What If This Were Enough? Read online

  Advanced-level Kondo offers particularly exquisite peeks into the author’s madness: She refers to tidying up as a “once-in-a-lifetime special event,” endorses “treat[ing] your bras like royalty,” and recommends covering stuffed animals’ eyes so that they can’t flash you accusatory looks from that Goodwill-bound bin by the front door. In other words, calling Kondo’s infatuation with organizing a “love of tidying” is a bit like praising a tsunami for its unmatched passion for redesigning entire coastlines. It’s a personality disorder in motion more than a lifestyle brand. Perversely, that only makes it all the more magical.

  But maybe it takes a slightly unhinged person to reverse our decades of mindless consumption. Who else would dare suggest, “The basic rule for papers: Discard everything”? (Are they not required to keep tax records in Japan?) Who else would name a section of her book “Photos: Cherish who you are now”? Imagine Southwest Airlines changing their slogan from “Wanna get away?” to “What are you running from?”

  Kondo has never seemed quite in step with the rest of humanity. (Regarding letters: “Rather than putting them directly into the recycle bin, it is more respectful to cover them in a paper bag first.”) Yet her semi-unhinged belief in the supernatural wonder of things is part of what makes her prose so riveting. The fact that she’s writing these odd, gorgeous snippets of poetry about sifting soulfully through your sock drawer is a big part of her appeal.

  Yet as Marie Kondo becomes an internationally known guru—a few years ago I received an invitation to hear her speak in Los Angeles, where she was going to share “wisdom and practical information,” presumably about, you know, folding—it’s important to remember the shadow-message that lies just underneath Kondo’s shiny veneer of prim optimism: We live in a world that wants us to replace the hundred bags of worthless stuff we just threw out with a hundred more bags of worthless stuff—not eventually, not next week, but today. Capitalism is exquisitely designed to remind us at every turn that not only is our happiness contingent on our ability to purchase more stuff, but our inability to do so makes our unhappiness all but guaranteed.

  The poetic subtext that turned Marie Kondo into something akin to a globally recognized religious figure, the Dalai Lama of decluttering, is that we don’t need more stuff. More, in fact, is a sickness. Kondo’s message is, and always has been, that we should work with what we have instead.

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  That’s a message that’s surprisingly difficult to find anywhere else. What would it mean to read all of the books you own, for example, before you buy a new book? What kind of a pariah would give used items as gifts? What if you resolved never to buy another article of clothing, and to only wear the clothes you already own? None of this sounds socially feasible. It might seem quirky or eccentric at best, downright pathological at worst.

  Nowhere do we see this more than with our children, for whom stuff is the ultimate celebratory gesture. At kids’ birthday parties, bags of cheap plastic junk are handed out as the guests leave. Parents have recurring conversations about the difficulty of forcing their kids to get rid of trinkets and unused toys; then another party rolls around and they’re disseminating worthless crap like everyone else. If you were to throw a party and tell the kids to “go outside and make mud pies,” you would only embarrass your kids. Birthdays are for stuff. Celebrations bring more stuff. Every holiday revolves around stuff—giving it, receiving it.

  Most of us don’t model happiness in a vacuum of things. But at a time when our screens are never far from our faces, advertisements for more new stuff flash in the margins of our view most of the hours of the day, and our shared public spaces are almost without fail commercial spaces, creating fun and happiness or even just appreciating solitude and silence adds up to an important survival strategy.

  What would it feel like to spend a day without stuff?

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  The modern, minimalist home, with its “White Dove” walls and its recessed speakers and its smart-home technology, might seem like the natural, more evolved landing point in the rise and fall of materialism. Yet while spending a massive amount of money to get rid of or hide all unsightly possessions might look like emancipation, that kind of a life creates its own anxieties. It’s the free-floating neuroticism that springs from attempting to maintain a sleek, spare home but always falling short. Because even though we all tend to tell ourselves a story of why we fail—we are lazy, we are bad at cleaning, we don’t have time—the truth is that a clutter-free existence exerts a constant pressure that’s oppressive in its own way.

  And as interior design standards have trickled down from luxury hotels to outdoor malls to retail spaces to mom-and-pop restaurants to your friend’s house (that somehow feels like a cross between a luxury hotel and a Dwell spread, how does she do it?), as regular humans peruse design magazines and pin photos of their dream apartments and houses on their Pinterest boards, the ability to simply live with your regular old ramshackle not-very-designed, somewhat cluttered habitat becomes harder and harder. Somehow, you’re supposed to inhabit a pristine museum instead.

  And minimalism is no longer just for the very rich or the under-occupied. Your house can’t merely be clean; it also must be empty. Clutter is a symbol of your weakness, a sign of an unsophisticated mind, a sign that you don’t know what’s cool, a sign that you are falling behind. Upper-crust decluttering has trickled down and rendered the clutter-embracing slobs of the world obsolete.

  These are the sorts of unrealistic social pressures that keep the stock market on its perpetual upward march. The economy expands to infinity only if our desires and expectations expand proportionately. Standards must always be shifting like unsteady ground beneath our feet. The manufacturing of shame dictates that every mundane thing we do that is currently seen as Acceptable and Good will eventually be deemed Not Good Enough by the cultural marketplace.

  But if we envision a life of perpetually staying up-to-date with the styles, the trends, the sounds, the smells, the looks—let’s not even say “the ideas,” since ideas have come to feel as onerous and beside the point as file cabinets or Rolodexes, when compared to memes or screenshots or tweets—we are committing to a life that is cluttered but also disposable, a life in which it becomes harder and harder to distinguish between passions and trivia. Whereas Kondo herself might be viewed as a kind of prophet embracing “joy” in all of its sparest forms, the decluttering movement, as it has been metabolized by our culture, makes it clear that you’re only sloughing off unnecessary things so that the new trends and styles and sounds and smells can be purchased and absorbed into your environment and sloughed off in turn. Ideally you will swim up a stream of things for your entire life.

  Figuring out how to sort our belongings might sound trivial at first, but it forms part of our guiding modern religion, one that binds us to lifestyles built around excess while failing to meet our most basic human needs. Not only do modern consumer choices rarely bring us long-term satisfaction, but they’re exhausting. It takes a lot of energy to recognize which signifiers will place you in the dreadful almost-past with the know-nothings who aren’t always moving forward, always casting off and acquiring more, always focused on what comes next.

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  If she weren’t herself subsumed by the same high capitalist processes that doomed her to become the human equivalent of needless clutter, Marie Kondo had the potential to be a true prophet of this strangely dissatisfying age. Because her message, that your things shouldn’t make you feel anxious or guilty or unnerved or uncomfortable, can’t help but sound like a rare drop of truth in a sea of madness. After all, it’s not just our stuff that’s making us anxious. It’s also the thousands of messages on our phones, hovering before our faces every day, asking us to react, like, follow, listen, comment, retweet, forward, join, enlist, consume. We are besieged by alerts. The soundtrac
k to our days is our phone’s relentless ping, ping, ping.

  Turning your phone off, turning your sound off, going offline—these things are viewed not just as antisocial but as irresponsible. A few years ago, I had an acquaintance inform me that I had a “texting problem” because I didn’t drop everything and text back at any hour of the day. I tried to explain that I’m a writer, so I need several hours of uninterrupted silent time to do my job. But because I work from home, this was met with eye rolls. You must answer more quickly, was the response. Everyone present agreed. I had a problem. Waiting four hours is too long. You must not mute the constant pinging. You are on call to everyone at all times.

  The digital clutter of our lives doesn’t merely make us anxious, interrupting our train of thought and blocking us from longer periods of silence and the deeper thinking that can go with it. Our digital clutter redesigns our world around the temporary. Constant interruptions turn us into amnesiacs who are required to respond, reply, and react from moment to moment. This is why we have so little memory of what happened last week, let alone what happened last year or twenty years ago. We are constantly threatened with interruption, so we experience each moment as something that could easily be discounted, could easily be erased or subsumed by some more-important message. Our minds, in other words, are filled with the clutter of what comes next: messages and tweets and texts yet to be received. We live in a world of past and future clutter. We are boxed in. There is no space for where we are right now.

  It’s no wonder we’ve responded so enthusiastically to the message of minimalism. Our minds are so filthy with noise and anticipated interruptions. There is no way to just be here, now.

  By imbuing objects with feelings (in keeping with the Shinto tradition), Kondo underscored the importance of the feelings that our objects evoke in us. But when we tune in to those feelings, something strange happens. We start to recognize not just the joy that things can spark, but the anxiety as well: My iPhone makes me worried that the school could call at any minute to tell me my daughter is sick or hurt. My FitBit reminds me that I haven’t exercised yet. My laptop reminds me that a catastrophe could be unfolding somewhere in the world right now, but I won’t know about it until I check the news.

  Can I step away from this digital maw? Will my voice still matter if no one can hear it? Can silence feel more pressing and important than a ping? Instead of imagining the next text, the next tweet, the next Instagram post, the next flash of what my cousin did over spring break or what my neighbor ate for breakfast, what if I could imagine living in this moment, without wanting more? The question isn’t whether or not your stuff sparks joy. The question is: Can you spark joy all by yourself? Do you remember how that feels?

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  My father’s wallet sits in the top drawer of my desk. Every few months, I pull it out and look at his money: $26—a twenty (dated 1990), a five (1993), and a one (1988). When this cash was in my dad’s wallet, he was fifty-six years old. Along with that $26, he had a retirement fund, several investment properties, a condo, a brand-new Lexus coupe, and a small piece of paper stuck to his dresser mirror on which he had scrawled a reminder, in black ballpoint pen: “All of heaven is within you.”

  When I take my dad’s wallet out of my desk drawer and hold it in my hands, it brings me what the Japanese would call mono no aware, which translates literally as “the pathos of things” but means more broadly, “a melancholic awareness of the transience of existence.” My father’s wallet reminds me that nothing lasts. Just when you’re starting to get comfortable, you disappear. And maybe only one or two of your things will seem important to someone else when you’re gone.

  That’s sad, but it’s also a reason to wake up to the enormity of the moment, to the unbelievable gift of being alive, right now. You don’t need more than this. All of heaven is within you.

  running on empty

  Harriet Daimler, the protagonist of Iris Owens’s 1973 novel After Claude, has a knack for eviscerating self-satisfied urban types. After rolling her eyes at a slender girl passing a joint (“ ‘I’m wrecked,’ she bragged, as though it took a special talent to get stoned”), Harriet utters a relatable prayer: “Lord, spare me these dimpled darlings who are always congratulating themselves for not having any thoughts or feelings.”

  Harriet might have given those dimpled darlings a little more credit. Floating through life unencumbered by thoughts or feelings is more challenging than you might imagine. As the tabloids have demonstrated for decades now, even those with untold cash reserves and limitless adoration from the masses can’t tamp down their neuroses or their melancholy for too long. Empowered to sip champagne among half-naked nymphs beside glittering swimming pools, somehow these mortals still struggle mightily to keep their pesky thoughts and feelings from messing with their good lives.

  Neuroticism in paradise is rarely explored in the luxury-focused narratives that have filled the small screen for the past five or six decades. Escapist fantasies, after all, rely on images of glamorous, leisurely living to transport us from our ordinary living rooms into a gorgeous world inhabited by shiny, beautiful people. From The Love Boat to Dynasty to The O.C. to Ballers, such fantasies hold a special place in our culture. But none can quite stack up to the happy-go-lucky, high-fiving men at the center of HBO’s Entourage, that mid-aughts exercise in wishful thinking. Since the show made its debut in 2004, the mood of celebrity culture has shifted from adoration (Vanity Fair profiles, expanded Oscar coverage, Cribs) to contempt (unflattering paparazzi close-ups, Gawker Stalker maps) to indifference, and back to a kind of obsession (Kim Kardashian, Beyoncé, and the cult of Instagram). Through it all, Vince and his posse remained ever the same: cruising in their SUVs, sipping on their lattes, and conquering slick agency offices and bass-thumping nightclubs alike with the slouchy nonchalance of sophomores at a kegger.

  Their obliviousness to the shifting cultural climate could be viewed as a testament to the joys of living in a well-financed, hermetically sealed bubble of comfort, though it’s easier to suspect that these four men were just plain oblivious. How else did Vince (played by Adrian Grenier), Drama (Kevin Dillon), Eric (Kevin Connolly), and Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) dedicate most of their time to the pursuit of pleasure without appearing to take much pleasure in any of it? Some have referred to Entourage as a West Coast, male version of Sex and the City, but the differences between the two shows are more instructive than the similarities. Unlike the promiscuous epicureans of Sex and the City, who recounted each romantic dalliance as if it were a meal at a five-star restaurant, Vince and his boys treated sex with pretty strangers like fast-food takeout. For a bunch of guys who ogled more curvilinear flanks per episode than Gopher and Isaac did on an entire season of The Love Boat, these four were remarkably dispassionate about their primary hobby.

  And far from sweating the sexual small stuff, in the manner of Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte (This guy still lives with his mother! This guy has too much back hair!), the Entourage crew successfully swatted away apprehension wherever they found it, abandoning reflection or insight for bong hits and marathon sessions with the Xbox. Year after year, the frat-boy wisdom they repeated to each other remained the same: Nothing—not a job, not a woman, and certainly not a sense of your wasted potential—is worth losing sleep over.

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  Despite its fabled excesses, Hollywood has a healthy track record of self-mockery. As portrayals of fallen stars go, though, it’s tough to beat the bitter former silent-movie legend Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) of Sunset Boulevard or the delusional former child star Jane Hudson (Bette Davis) of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Both Norma and Baby Jane have a predilection for creating imaginary worlds out of thin air—exactly the sort of talent that starts to look less enviable once the cheering crowds stop cheering and wander off. In these Tinseltown self-satires, thoughts and feelings are a liability,
fame is a deadly acid that scars the psyche beyond recognition, and no star is so bright that it won’t eventually flame out spectacularly.

  The character who perhaps most memorably embodies the perils of intelligence and sensitivity in Hollywood is one who doesn’t inhabit Hollywood at all—played again by Bette Davis, this time as Margo Channing in All About Eve, which is set in the world of New York theater. Margo can’t even appreciate her glory days, because she’s too smart not to know that they’re numbered. Unable to censor herself or ignore the brutal superficiality around her, Margo transforms from celebrated starlet to self-imploding black hole of ego-driven darkness over the course of two hours. All of the paparazzi-incited outbursts in the world can’t approach the simmering contempt of Margo’s announcement, at a party of wary onlookers: “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

  In each of these movies, Hollywood’s humiliations transform once-exalted divas into paranoid monsters with a compulsion either to regain their former glory or to stop at nothing to destroy the ascendantly glorious. Imagine if Vinnie Chase had that kind of passion! Even when he finally succumbed to a drug-fueled downward spiral, it came off with all of the heaviness of an after-school special, with Vince in Scott Baio’s stoner role. But then, part of what made each season of Entourage feel interchangeable with the next was the fact that the corrupting influence of stardom never had any cumulative effect on Vince (or on us, the audience). Like an eternal ingénue, Vince remained magically resistant to the ego-bloating aspects of Hollywood life, never feasting on the empty praise of adoring fans or fawning studio heads. Instead, he partook of the string-bikini-clad spoils of fame with a casual levity. His one brief explosion of expletives and anger didn’t feel motivated by anything as heavy as existential dread or a wounded ego. He was just a little peeved that night, too low on sleep and not high enough on coke to make small talk with strangers.