Am I the only one watching Marie Kondo’s new Netflix series descriptively named Tidying Up With Marie Kondo and wondering how much joy the stuff in my life can really spark?
Don’t get me wrong. I like my stuff. I use stuff all the time. But the standard Kondo advocates is to keep only the things that “spark joy.” That seems like a tall order for a blender, a screwdriver, or a pair of socks, but maybe it’s just me.
As I meditate on whether my desk lamp “sparks joy” or just helps me see what I’m doing, I can’t help but think of George Carlin riffing on how we keep needing bigger and bigger places to store all the stuff we accumulate, until we go on trips, where we pack smaller and smaller versions of our stuff until we get down to the bare essentials. It’s funny. You should watch it (if you don’t mind some adult language). I’ll wait: George Carlin Talks About Stuff
As I think about it, maybe Kondo and Carlin both are saying the same thing: we don’t need as much as we think we do.
Every object in our lives adds weight. If nothing else, every object has to be stored. If we move, it has to be packed and transported. Maintenance and cleaning are generally required. We have to keep track of where everything is, what it does, and why we have it. For any individual thing, that overhead might not be too bad. But multiply across the number of objects in your life and the mental overhead starts to add up.
It’s hard to know whether something “sparks joy” or not, but maybe Kondo’s mantra isn’t a bad shorthand for thinking hard about why we have the things we have or want the things we want. If something no longer serves a purpose in your life, maybe it’s time to let it go and free up the mental overhead that goes with it. If a new, shiny thing will not make you better off in some concrete way, maybe it’s better not to acquire it, or at least wait until you know what it will do for your life and how it will do it.
I don’t think I will ever achieve the tidiness perfection that Kondo preaches, but I know I can do better about being careful about the stuff I let into my life. Time and attention are our most valuable assets. Only the things that matter and make a positive difference improving our lives deserve either.