Quarantine Week 4: Marie Kondo Your Life

Who hasn’t heard of Marie Kondo? She became a household name in 2014 with the publication of her first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Her book spiraled into a Netflix series, Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, which first aired in 2019.

Kondo’s method of “tidying” consists of two parts: discarding and sorting. To properly discard, you must amass your belongings into categories (clothes, books, makeup, papers, etc). Then, you sort through the objects in each category one by one, keeping what sparks joy and discarding what doesn’t. Finally, you sort the remaining “joyful” items with thoughtful intention, placing them in an organized fashion into compartments and boxes and nooks and crannies that are at once easy to access but not egregious to look at.

Kondo espouses a minimized, but not minimalist, approach, with a view that buying new items is okay so long as you have space, so long as they spark joy, so long as they do not clutter your home and thereby, clutter your life.

I decided to adapt Kondo’s approach during one of the many grey days of quarantine. People like to say that long days make quick years, and that might be true. These quarantine days aren’t especially long, but they do have an air of sameness. Is it Monday or Wednesday? Friday or Thursday? Does it even matter anymore? I hoped that in de-cluttering…