In 2022, I thought a lot about the joy of stuff

Published on 7 December 2022

You’ve likely come across Marie Kondo’s books, glossy and coffee table ready, in places like train stations and Oliver Bonas. She’s also got her own Netflix show where, like a Japanese Mary Poppins, she sweeps into the lives of hapless Americans with her promises that everything will be better once they have cleared out their useless crap. And it’s true! Hold up the items in your home and see if they spark joy, she urges. If not, it’s time to let that thing go.

I once told my mother, herself a lapsed Catholic, that the nearest thing akin to religion that I’d felt drawn to as an adult was the word and gospel of Marie Kondo. She was slightly affronted – until I showed her the chapter on folding. A retired nurse who likes to cultivate the same level of minimalism in her house as the hospitals she’s spent her entire working life in, she instantly understood the appeal of imposing predictable order in your home.

There is a deep pleasure in discarding the things that you’ve gathered up in disconsolate, listless moments, thinking they’ll bridge a gap. I’m over that shit, you think, as you pull the half-finished tapestries, the glitter glue gun, and the calligraphy book, from beneath your coffee table. All the stuff that you thought would replace the doomscrolling in front of the TV that you succumb to late at night, in that baggy hour or so before you have to try to force your dumb body to sleep so you can take it to work. Now I have my bullet journal/yoga video playlist/meal prepping, everything is different. Six months later, you find yourself leafing through an abandoned keto cookbook, perched on the yoga block you fished out from behind the sofa when you decided it was about bloody time you mastered the splits. Let the yoga things into your life, let them flow out again, to the charity shop. Namaste. You are at peace, now that mat isn’t sticking out from beneath the sofa, pricking your conscience every time you sit down to open up Instagram with the humped posture of a gorilla. 

We are all guilty of succumbing to the siren call of stuff. That fresh-after-pay-day feeling, when those things you’ve been needing to take your hobby to the next level finally go on sale. 

Stuff isn’t something you need, like clothes to put on your body, or things to cook your meals in. It’s the things that you insert into your life, imagining you’ll crowbar the time to use them in between all the other things that you do in your week to present as a functional adult. Things like keeping a house that is at least superficially clean, where objects don’t threaten to spill out and deck you every time you pull open a cupboard. This is tiring and quite dull. It’s so nice to augment it all with an enriching treat. A board game perhaps, or a pack of novelty cocktail straws. It’s not even about the object, it’s the moment of respite that you imagine you’ll find with your loved ones, enjoying it all.

Of course, decluttering your stuff isn’t just about the joy of tidying up (sorry, Kondo-sama). It can also mark a transition from one epoch to another.

One of the most joyful Whatsapp exchanges I had this year was with a fellow IVF-enduring friend. Were we sharing scan pictures of the much-wanted babies that were blossoming inside us, thanks to a blend of science, magic, and incredible luck? No. That cute stuff is for what I like to think of as “vanilla” pregnancies. We shared pictures of discarded boxes of medicine, sliding down our rubbish shoots, never to darken our bathrooms again. Not just sparks of joy, a blazing fiery inferno, every time I glance at the empty shelf where the needles used to sit.

With a new member coming into our family, I have taken my Kondo-ism up a notch. Mostly, it involves moving piles of things that I have confirmed to spark joy from one side of the flat to the other, but in a way that I’m assured will help the energy of our family flow. 

Like any sane person in 2022, I am overwhelmingly aware of the cresting environmental crisis. The landfills. The microplastics that percolate into the soil and the plants. The fact that for 6 weeks this summer, our flat consistently stayed 9 degrees above the recommended temperature for a small baby. I don’t want to exacerbate the problem for my child. I have found myself pondering why we can’t buy biodegradable wooden prams or recyclable baby bottles, given the acute environmental focus that having a pending person inevitably brings to parents-to-be. I can help make a better world for my daughter, I think, as I sit, curled around my laptop, skimming through Facebook Marketplace. If only I can just get the right stuff.