Let’s Talk KonMari #4: Small Potatoes

(Part 4 of a series on KonMari’ing my house. A why-to manual, not a how-to. The rest of the series is here: Clothing, Books, Papers, Sentimental Objects, Storage and Cleaning.)

After clothing, books and papers, Marie Kondo recommends tackling the “komono” (小物).

The name means “little things” and repeatedly gets translated as “miscellany” for KonMari purposes, but the category itself is huge. It’s pretty much every item in your house that isn’t clothing, books or paperwork and that exists there for practical (as opposed to sentimental) reasons.

For this reason, komono is often the category people get stuck on the most, as in this Reddit thread. That’s if they don’t throw out the KonMari method altogether on the theory that “everything else” shouldn’t be a damn tidying category in the first place.

A Big Pile of Small Potatoes

I’ve never had the honor of being invited into a Japanese home, so I can’t begin to speak for how they’re organized or what they contain. In the US, however, komono is by far the largest category in the house.

It’s even larger when the house’s residents aren’t fashionistas or bookworms. A Scholastic study estimated that 61 percent of low-income US families have zero books in the house. Zero.

Scholastic, of course, is concerned about the effect of a bookless home on children’s early language and literacy development. In the KonMari context, it’s more likely to inflate the amount of komono to be sorted through. Books take up space, and they occupy our time. A house with no books is likely to have something else in that space that takes up its occupants’ time.

Does Your Spatula Spark Joy?

Komono is overwhelmingly stuff we keep for practical purposes. It’s not personally chosen as an expression of identity (clothes), as a means to shape our identity (books), because we have adult obligations to others (papers), or because we have feelings (sentimental objects). It’s there to do the heavy lifting of keeping us alive.

As such, it poses two challenges that most of the other KonMari categories do not. First, it’s hard to imagine a lot of these things sparking joy. Second, because we view them as workhorses, we don’t see the ways in which these objects mediate our identities, particularly our class identities.

“Praise it to the Hilt”

Some of the earliest KonMari-related jokes I saw on social media had to do with tossing out our washing machines or vacuum cleaners because they don’t “spark joy.” It’s tough to see a roll of paper towels warming our hearts, especially when we think about it in the abstract.

In Spark Joy, Kondo writes, “If you come across komono that don’t particularly spark joy, try praising them to the hilt.”

Praising our material possessions, like thanking them, is a huge sticking point for Westerners who criticize Kondo’s methods – and it’s also why many commenters, like Jessica Roy in the LA Times, have pointed out the racial element of this criticism.

Kondo recommends thanks and praise because the KonMari method embraces animism as a given. The Shinto concept of everything, even individual grains of rice, having a god/soul/divine essence (I really have no idea which, whether or how to translate “kami” here) is a natural underpinning of Kondo’s approach.

It’s also, to most of us in the US, very, very weird.

Shinto isn’t the only world religion to embrace the concept of material objects sharing in the divine essence. A Muslim teaching explains that every inanimate “thing” in the world, down to individual blades of grass or grains of sand, is constantly engaged in praising its Creator. Psalm 150:6 says “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord,” with the definition of “breath” capacious enough to encompass ideas like spirit, soul, or the imprint of Divine creation as well as literal respiration.

For US material culture, however, the idea that individual objects might have personalities, spirits, or some other “being”ness we might recognize or respect is an affront to the ways we perform class success.

Who Is the Master Here?

Class status is frequently measured through performances of commanding and controlling others, and in the middle class, performances of status are most often performed through material objects. This is the driver behind our parents’ “keeping up with the Joneses” and our participation in both acquiring objects and divesting ourselves from them as a form of virtue signaling.

One of the ways to define class status in the US is by examining a person’s relationship to and use of stuff. The middle class embraces stuff both as a way to exercise the command and control that are usually exercised upon them by the capitalist class and as a way to signal their relative “middleness.”

I’ve certainly played this game in the past. In college I owned a knockoff Gucci clutch that I damn well knew was a knockoff, but I still preened when other people didn’t. Personal possessions I don’t even like, such as the bottle of Chanel no. 5 I inherited from my grandmother, have nevertheless held places of reverence among my personal things for years. They’re symbols of Status, of the better (and richer) me I longed to be.

The middle class even uses material things to moralize themselves into a position “above” the poor, kvetching about “poor people” who own iPhones or who drive dependable cars. Using material goods to signify status is a luxury the middle class believes should be reserved for the middle class.

“If I were poor, I would eat lentils,” say middle-classers, conveniently dodging the question “Okay, but if lentils would make you richer, why don’t you eat them now?”

The upper classes don’t need to play this game, and when they do, it is a dead giveaway of a failure to shed middle-class sensibilities despite an increase in material wealth. Donald Trump is the classic example: the poor (or middle-class) person’s conception of how a rich person should live, with gilded apartments, ketchupy steak and excessive golfing.

In fact, there’s only a certain amount of money one can spend on material comforts before all of one’s needs are luxuriously met. When money is invested in material displays beyond this point, it ends up being spent on things that are superfluous by any standard, like a tenth yacht.

This is why minimalism has become a method of signaling higher class status, rather than lower. “Minimalism is a virtue only when it’s a choice, and its telling that its fan base is clusetered in the well-off middle class,” says Stephanie Land in a 2016 NYT Opinion piece. “For people who are not so well off, the idea of opting to have even less is not really an option.”

Thanking the Help

Because the middle class allays its class anxiety (and the middles have more than everyone else combined) via material things, and because that allaying has much to do with exercising the command and control that are otherwise exercised against the middles, the class that constitutes the vast majority of KonMari consumers is also the class least interested in hearing that we are interdependent with our things.

Being middle class is about having “earned” the luxury of commanding our things: of buying things “just because,” of discarding things without a thought, of spending a premium for “designer” or “gourmet” options. Interdependence with things – the state of needing practical objects for practical purposes – is seen as lower-class. You need lentils; you earn steak.

So when Marie Kondo rolls in and suggests that our things might have feelings about how we treat them, we respond with all the indignation of Ebenezer Scrooge recommending that the poor die “and decrease the surplus population.” How dare you suggest that my purse or shoes deserve some consideration for their hard work? They’re here to serve me! That’s what I pay (for) them for!

This is, of course, exactly the attitude of the shareholder class toward the laboring class, and nobody in the latter group likes it when this attitude is directed at them – so we, in turn, take it out on our material possessions.

Kondo’s animism suggests an alternative path, in which we learn to cooperate with the material objects that share our living space rather than to command or control them. It’s a much kinder approach, and it’s also one that smacks of collectivism. Suspicious stuff for the country that claimed materialism won the Cold War.

The Cull and What I Learned From It

One of the weirdest upper-middle virtue-signaling experiences I’ve had in social media groups about KonMari is meeting the subculture of people who are using the method to one-up Sharon from down the block.

It’s the subculture that’s on full display if you search for “KonMari” on Pinterest. In between the infographics about how to go through all your crap are endless photos of perfectly-appointed drawers, kitchens and children’s rooms.

I’ve even encountered people who seem to think “spark joy” is synonymous with “shop like you’re as rich as you think you are.” One story, which I heard secondhand, involved an acquaintance and a friend of hers who stopped by one day while my acquaintance was canning fruit. My acquaintance mentioned proudly that she’d inherited all her canning jars from her mother and grandmother.

The friend’s response to this was scorn: “I threw all mine away and bought new, since I discovered Marie Kondo.”

I’m less interested in the decision to buy new than I am in the scorn itself. Having sorted 90 percent of what we own, I now know that my reaction to someone telling me they’d kept their heirloom canning jars would have been to assume that the heirloom jars made them happy, possibly in a way that new jars never would.

Their happiness isn’t my happiness, but that doesn’t make their happiness any less valid than mine. I suspect that anyone who missed this message also missed the point of the KonMari method.

I also don’t expect that anything that spark joy for me will automatically spark joy for anyone else. For example:

 

Most of these are vintage ornaments from the 1940s or thereabouts. I got them from my stepmother, who got rid of them because all they sparked for her was annoyance.

I love them. My only regret is that they’re showing 80 years’ worth of wear, because if I had my way, I’d keep them in their original state forever. I am thrilled to have these in our Christmas decorations, even though I know there are untold numbers of people who look at them and see nothing but junk.

The ornaments aren’t the only thing in the house that would get me a raised eyebrow from anyone for whom household decor is a means of one-upping the neighbors. But the beauty of having done this process is that I don’t care.

People who walk into my house are going to see me. They’re going to see a space full of stuff that brings me joy. If they love me, it’ll spark joy for them too; if not, they are cordially invited to keep on steppin’.

Next time: Sentimental Objects.