisis and, one evening, browsing the Netflix catalogue, I started to watch the serie “Tidying up” with Marie Kondo, a Japanese writer, expert in reorganizing the domestic space to live a happier life.
I can’t say the reason why I clicked on “Play”, maybe it’s because we live with my wife and my daughter in a small apartment of 63 square meters and we struggle to stock the stuff we have and sometimes our drawers and wardrobes look messy. I didn’t have big expectations, I said myself: “Let’s see some minutes and pass to something else…”.
Without ever realizing it, I found myself at the end of the first episode completely absorbed by her method which in few words is: “Create your domestic environment with things that spark joy”.
What we learnt
Looking at the stories of different people, we can clearly see that our appartements and houses are filled with things that we purchased and that we have just forgotten after few days or month. Things that we don’t use, of which we didn’t remember the existence. When we look for something we need it we never found it at the right moment. Only when we start to dig in our boxes than we say “Ahhh, look where it was this f…ing thing!”
Pile of clothes, shoes, electronic devices that are stocked somewhere, far from our sight and that make our space busy and asphyxiating.
Her philosophy is not suggesting to embrace minimalism but rather push you to surround yourself and your relatives with things that spark joy for you. And those things must be clearly visible to you and not hidden in a big mess.
The tips she gives to organize and tide up your spaces are easy and practical: the way you can choose the things to throw away (or I prefer to say donate), how to fold your clothes, how to categorize your things and they can be applied to all the spaces in your home.
When she suggest you to take out all your clothes or shoes to start to tide up you feel immediately you have done something wrong in your life. A guy in one of the episode of the series had collected 160 pairs of sneakers (with many of them still to wear)
So I started to follow her suggestions with my family and:
- we’ve founded many things that we don’t use and that occupy space.
- we started to throw away what are in bad conditions and we have donated things that someone can still use (in France there are some very useful websites to recycle stuff like Geev, Leboncoin, Smiile). We have already agreed with some family to deliver them our “gifts” after the lockdown;
- we feel we have too many useless things
- we feel we can do something for the planet recycling things and helping people donating them stuff that can be useful for them
- we have reorganized our spaces and our apartments look magically bigger and nicer
- we feel this method can be applied to other part of our life and that can be a real philosophy of life
- we’ll think many times before buying other things in a compulsive manner due to the advertisement or for a wish of short term satisfaction
- we feel we’re going to accomplish something helpful and meaningful for our life
Tidying up and ecology
The human beings don’t need a ton of things to be happy: we need the things that make us happy along our life, not for 2–3 weeks. We should really things a new way of life after this pandemic and even if the Marie Kondo’s method is not minimalism we should pursue a reduction of our consumption and focus on the things that make us really happy: less quantity and more quality. This should be applied in any part of our life. Let’s think about food for example: we know that a beef steak has a big impact on our planet to the CO2 footprint. If people eat 3–4 times per week beef meat:
- they need to low the quality of what they eat (unless they’re willing to pay a lot)
- they probably enjoy it less than they might do if they decide to eat it once per week but at higher quality
- they contribute at the big mass farming which is one of the factor killing our planet
This is just an example, we might mention many more (like for example work-life, electronic devices, etc.).
A general rule (which may seems obvious but it isn’t in fact): consume less but consume better. We should create a different economy, a good economy, with high quality things that probably are more expensive but last longer and give us more joy and satisfaction in the long term.
Results
Here some of the result after applying part of her method (we’re not very good at it yet and it’s a pity I don’t have the before photos):
