My family became converts to minimalism in 2008 after I wasted a beautiful Saturday morning cleaning out my garage, and a neighbor, seeing my frustration, made the casual comment “Maybe you don’t need to own all that stuff.” As I surveyed the heap of dusty things piled up in my driveway, out of the corner of my eye I noticed my son playing alone on the swing set in the backyard. The de-clutter, de-own movement is rapidly catching on, as evidenced, for example, by the popularity of Tiny Houses and the growth of organizations such as the National Association of Professional Organizers and the National Association of Senior Move Managers. IKEA chief Steve Howard may have let a secret slip when he said that in the western world we’ve reached “ peak home furnishings.” We live in a society where families are chronically stressed, tired, and rushed, with our excessive possessions compounding (if not creating) the problems. We’re at material overload and it isn’t fun like it looks in the commercials.
Meanwhile, home organization, trying to find places for all our excess belongings, is now an $8 billion industry. About 25 percent of two-car garages don’t have room to park even one car inside them, and still one out of every 11 American households rents off-site storage-the fastest-growing segment of the commercial real estate industry over the past four decades.
Most homes contain more televisions than people. Over the same period, the size of the average American home has nearly tripled, and today that average home contains about 300,000 items.
In America, we consume twice as many material goods as we used to 50 years ago. Let me begin by saying that, to me, any voice calling us to own fewer possessions is a welcome voice. Surely, in Kondo’s simple question was the razor to slice through indecision about what to keep and what to toss when pursuing a simpler lifestyle. Suddenly, it seemed like everyone who was flirting with the notion of decluttering their homes began talking about joy-sparks. If not, then So long, mustard-colored cardigan with the leather buttons. Does an item in your possession give you a little thrill when you hold it in your hands? If so, hang on to it. That was the criterion Kondo proposed for deciding whether to keep something. When decluttering expert Marie Kondo published her ground-breaking book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, hordes of grateful, stuff-encumbered readers around the world seized particularly on her question “Does it spark joy?”
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