Marie Kondo's Anti-Economic Economy

Marie Kondo (Netflix photo)

I first heard of Marie Kondo, like many middle-class white people, from a meme. When the English translation of her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up appeared in 2014, the story began circulating that we should hold everything we own, and discard everything that doesn’t “spark joy.” The immediate response, half affectionate and half derisive, gained meme traction: “Sorry, Electric Company, but your bill definitely doesn’t spark joy.”

Now that the American leg of her career has second wind through her Netflix series, she’s become a remarkably divisive figure. I don’t mean her controversial opinion about minimizing your library, which is mostly crap anyway. I mean the collision between people who want (but mostly fail) to enact her principles in life, and everyone else. Let’s start with one important principle: expecting anything inanimate to “spark joy” contradicts every economy everywhere.

It’s easy to say Kondo’s principle of anti-acquisitiveness doesn’t jibe well with contemporary capitalism. Poet and philosopher Wendell Berry has observed that late capitalism depends heavily on advertising, which is the art of creating dissatisfaction. Capitalism, as practiced today, makes people unhappy with what they have, and sells them temporary gewgaws to mollify that unhappiness. Which we then have to become unhappy with, and buy the next gimcrack.

Capitalist philosopher Adam Smith justified his Invisible Hand of Economics with this famous quote: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Which, taken literally, makes sense: small operators want to get paid, so they provide a service. When Smith wrote in 1776, when start-up costs for bread-making were high and competition was scarce, this was hard to dispute.

But it doesn’t explain the present. Meat, bread, and beer are today absurdly cheap, a value distorted by public subsidies. Instead of providing the necessities of life, capitalism floods us with luxuries, distractions, and empty pastimes to make the hours go away. Does anybody really derive joy from watching television? Literally following Marie Kondo’s principles would require you to discard, don’t fool yourself, virtually everything you’ve ever owned.

Still, I’d go further than mere anti-capitalism, because all economic theories, eventually, assign monetary value to invaluable commodities. Even Marxism, which pooh-poohs ownership, or Chestertonian Distributism, which opposes all forms of bigness, necessarily assign weighted values to things you cannot buy. All systems seek rules and standards which monetize things you cannot buy, like family and community connections.

Consider a piano. We know the monetary value of a piano’s workmanship, the price of maintenance, the worth assigned to the space it occupies which we could, hypothetically, fill with other stuff. But what value do we assign the effort needed to learn to play? Because, lemme tell you, when my parents required me to spend thirty minutes every day practicing scales drills, that huge, pricy slab of mahogany sparked no joy in me whatsoever.

The list continues. Anybody who’s ever aspired to a writing career knows we don’t, generally, enjoy writing; we mostly enjoy having written. (There are exceptions.) The finished manuscript may “spark joy,” but the process of creating it seldom does, and the tools necessary to perform that creation often feel like a burden. This computer sits here, black and silent, mocking me for the four incomplete manuscripts which appear whenever I press the power button.

Seeking joy, as a tactile response, is innately anti-economic. To assign value based on my response to a thing reflects the care I’ve invested in it. I value my bodhran exactly in proportion to the time I’ve previously invested in practicing, though you might value my playing distinctly less. And the craftsperson who made my bodhran values it according to their skill investment, which distinctly doesn’t resemble my skill investment.

Let me try another approach. If I handed you the manuscript of my current work-in-progress, I’d be entrusting you with something that sparks profound joy in me. However, my manuscript is bulky, unbound, incomplete, and unedited; it probably would spark no joy in you, and indeed would feel like a burden. What economic value, then, does my manuscript have? Does it have any?

Marie Kondo essentially exposes the lie in assigning any dollar (pound, euro, yen) value to anything. Value derives from our relationship to a product or service, which is unique and intangible. Once we price that value, we’ve debased the human interaction. KonMari housekeeping doesn’t just eliminate our clutter; it rebalances our relationship to value itself.