The tone is sensitive, the sentences clutter-free. The second thing you’ll notice is that it doesn’t tell you off. Cured of the shelves packed three books deep, of the drawer of old phone chargers, of the socks and the cardigans and the drying felt-tips. In just over 200 pages, it promises, you will be cured of this malady, this virus. The first thing you’ll notice when, like the 2m people before you (many of whom have gathered glassy-eyed on your social media to evangelise), you begin reading TLCMOT, is that it is pleasingly short. “When your room is clean and uncluttered, you have no choice but to examine your inner state.” ‘The material equivalent of the obesity epidemic?’: a cluttered private study. It’s chaotic minds.” Chaotic minds gather on Twitter, where they boast of “Kondo-ing” their bookshelves while waiting for the toast to pop, and perform social warfare on Facebook, where before and after wardrobe photos are a currency.
It isn’t tidy minds that go for tidy exteriors. “The more chaotic, abundant and junk-filled a society,” he explains, “the more its tastes in interiors will incline towards the minimalist, the austere and the tidy.” At a personal level, he adds: “The more turbulent someone’s inner life is, the more tidiness appeals. I asked Alain de Botton for the philosophical argument. Wallman breaks them down into the environmental argument (we’re worried we’re using more resources than the planet can sustain), the political argument (without having to worry about basic material needs we have become “post-materialists”), the social scientist’s argument (we’ve learned that possessions don’t make us happy), and the economic argument (we simply can’t afford not to).
Unclutter you mind meme how to#
Why, then, are we suddenly so desperate to learn how to live minimally? Every expert has an answer. It isn’t tidy minds that go for tidy exteriors The more turbulent the inner life, the more tidiness appeals. There are so many books being published about clutter that if you placed them end to end, you could easily fill a small one-bedroom flat, and have enough left for a precarious pile right by the loo. In his (also bestselling) book, trend forecaster James Wallman calls the problem “ Stuffocation”, and defines it as the material equivalent of the obesity epidemic. Women who struggle with too much stuff in their homes are more likely to feel stressed, tired and depressed and have a higher mortality rate.
Many of us “feel weighed down by our own excess”. Two thirds of us think we would be better off if we lived “more simply”. And it’s one that has arrived at exactly the right time. This is the message of the fastest growing self-help sub-genre, itself the world’s bestselling genre.
Get rid, purge, clear, toss, abandon, and with relish, too. This is the call of the clutter therapist. There’s a point, almost halfway through Marie Kondo’s bestselling book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying, where she politely invites the reader to chuck it in the bin. “If you think it’s a pain to fold your clothes, you haven’t discovered the true impact of folding.”
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