It seems like a fairly safe (if mundane) statement to make that America/the world’s obsession with Marie Kondo and downsizing has to do with both environmental concerns (not that getting rid of personal belongings does any good for the environment directly, but I think the impulse is connected) and a desire for control (in a world – and for Americans, a nation – whose survival seems more and more uncertain by the day). Owning fewer things seems like it should require less mental space, as well: if I own a discrete number of countable objects, they take up less thinking time in aggregate.
For me it goes beyond a straightforward desire for control – it’s a longing for some sort of reset button, a way to return to a fabled baseline that I’ve never actually experienced. I am extremely lucky in where I live and in relatively low rent for NYC, but since I moved into my apartment almost a decade ago it’s never been what I would consider baseline clean. That is, it’s a little bit falling apart everywhere. I can see through the cracks in the floorboards, brick dust sometimes come tumbling off of the walls, there’s not great sound- or smell-proofing so there’s always noise from upstairs and occasionally smells from downstairs (which is currently a nail salon…)–but it’s pretty lovely and reasonable. Still, I have a bourgeoise dream of moving into a place that is, if not new, freshly painted, fully sealed, and so clean that (even if this turns out to be a fever dream of my own capabilities) I can imagine keeping it so clean forever, because all I’ll have to do is maintain!
The only places I’ve lived (since leaving my parents house, that is) that had that clean-slate quality were dorms or grad student housing, and by design all of those places felt temporary. I have this very impractical vision of moving into a new place (one of these magical, hyper clean, free of lead paint places) after preparing by getting rid of anything I own here that I don’t need anymore – digitizing all of the reams of paper I have sitting in a clear plastic bin that weighs down the top shelf of my closet, rifling through my costume box and paring it down to things that maybe actually see the dark of another Halloween, taking photos of the “memories” I’ve saved in file folders marked with years so that I can recycle the ticket stubs, programs, and letters…and then, somehow, doing this same Kondo-esque process to the overwhelming number of files and pictures (most of them, now, of these items I’ve carefully photographed and then discarded) until I have something manageable, a set of photos on my hard drive that’s small enough to actually look through and enjoy from time to time.
If I had few enough objects resting on the floor that I could lift and dust underneath each one
If I had the exact number of pairs of earrings as the number of pairs of earrings I actually wear in real life
If my items were so manageable that I could not only keep them all clean but even keep the cleaning products clean
If for one single minute there could be no things left to do
If I’ve said something like this before, and I’m sure I have, it’s because it’s still tumbling through my mind on a daily basis, but I haven’t quite figured it out yet – not just the solution, but even how to say it, to explain the idea of this mythical baseline in which huge undertakings are no longer required, and all that’s left are the maintenance tasks like folding clean laundry and washing dirty dishes, leaving wide open fields of mental and physical space.
