The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up

It was the never-discarded trail of breadcrumbs left behind by my browsing on Amazon.com that led to Marie Kondo’s “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up” getting stuffed in a cardboard box and mailed to my apartment. With precision, Amazon remembers everything I’ve ever looked at, how long I looked at it for, and what I looked at next. It really wouldn’t benefit them to "tidy up" that history, nor would it anyone else who is enamored with the idea of “big data” and harvesting trends from massive collections of information.So it’s in this age of everything digital lasting forever, and giant mountains of digital ’stuff’ being heralded as the holy grail of information, that a book about throwing things away has become an international bestseller.Despite the celebrated promise of data hoarding, my past browsing led the magical website to believe that a book about cleaning (or ’tidying’ as Kondo calls it) was something I’d be interested in. The machine recommendeth, and I taketh away.I’ve never paid much attention to cleaning. When I was a teenager, the floor of my bedroom often wasn’t visible beneath all the piles of crap that I had accumulated. It’s not something the average guy considers a skill - house cleaning just doesn’t have the panache of most other activities that one can get better at with practice or study. I’ve improved since I was young, but flotsam still collects in my wake and lives on in my closets. A giant styrofoam donut, ancient t-shirts, graduation cap & gown, nine year old pay-stubs. Things I haven’t touched or thought of in ages.Kondo has a very simple philosophy: Take stock of every single thing you own. Touch each thing with your hands, and ask yourself if it gives you joy. If it gives you joy, keep it. If it doesn’t, get rid of it.This might seem pretty vague. Whether not a thing is "giving me joy” doesn’t seem like a quantifiable measurement, and at first I didn’t expect the process would produce any results. But surprisingly, as I began going through my closet, touching things one-at-a-time made a tremendous difference in my ability to calculate that thing’s worth. Just glancing at a pile of books on the floor, or pausing to stare for a moment into the closet doesn’t call up the value of each item as plainly as if they’re picked up and handled individually.In a single morning I filled eight trash bags with clothes ready for donation. My wardrobe now takes up about half the space that it did, and I feel confident that I would actually wear every single article I made a thoughtful decision to keep. Magic, indeed.But life-changing? Like the measurement of whether or not an object gives you joy, to determine if something has “changed your life” is subjective. To really be "life-changing” like book’s title suggests, this exercise in “tidying” would have to affect the possessions that I really cherish, and that take up the most space - books.For the last decade (or at least since Amazon Prime was invented) the size of my book collection has increased indiscriminately, annexing ever more space in my apartment. It is absurdly easy to have a passing curiosity, and two days later receive four books about it in the mail. Against this front, I waged a campaign to lighten my shelves.When I was finished, I had four boxes to donate at the local Goodwill store. They weren’t full of garbage, or torn paperbacks, or comics. (I actually haven’t gotten to Kondo’ing my comics yet - that will be a true test.) I felt good driving away from the donation drop-off, thinking that I made an effort to stop hoarding information that I’m not using, and instead passing it to someone who couldn't afford it otherwise.On books, Kondo writes “their true purpose is to be read, to convey information to their readers. It’s the information they contain that has meaning. There is no meaning in their just being on your shelves.” Simple explanations like this are abundant in the short book, and true to her philosophy, she even recommends getting rid of it after you’re finished, or until you no longer need to reference the information it holds.Cleaning has never seemed like it supported any philosophy to me. It has always just been an a banal domestic time-suck. But this book frames tidying in such a way that it can not only make your house look nicer, but make everything in life feel a bit fresher.“By putting our house in order, we can live in our natural state. We choose those things that bring us joy and cherish what is truly precious in our lives. Nothing can bring greater happiness than to be able to do something as simple and natural as this.”