Out of Sight is Not Out of Mind

The answers are surprisingly practical for an intuition-based method. But it makes sense, because the joy test leads directly to living from our values instead of our habits. You’d think we already do this, seeking joy by default, but often we’re working from another motive that doesn’t always serve us in the long term: familiarity, fear, gratifica... See more

Otherwise we end up with too many possessions that evoke negative emotions: shame, guilt, regret, revulsion. When you look in your closet, chances are half the clothes in there make you feel bad for one reason or another.

Cutting these emotionally draining objects loose is an amazing feeling.

The joy criterion seems to apply to everything else in life too.

I thought tidying was just a matter of making things look nicer. While I was going closet-to-closet, purging and re-stacking, a tiny Japanese woman was developing a science around the idea of “everything in its place”. Now she’s got a million-selling book and a three-month waiting list for her services.

Unless you’re born organized, decluttering is a fight against gravity and entropy, and maybe some other inalienable laws of the cosmos.

Her name is Marie Kondo, and she says our conventional notions of tidying set us up for relapse. When we’re children we’re told to tidy our rooms, which we know means “get everything off the floor and out of sight”, and we generally don’t develop the concept of “tidy” any more deeply than that.

There’s a lot more in the book, but the central commandment is to apply the joy test to every item you own, right down to the post-its on your bulletin board.

Our homes — and consequently, our lives — get messy because we have fearful and unhealthy relationships with our possessions. Where you keep your things is important, but it’s less important than which things you keep, how you feel about them, and why you have kept them.