6 Ways I Disagree with Kon Mari

I have personally been through Kon Mari’s 2 books most recent books on tidying and de-cluttering. I can honestly say that I did really value these books and I do find lots of good things about them. I did actually go through the entire book step by step and followed her methods. However, I can attest to the fact that clutter crept back into my home. At first I felt a lot of guilt and shame. Maybe I had not done everything correctly? Where did I go wrong? Did I fail? Why do I continually need to de-clutter/clear my home? What’s really going on here on a deeper level? What problems am I not dealing with? What am I resisting?

These questions really helped me because it really made me see the deeper personal relationship we have with our things and how it connects to our homes and ourselves. Recently I have begun de-cluttering in my home again, but I do it in a completely different way. Here are some thoughts on Kon Mari’s method and ways that I disagree with her through my own experience.

1. There is no such thing as a rebound: In Kon Mari’s book she claims that if you go through her method you will never need to do a big de-cluttering session again. She calls needing to do a major de-cluttering session a “rebound.” If we happen to have a need to do more de-cluttering it does not mean that we have a disease that came back. It does not mean that we have failed. It does mean that we have more exploring to do in our homes, to discover what our things mean to us and what our relationships with our things represent in our lives. This is a continual process of discovery, letting go and learning. I believe that exploring your home is a habit that you can develop and one that can happen daily or weekly. It is not a “one and done” process.
2. Most of us don’t have the time to fold our clothes like origami on a regular basis: I will freely admit that when I first went through her method I was in love with trying to fold my clothes very neatly and spent some time rolling things up, trying to get them to look a certain way in the drawers. Although I do think there is beauty in that, it is not a realistic assumption that we will spend the time and effort to do that sort of folding very often, especially if we have laundry for more than 1 person in our household. I believe that we all have a way of organizing our clothes that works for us…