The more important part is that I found a way to bankroll it. In 2016, after months of unemployment, I decided to become a small time Marie Kondo. I whipped up a Nextdoor listing that included an unassuming picture of myself, a mention of “college educated,” and a snappy quip about loving “real life Tetris.” I set my fee to $13 an hour, close to the California average for housekeeping . No nibbles. I decided to get gutsy—I increased my rate to what felt like a goofy sum, $25 an hour, and added “consultant” to the job listing. Within two days, the requests began piling in.

I have always been good at organizing. I excessively purge and sort, immersing myself in organizational minutiae to the point of obsession. My bookshelves are alphabetized by subject, I use up all of my free makeup samples, and if you name a single item in my house I can tell you where it is. As a child I yearned for a label maker—a gift my parents wisely did not indulge—and spent hours borrowing my aunt’s every time we visited her. If it can be organized, chances are I have done it.

What I found pretty effectively corroborated the stories seen in Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, Netflix’s eight episode series that follows organizational guru Kondo’s work as a tidying consultant. People were drowning in prisons of their own making, armed with so much clutter they couldn’t manage it on their own, struggling to find places to store it. I helped one client sort out ten years worth of mismatched socks. Another had never gone paperless, and had fifty years of paper files—bank slips, home mortgage documents, thank you cards, old PC manuals—that he insisted on sorting into dozens of tabs in a series of filing cabinets. As I worked, he refused to throw anything away.

Americans have long been taught to buy things, countless things, as a means to satisfaction and happiness. The impulse is as listless as it is absorbing, a bandaid to patch a problem that no material item can adequately satisfy. The process of accumulation eventually makes it hard to find or effectively store the things we already own. In 2012, UCLA's Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) found that—in a systematic study of 32 middle-class, dual-income families in Los Angeles—only 25 percent of garages could actually store cars because there was too much other stuff in them.

It’s no wonder, then, that Marie Kondo’s “tidying” practices have spawned a tidy empire. The petite Japanese woman’s visibility skyrocketed after publishing the best-selling The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (Kondo actually wrote the book as a stopgap to appease the long waitlist for her tidying consultation services). It, along with its follow-up Spark Joy, have sold more than 7 million copies worldwide, and her work has been translated into 38 languages.