The sad rich man tries to throw away the life he’s built. He stands in a room cluttered with what others might call junk: cracked plates from a dead aunt, threadbare sweaters bought on sale a decade ago, books with yellowed pages and bent spines. He’s told to hold each item, to ask if it sparks joy. If not, thank it and let it go. With a kiss on the figurative lips? No, though that seems like it would be a pretty little affectation to add to this silly ritual. For those of us who grew up counting pennies, joy isn’t a spark. It’s a ledger. Every object is a calculation—what it costs, what it might save, what it remembers.
Marie Kondo, the tidying evangelist, got rich selling a gospel of subtraction. Her method is simple: gather your belongings, category by category, keep only what stirs delight, jettison the rest. It’s a philosophy polished in Tokyo’s middle-class comfort, far from the tenements and thrift stores where the least of us learned to stretch a dollar into next week, next month, next year. Kondo’s world is one of abundance masquerading as restraint. She talks of gratitude for discarded things as if letting go were an act of grace. But when you’ve known lack, letting go feels less like prayer and more like surrender.
Kondo’s rise was swift. Books, Netflix deals, a global empire built on the promise of clean white shelves. Her success hinges on a universal ache—the weight of too much. But “too much” is relative. For some, it’s a closet bulging with unworn clothes. For others, it’s a single winter coat, kept long past fashion because replacing it means choosing between heat and groceries. Kondo’s method assumes a baseline of security. It doesn’t account for the fear that gnaws when you’ve hungered: What if I need this someday?
Her advice to tidy “all at once, intensely and completely” is a luxury. Those who’ve scrubbed filthy toilets or worked double shifts wiping king-sized rear ends at the group home know that time is a commodity. A single parent doesn’t have weekends to spend folding socks into origami rectangles. The KonMari method is a full-time gig for those who can afford to treat their homes as projects. For the rest, survival is project enough.
Kondo’s Shinto-inspired reverence for objects—kami in every trinket—clashes with the pragmatism of scarcity. When a crummy “World’s Best Grandpa” mug is the only one you own, it isn’t spiritual. It’s necessary. Sentiment is a byproduct of use. The keepsakes we cling to aren’t just memories; they’re receipts. Proof of sacrifices made, bargains struck. A child’s crayon drawing taped to the fridge isn’t decoration. It’s a monument to the overtime that paid for the crayons.
The minimalist movement, Kondo included, mistakes utility for waste. They see a crowded bookshelf and think clutter. We see a library bought or stolen one dog-eared volume at a time, each a small victory over a world that told us knowledge wasn’t for meatballs like us. To discard a book isn’t to free space—it’s to erase a milestone. That first volume of Cerebrus I surreptitiously swapped price tags on and bought for a measly $2.99 from the university bookstore way back in 1999? That’s always going to be my personal property.
Kondo’s followers speak of freedom in emptiness. But emptiness, to those raised on the edge of loss, feels like danger. A bare wall isn’t serene; it’s a reminder of what’s been taken or what might be taken next. We fill our spaces not out of greed, but defense. Every object is a rampart against the receding and hungry years that draw us ever closer to the void.
There’s a cruelty in the assumption that joy is purely aesthetic. Kondo urges followers to surround themselves only with beauty. But beauty’s a privilege. The hand-me-down sofa, sagging and stained, isn’t an eyesore. It’s a relic of family—those ties of human affection bind as well as gag—and of someone who cared enough to pass it on. To judge it by its fabric is to miss its story—the nights it cradled a sick child, the conversations pooled in its cushions like smoke.
Kondo’s method works best for the rootless rich—those well-off lost souls with the means to replace what they discard. But strong, gnarled roots are built from accumulation, the same way the coal miner’s calluses are forged from hard labor. The immigrant’s suitcase, stuffed with photos and letters, isn’t clutter. It’s a lifeline. The working-class home, with its mismatched dishes and patched blankets, isn’t messy. It’s a museum of resilience.
The danger isn’t in Kondo’s advice but in its absolutism. The promise that less stuff means more self. But self is built in the accumulation—the scars and salvage, the objects that outlive their use. To strip a life down to only what’s pretty as an Instagram picture is to deny the grit that made it.
Kondo’s fans will argue her method isn’t about wealth or class. They’ll point to her gratitude exercises, her insistence on mindfulness. But mindfulness is predicated on having a full belly. Gratitude is a nice-to-have when you’re not tallying the Bidenbuck-inflated prices of every meal. The KonMari method, for all its Zen trappings, is a product of a world that can afford to discard because it can afford to forget.
Most of us keep things not because we’re blind to their flaws, but because we see past them. The sweater with the moth hole? It was a gift from a half-sister we’ve seen twice in 42 years. The cracked bust of Seneca? It survived the move after our parents’ marriage went to the dogs. These objects are not joy sparkers—they’re mute witnesses. They remember when we couldn’t.
Kondo’s empire thrives on the myth of reinvention. Tidy your home, tidy your life. But reinvention presumes there was something “invented” in the first place, not a mere accidental coupling of sperm and egg. Those who’ve lived on margins know the cost of letting their guard down, letting things go. To discard is to trust that tomorrow will be safe enough to need less. Some of us aren’t there yet.
This isn’t a dismissal of Kondo, who claims to have embraced a form of “messier” minimalism in her later years. Her method has soothed the troubled minds of many middle-class matrons and old maids. But it’s a balm for a specific wound—the stress of excess. For those acquainted with want, excess isn’t the problem. Security is. The KonMari method urges us to edit our lives, paring a finished manuscript back to the Hemingway-esque bone. As we kids said back in the mid-1990s, “No dice, homeslice.” For the moment, we’re still writing ours.