The Netflix series has sparked a whole new wave of tidying. But can I apply her minimalist approach to my love life, friendships and diet?

Marie Kondo is the latest in a long line of people put on this earth to make me feel bad about myself. I know, deep down, that everyone has problems, but on the surface Kondo very much appears to be someone who does not. I’ve never seen a more capable or composed human being in my life. Watching her kneel on the floor, patiently teaching stressed out suburban parents how to fold a T-shirt, fills me with equal parts delight and sadness. She’s exactly the sort of person I used to try to transform myself into every January, until I accepted I’m simply too psychologically feeble.

According to Kondo’s worldview, an orderly home begets an orderly life. The KonMari method, outlined in her 2012 book The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying and this year’s hit Netflix series, is designed to “spark joy in the world through tidying”. Once you’ve thrown away every grotty holiday vest from the 90s and learned how to organise your knives, so it goes, order within your relationships, career and digestive tract will soon follow.

Having reduced my number of partners to one, I have already KonMari’d my love life

This, I believe. I’ve gone through enough depressive episodes to know that physically decluttering a room can have a mirror effect on your mental state – but unfortunately I love things. As a twentysomething on her eighth lease in an increasingly precarious rental market, you’d think I’d have learned to downsize, but I’ve done the opposite. I haven’t had dominion over more than 12 square feet of space in my entire life, and as long as that is the case I will continue to fill it with votive candles, matryoshka dolls and interesting sugar packets from Berlin cafes, and lug it all down endless flights of stairs in big plastic tubs marked “Bits” every time a landlord decides to hike the rent up.

But, in theory, couldn’t the KonMari method be applied to anything? It’s a way of life that involves going about, looking at stuff, and asking – like Hamlet to Yorick’s unearthed skull – does this spark joy? The answer, according to Kondo, points the way to a life filled only with items we truly cherish. Who’s to say the same approach can’t work for our relationships or finances? To find out, I applied the KonMari method to four key areas of my life.

1. Friends. As a wretched people pleaser, can I cull some stragglers?

The Kondo method posits, “The more you own, the less it means”, which translates to something along the lines of, “One pair of comfy jeans is better than eight pairs that make you feel body conscious”, but could also work as a comment on the value of a few close friendships over lots of superficial ones. It seems like good practice to interrogate the dynamics of your relationships once in a while; separate your durable hoodies from your Topshop tunics circa 2006, so to speak.

Exes you lied about wanting to stay friends? So long. That mouthy bloke you suffer because you rate his girlfriend, but with whom you always end up getting sucked into a two-hour debate about identity politics at someone’s birthday drinks? Farewell. The person whose birthday drinks it was? Auf wiedersehen, didn’t really know her anyway.

After a week of culling stragglers, I don’t notice much difference. I guess I’m not widely known for my witty rapport or eagerness to go outside. Also, I don’t tell anyone that’s what I am doing, which is arguably bad form since one of Kondo’s main rules is to thoughtfully consider an item and thank it for its service before letting it go. But it feels unnecessary to hit up someone I’ve seen naked, after several months of silence, to inform them I won’t be responding to their texts in future because they don’t spark the requisite joy.

Still, I feel better. As a wretched people pleaser, I find it difficult to liberate myself from the sense of obligation to be everywhere for everyone all the time, and the inevitable crush of guilt that comes with that impossible task. It is freeing to have a system imposed upon me that gives me permission to ignore a text asking me to listen to a friend of a friend’s band; I can concentrate on more pleasurable activities instead, like watching YouTube documentaries about serial killers or doing a protein treatment on my hair.

All this extra leisure time and free headspace makes me feel like a member of the aristocracy, or a regular man. The more I learn to appreciate doing things I actually want to do, the more everything else starts to feel like an imposition. Do I want to go out for a drink? Do I want to do emotional labour at 10pm on a Wednesday? Or, do I want to watch The Office while deleting every text that isn’t a soup recipe from my mother?

The more I shoot people down, the easier it becomes. It starts with loose acquaintances, but this reasoning begins to infiltrate my close friendships as well. Sorry, mate, can we see that film you like the look of another night? Sorry, mate, I know it’s your wedding but the thing is: I don’t feel like it. Sorry, mate, I can sense something heavy is about to come up in this conversation so I’m going to excuse myself to go to the toilet for a really, really long time.

After two weeks of indulging myself, I forget how to have a normal conversation. I feel strange and empty. Presumably someone less desperate for solace would benefit from this process. I, however, have spent more time with the big rabbit at my local museum than my own housemates, and now nobody speaks to me unless it’s about bills.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The first hurdle I encounter is that I don’t have an end goal.’ Photograph: David Yeo/The Guardian

2. Love. Can I reorganise my relationship and pinpoint our shared vision?

Having reduced my number of partners to one, I have already KonMari’d my love life by acknowledging what sparks joy (someone who gives me compliments and laughs at my farts) and discarding the rest (Tinder matches whose ambivalence I overlooked in exchange for free pizza). But how does the method fare within the framework of heterosexual monogamy?

The KonMari method does claim that couples can deepen their ties through tidying, but I can’t be arsed with that. My boyfriend is five years younger than me and we have enough of a borderline mother/son dynamic as it is, without getting into enforced room tidying. Instead, I decide to organise my relationship the way Kondo reckons I should organise my wardrobe: pinpoint my vision, pile everything up, then take each item in my hand and think about how it fits into my end goal.

The first hurdle I encounter is that I don’t have an end goal. I don’t want to get married. I don’t want kids until I know I’ve hit my physical peak, and the only way we’re getting a house in this economy is if we build it on The Sims. So we apply the KonMari method to the reliable constant we do have: sex.

Just to clarify, when Kondo talks about “sparking joy” she’s referring to a warm and positive feeling. It’s not a case of choosing what to discard, but of choosing what to keep. This philosophy fell flat on its arse as far as friendships were concerned, but came into its own when it involved spreading my nefarious paraphernalia out on a bed to see which things we wanted to take into our future. There is something beautiful about holding a knackered bullet vibrator tenderly in your hands, as a couple, and whispering, “Thank you for your service”, before dropping it into a bin.

3. Food. Do I want to take this sausage roll into my future? Can I take two?

The KonMari method is about checking in with your feelings toward things. Whether it’s a cushion or a cardigan, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. When applied to food, this became complicated, because the eye of this beholder tends to be much larger than her stomach.

I usually manage to curb myself from eating half a pint of ice-cream right before bed. What I want, however, is to eat the whole thing and wake up at 3am with acid reflux. So, in the noble pursuit of joy, I allow it. In goes the ice-cream, along with 1,000 almonds which I chain eat throughout the day, and an obscene amount of bread. Of course, I ask myself the difficult, soul-searching questions along the way: Do I want to take this sausage roll with me into my future? Or am I just bored? Obviously, the answer is always, “Can I have two sausage rolls please.” But said with feeling, which is what counts.

This mainly involves asking everyone I come across if they have a biscuit, like a 15-year-old hustling for cigarettes

The biggest change I have to make is to my weekday work lunches. Typically, these consist of whatever I’ve had the night before, reheated. I’ve been vegan for seven years and I’m the first to admit couscous is austere, especially when eaten three meals in a row after a 16-hour stint in the fridge. Unfortunately, my finances dictate that this is the life I must lead. So I try to break up the day by seeking out joy elsewhere. This mainly involves asking everyone I come across if they have a biscuit, like a 15-year-old hustling for cigarettes, and going to Pret a Manger every few hours. I have not eaten this poorly since year seven, when I developed a mistrust of the school canteen and spent all my lunch money on Galaxy Caramel.

4. Social media. Can I take a moment each morning to thank the internet?

If you were to “tidy up” your social media – by posting only things that are “meaningful” and deleting everything that is no longer of value, for example – you’d quickly realise that what you have on your hands is the equivalent of five to 10 years’ worth of knickers with the elastic gone out of the waist. This dank meme; this well-lit photograph of a mountain near your parents’ house; this witty observation about Brexit – do they spark joy?

The answer is no. To tidy my life accordingly, I would have to wipe it all. Erase my digital footprint. End up doing that thing grizzled white male actors do in films that are well received at Cannes, where they abandon society to rusticate in the mountains and raise their children outside the toxic grip of “the system”. I would go mad, basically.

Instead, I stop using apps unless I “need to”. I delete Facebook, tweet only things that are work-related and unsubscribe from every Reddit community except one where people submit gifs of animals being brushed. I revert to life as it was at the dawn of social networking – where the only conversations you had were ones you sought out, where feelings were communicated through quotes from coming of age books and photos of Courtney Love.

Scrolling through Instagram one evening towards the end of the experiment, I think about all the moments in Kondo’s Netflix show where she gathers everyone together in one communal spot to thank it before the tidying process can begin. Everyone closes their eyes for a quiet moment of reflection, in which they acknowledge the space they’ve made for themselves but probably take for granted every day. The result of this mini-meditation is often an overwhelming sense of appreciation – a feeling of warmth that clears a path for gratitude, illuminating everything around you even if it is a total shit tip. It’s a touching moment – one that’s antithetical to the way we operate normally, especially on social media, which is literally designed so that any object is instantly replaced by the next.

I consider a future where I take a moment each morning to thank modern technology. Perhaps that small act of recognition would make the whole thing less horrid, less antagonistic, and it would become a force for good.

Then I think about actually closing my eyes and saying, “Thank you, computer” before logging on for a nice long day of smashing ‘like’ on criticisms of Winston Churchill, and how psychotic that would be. And it brings me joy.

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