Decluttering the Pandemic: Marie Kondo, Minimalism, and the “Joy” of Waste

Born largely from discourses on environmental sustainability, the contemporary minimalist movement has produced a new relationship to consumer objects. Where the accumulation of objects once conferred the status of wealth and prosperity under capitalism, minimalism aims to rethink the object as a spiritual extension of our inner lives. This is nowhere as evident than in the writing of Marie Kondo, whose teachings on “joyous” decluttering has enraptured a new class of consumers. Yet, for as much as contemporary thinking on minimalism figures in the image of eco-conscious neo-spirituality, this essay aims to demonstrate the relationship of minimalism to waste. For as much as the decluttering of our private spaces signals to the values of self-control and discipline, it also inadvertently intensifies a relationship to objects in which things that fail to “spark joy” become consigned to the garbage dumps and landfills that today swell with the abject accumulation of consumer society. For as much as the fashion of minimalism gestures to the aspirations of anti-consumerism, it is concomitantly the positive condition upon which the overflowing possessions of a Western consumer class are fated to become trash.