What Marie Kondo Means To Me

Marie Kondo (Netflix photo)

The internet collectively lost its mind last week at the revelation that home management guru Marie Kondo has largely abandoned tidying up. Now a mother of three, Kondo simply has other priorities. The online response has been an embarrassing pile-on, in which I bashfully admit I participated. Millions worldwide felt validated by the revelation that Kondo’s household management strategy doesn’t work if you have kids, a job, or a life.

Now the heat of excitement has largely dissipated, I’d like to consider what Kondo’s admission really means. Because I don’t think it means we have permission to live sloppy, chaotic lives. Though I can’t confirm it, I’d imagine that the messiest parts of Kondo’s apartment probably look more orderly than the cleanest parts of my bachelor pad. She practiced habits of cleanliness long before real life derailed that ethic.

We humans enjoy seeing the mighty brought low. The public schadenfreude demonstrated whenever Elon Musk finds another way to mismanage Twitter is just one current example. We feel gratified knowing “the great” are fragile like us. Unfortunately, I know something about falling short of goals. As a Christian, an American, and a progressive, I’m a member of several groups that are historically bad at living up to our own standards.

Rhetoricians speak of the “Fundamental Attribution Error,” a fallacy of informal logic. Briefly put, we assume our own misbehavior is a consequence of circumstances, but we assume other people’s misbehavior stems from their personality. When I personally fail to uphold my voiced values—my religious morals, intellectual standards, or just proper etiquette—I’ll tend to blame something outside myself. But when someone else fails, they’re personally culpable.

I see something similar happening with Marie Kondo currently. People who previously rushed to defend themselves against criticism for haphazard housekeeping because they have demanding jobs, small children, or whatever, now see Kondo having to schedule her life around her kids, and construing it as a failure of her philosophy. People who would never blame their politics or religion for their own failings, cast the same aspersions on Kondo.

But I’d contend that no philosophy ever encompasses every possible circumstance. The entire point of Marie Kondo’s tidying philosophy wasn’t to live permanently inside a Better Homes & Gardens display; it was to practice in moments of limited pressure, training yourself how to think. Because when the pressure hits, when you have kids demanding your time and attention, it’ll be too late to learn how to maintain your house.

Previous moral scandals have erupted because people thought their religion or philosophy protected them from failure. Famed televangelist Jimmy Swaggart preached against sexual indiscretion, then got caught with a hooker. Swaggart wept on television, pleaded for believers’ forgiveness, and then… got caught with another hooker. Because he believed his faith didn’t just direct him from sin, he believed it made him invulnerable to sin.

Other examples accumulate. We know teenagers who sign “virginity pledges” are no less likely than the general population to actually have premarital sex. However, because they believe they’re morally immune to premarital sex, they’re less likely to have birth control available when it actually happens. Because these teenagers didn’t practice their moral responses in low-pressure conditions, they had no response when the pressure was on.

Paging Bristol Palin, stat.

Moral philosophies, whether Christianity or pragmatism or Marie Kondo’s systematic cleanliness, aren’t intended to last forever. One doesn’t rest on moral accomplishments like a fat puppy. Rather, we need to exercise our moral positions in safe environments of controlled pressure, just as athletes practice weight training in the gym between bouts on the field. Practice doesn’t make perfect; rather, I’d say that practice makes prepared.

Permit me to overextend the athletic metaphor. Anybody who’s worked out knows the person able to lift the heaviest gym weights isn’t necessarily the strongest person. Rather, somebody with practiced form and moderate strength can outlift somebody with sloppy form and great strength. That’s what Marie Kondo, and other philosophers, should offer us: not strength, but form. Because we still have form even when our strength inevitably fails us.

We haven’t seen Marie Kondo’s post-kids house. But I’d bet money that we’d enter and, while she blushed and apologized for the mess, we’d gawk at nearly everything in its place and free of dust. Because through years of practice, she’s learned the habits of making good decisions about what to keep or discard. She knows what she values. And unlike us, she knows the right way to get it.