So you’ve watched a decluttering show, or read Marie Kondo‘s The Life Changing Magic Of Tidying Up and thought “yes! I shall only be surrounded by things which spark joy!” and gone through like a space-motivated hurricane.
And then once that righteous zeal has evaporated you’ve discovered that sure, that spatula might not have exactly sparked joy but it really provided a great answer to the question “what’s a good way to flip this rapidly burning egg?”
And a friend joked that she’d been so inspired that she’d done a massive purge at the beginning of the year, only to discover that clothes she’d established in summer were just taking up space were more joy-sparking in winter, at which point she was thinking “where the hell are my coats?”
So in the great tradition of well-balanced scientific surveys, I put the call out on Facebook and… well, there was some heartbreak in there:
“I threw out my birth certificate, and I’ll never live it down.”
“Threw out a load of “old” bicycle parts – including a set of British bicycle hubs by Harden that now sell for $600.”
“I accidentally gave a pair of brand new running shorts to Goodwill when I was moving recently. It’s been 6 months and I still think about them every day. They didn’t fit that great anyway and I could go and buy a new pair but it’s the principle of the thing.”
“Cowboy boots I bought in NYC in 1991. What was I thinking? They were gorgeous.”
“When my first marriage ended I threw out virtually everything but my books, albums and the clothes on my back, including whole drawers of paperwork without looking through it. I later realised I’d thrown out virtually every photo of, and piece of writing by, a dear departed friend.”
So with the spring clean just around the corner clearly the answer to Marie Kondo and her decluttering advice is to embrace a hoarder mentality and just accumulate a pile of everything, and hide underneath. Simple!
Or maybe there’s a sensible middle ground: as one particularly astute person pointed out:
“I keep anything that sparks ‘meh’ or higher. Joy is a very high bar and I’d have to buy a new spatula and detergent almost weekly if I did it Kondo-style.”
See, Australia? Spatulas. They’re the only thing saving us from chaos.