Zasio asked the group to weigh Marnie’s excruciating choice. “How many say purchase?” she asked. “How many say don't purchase?”

The verdict, loud and clear, was “don’t.”

“Should I take a picture?” Marnie asked.

“That might be too much temptation,” Zasio said.

After extracting Marnie from the shoe section, Zasio asked her how anxious she felt, on a scale from 0 to 10.

“It’s a 9,” Marnie said.

As soon as she had glimpsed the shoes, Marnie recalled later, she lit up. “Look at the colors! Oh my God, they're orange, and pink, and blue, and they're the exact colors that I love,” she said, her voice still tinged with ecstasy. “It felt so delicious.”

Marnie and others in this story asked me not to use their full names because they’re worried their careers will suffer if their conditions are revealed. Marnie loves things—“beeeea-utiful” things, as she puts it. Not buying them “suuuucks.” Had Zasio not intervened, she would have bought “three pairs, probably.”

She has no idea how many sneakers she already has. “What difference does it make?” she said. “What a stupid question.”

Minimalism has swept up middle- and upper-class Americans recently, depositing them neatly in an IKEA Trofast container. Women are paring down their wardrobes, adults are moving back into dorm rooms, and there are now four reality shows devoted to tiny houses. At the forefront of this movement is Marie Kondo, the Japanese organizing guru whose maxim is to throw out anything that has outlived its purpose. In the wake of the release of her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Kondo’s acolytes have stepped up their donations to Goodwill and Instagrammed photos of their underwear drawers. Spending time with the hoarders, however, reveals how difficult it is for the people who truly need Kondo-type interventions to live by them. The hoarders, who love things, seem baffled by the recent nationwide rejection of stuff.

To help explain her hoarding habit, Marnie showed me her phone, which displayed 11,944 unread emails. Not everyone swears by inbox zero, of course, but some of the emails were for local-event listings in New York.

She left New York 16 years ago.

Then there’s the time she went to Israel and spent $400 on dead-sea face cream. “I could shop for skis,” she said, “and I've never skied in my life.”

She works a lot of hours. She stays up late at night online shopping. She showed me a photo of her L.A. home’s back room, packed to the brim with boxes and bins. Two pink, unused Sephora makeup bags sit perched on the ledge of the stuff-mountain.

Recently her house flooded, and all the boxes had to be taken out, and it was startling to see just how many there were. “A hoarder’s nightmare,” Marnie called it. She started thinking maybe she needed a bigger house.

Then she started thinking maybe that’s the exact wrong solution.