Tag: konmari

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Hey again, Marie Kondo || Part 3 – mostly environmental and money stuff, but also a little bit about time

Alright, more thoughts going through the konmari process:

The upside of throwing things away?

Especially with everything closed, it’s been harder to get rid of things in a way that feels responsible.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

Sometimes, it seems like having places to donate things to is a way to make ourselves feel better. It takes minimal effort to donate, but maybe it doesn’t do as much good as we think.

Maybe it’s better to feel the pain and effort of getting our stuff to good homes by giving it directly to others or selling it online.

Maybe it’s a good thing to feel the pain of throwing it away.

Maybe this pain will help prevent buying new stuff.

Maybe, now when buying something, it’ll be more automatic to think not just about the pleasure it gives now, but where it will live in the home, and where it will go after.

Otherwise, it’s so easy to continue on the cycle of buying things and then thinking “Oh, I can just donate it if I don’t want it later.”

We so often talk about reduce, reuse, recycle, and it so often feels like the focus is heavily on recycling.

After all, that supports industries: the purchase of the good, the collection of it, the manufacturing into something new that can then be resold.

But really, reduce is the one that will truly have the greatest impact.

No one profits off of that though.

No one except all of us, but where’s the fun in that?

Burdens

Thinking about how much money was spent on stuff that now feels like a burden…

In quarantimes, it’s been interesting to find things that took up space for a really long time and to discover that they actually bring joy now.

(Timing is everything…)

But, ok, so the worst case fear for getting rid of things is often a mix of sunk cost fallacy and “what if I need it?”

So, now that the best case scenario is coming true, now that those things are being used that have been sitting around for years, has it been worth keeping them?

I don’t know, I don’t think so.

There’s obviously the psychic cost of those things sitting around, taking up space, needing to be moved between homes.

But there’s also the opportunity cost, all that time when those things could have been making other people happy. Or at the very least not being irritating to me.

There’s also the possible cost of my now being tempted to bend my life so it fits into using these old things that suddenly seem more valuable since getting new stuff is harder.

I don’t know, I hope that experiencing the best case kind of shows me that it isn’t worth it to cling onto stuff, but I worry I’m not feeling that in my gut yet.

Delicious waiting

I’ve hit a bit of a bump in my process, but before that, I enjoyed planning out my konmari.

Staring at the mess and looking forward to processing it.

Putting it in my agenda for the future and actually getting excited.

I’ve been finding this for exercise too, learning about new ways to move my body and feeling antsy to get going rightnow; putting time in between now and moving that way makes it tantalizing, something I want to do instead of a chore.

My inability to repay debt right now is the same. I feel like once I actually get to a position where I can start that again, I’ll want to fucking destroy it.

On the flip side, I also found myself looking at shirts online that I really want to get but don’t feel ok ordering just yet.

I just hope the delicious waiting doesn’t apply to consumption too.

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Hey again, Marie Kondo || Part 2, mostly fitness stuff

So I’ve noticed a few parallels in terms of dealing with fitness and konmari-ing:

Making the wait delicious

Instead of jumping right into doing the thing now, I’ve been deciding to hold off on different projects.

I’ve found myself reading about them, itching to get started. I’m finding that makes me more excited once I do get started.

And then when I do, I’ve been taking on less than I can handle (inspired by Tiny Habits), which makes continuing those habits really tempting.

Not sure if this will work with other things too, but interested to see!

Reduce focus on opposition

Another parallel with exercise is the fact that so much exercise is framed in opposition to the body instead of building it up. Or the destruction or reduction of things, like fat or weight. Or numbers that ultimately aren’t the *best* reflection of wellness.

For instance, I kept finding myself taking the most pleasure in the number of reps going up or increasing my weights.

I’d then find myself unfortunately glancing at the scale and getting a tiny bit deflated when I saw the numbers go up, when isn’t that exactly what I’d *want* to see happen if I’m weight training?

I’ve instead tried to focus on the tiny little bump at the bottom of my bicep that’s now starting to bulge, or the way I just *feel* stronger.

I realized that I need to reduce taking pleasure in the numbers; I need to reduce that focus to stay healthy.

I started noticing a similar thing with Konmari-ing. Like I was thinking about all the things I need to get rid of, all the material pounds I need to shed or bags of stuff to donate or throw out, all the *decluttering* I needed to do to slay the clutter monsters.

But I’m not sure where I saw this but somewhere it was mentioned that Konmari is more of a mindfulness exercise. And I realized that something may have gotten lost in translation.

Just like yoga has become about “poses,” Konmari has become about “decluttering” instead of really about the mental shifts that are at its core. I need to focus more on that inner work now, to process the grief and fear that’s making it hard to break the attachment to random shit.

Beware false / exploitative messengers

I’ve also been trying to be better about the people I’m allowing myself to read.

Like I’ve started listening to my gut when I notice that certain subreddits about these topics make me feel not great, make me feel more dragged down than uplifted.

I’ve also been hating on all the ways in which content can be exploited. Like, let’s be real, there are articles that are really just basic Konmari principles + getting us to buy shit + not citing the WoC who popularized the ideas in the first place. Let’s not pretend that you came up with that “pose” yourself; it’s an asana that’s existed forever.

Obviously a lot of content creation and teaching is about repackaging ideas in ways that are more applicable and beneficial for the audience, which is a huge value! I’m just saying please cite your sources, please and thank you.

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Hey again, Marie Kondo || Part 1, mostly COVID stuff

Alright, here are some thoughts revisiting Konmari this time around:

Clutter = scarcity mindset + abundant resources

I grew up in a messy, messy home. Like I’m pretty sure at least one of my close childhood friends has actually never been in my room because it was so.fucking.messy. I’ve probably never seen the whole floor.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot though for quite a while is the fact that the things that are holding me back might be the same things that have held my parents back, that it’s not just that I’m becoming like them, but that they’re similar to me.

(Like there’s a lot about how neglected mental health is for the kids of immigrants, but what about the mental health issues that generation had that just never got names?)

ANYWAY, I realized that I always resented the messy messy house and as a response, sometimes went in the opposite direction of wanting to have nothing.

But obviously that’s a luxury. It’s a luxury of an upbringing where there was always enough, while my parents’ generation grew up needing to hold onto everything.

But then they had the opportunity to finally afford more things, and so that need to hold onto everything met the ability to *finally* buy everything and BOOM clutter.

So while I work through my stuff, both figurative and literal, I’m trying really, really hard to turn resentment into compassion.

Can efficiency be the enemy of resilience?

Sooo ruthless efficiency has fucked us over in so many ways and is taking so many creatures down with us.

For instance, here’s a story about how so many animals that have been raised for slaughter will now be dumped in landfills because there’s so little wiggle room in terms of how these facilities are set up.

These economic considerations also led us to have less wiggle room in human hospital capacity here in the United States as opposed to other nations (there’s another article that did a better job explaining it that I need to find, but here’s one with a little info on how we compare).

How can we use this in our real lives? Well I feel like a question that I see going into a lot of personal finance people is about whether to hold onto cash or invest. I was usually on the side of, well, isn’t it better to invest that money so it’s doing the most? But I’m coming to see that having that cash cushion is super important.

(It’d be great if the same shame that we apply to individuals in having enough for a rainy day applied to businesses though…)

But also it has me thinking more about how COVID could impact my own relationship with stuff moving forward. Like I used to like to have just what I needed without stocking up, but I feel like I’m going to end up learning towards keeping more things on hand now just in case.

I’ve also been feeling super lucky to have a bunch of stuff around that I probably should have let go of a long time ago, which I worry will reinforce the idea that I should keep things “just in case.”

I think I need to keep reminding myself that there’s a psychic cost to keeping stuff around, that the cost of replacing it might be less, but that’s also assuming a level of financial security that seems pretty uncertain right now.

Even asking myself “What’s the worst case scenario?” seems a bit iffy given how this time has shown that there’s so many shitty things possible that might have been difficult to imagine before.

For a while, I was training myself to be better about not eating past being full just because it was on my plate, and I did find it helpful to think about the fact that that food is wasted if it makes my belly too full. Maybe that’s the angle I’m going to need to go with letting go of stuff as well…

Limited space = limited stuff

It was so easy to have less stuff in a tiny apartment.

So many suburban homes are just too fucking big.

And we’re probably really tempted to just fill up all that space, just like we want to eat more if we’re eating off of bigger plates or just like meetings will expand to fill the time allotted to them.

I’m going to try to use that to ensure that my “containers” are smaller, that I don’t have unneeded storage thingies, that there are fewer tempting surfaces for things to pile up.