Wake Up Your Books – What Marie Kondo Tells Us about Ourselves

Not long ago, apropos of nothing, a loud crash emanated from the kitchen. There on the floor, in a pile of its own dirt and surrounded by broken pottery, lay my aloe mitriformis. A moment of anger flashed through me – Why did it jump off the window sill? – before I remembered that I was the one who had set it on that narrow ledge.

This isn't the only time I've blamed objects I normally think of as inanimate for their actions. My relationship with the cord to my ear buds is fraught. So is the one with objects that like to jump out of my pocket after they tangle themselves with my keychain, my irrationally temperamental television, and long sleeved clothing in general.

Animism Everywhere

In Thailand, I discovered, no one is ever alone.

Every house has its own angels, for one thing. They live in the little spirit houses, perched on pedestals in some sunny corner and fed and feted to keep them happy. And the world is full of gods and ghosts – dozens of species of specters. (I did a little work on them – you can find it here.)

If what I've seen and read is right then the idea that the world is full of sentient beings, or just full of sentience, is the norm. The empty, inanimate world Americans imagine they live in is fairly unusual.

Animism is an ancient idea, and one we find in societies around the world. In the west, in modern times, though, we don't often talk about it. The idea that inanimate objects actually have personalities and plans seems unreasonable, maybe even superstitious. It gets buried under perspectives that grew out of the Protestant Reformation and the scientific and industrial revolutions. But it's still here, hiding out in the open. It's what your zipper snags on. It's what hides your keys.

Many Christians believe that God created the earth for humans and gave us dominion over it. We, the living, the logical, are in charge here. Everything else is meant to work for us. The scientific revolution was built around the idea that things behave predictably, and our job is to identify the patterns. And the industrial revolution allowed us to imagine that the products we bring into our homes reflects our choices and nothing else.

Why does all this matter? It shows that most Americans don't completely understand the complicated relationships they have with their things. And Marie Kondo has come to help us out.

Marie Kondo and Your Animate Objects

By now everyone knows how Kondo's Tidying Up - where

meets animism - works. At the beginning of each episode, after she has met the home-owners she'll be helping, These homeowners have collected too much stuff for some reason or other, because it reminds them of a lost loved one, because they might need it, or because it reminds them of who they want to be – all ways they've chosen to define the things they own. And now, the things they own have somehow taken over the house.

There's a long moment early in each episode, the only extended dialogue-free moment, in which Kondo introduces herself to the house. She kneels down and touches the floor quietly. Piano music begins to play, as though it were slowly beginning to rain in a romantic movie.

This may seem a little silly to American eyes, like a deadpan Peewee's Playhouse. But it only seems strange because it reflects a style of thinking that Americans often reject as irrational.

Then, Marie and the homeowners get to work. Instead of asking people to choose objects to save or toss based on the standards they've been using, she instructs them to take a moment to evaluate their relationships with the things they own: if they spark joy, keep them. If not, thank them for their service and send them politely to Goodwill.

This way of evaluating relationships seems to be a real relief to many of her clients.

As I said, this isn't just a quaint Japanese way of dealing with stuff. The communing with the house, the thanking of discardable goods – these are a different way of thinking about the world we live in, and the habits she teaches are ways of practicing that way of thinking. The problem her actions implicitly point out has to do with the fact that, in the end, we don't exactly define the objects in our worlds. To a much greater extent than most Americans would like to believe, they define themselves. Or, at least, they're built in ways that make us deal with them as though they had identities of their own.

You might know this old saw:

To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

This isn't literally true, of course, but it does make a valid point about hammers: there's only so much you can do with one. The way you treat a hammer is different from the way you'd treat a bunny or a gun.

It's Not You, it's Us

What, exactly, does this have to do with Tidying Up?

There are three ways we can figure out what something means to us. (This is according to Alf Hornborg, a Swedish anthropologist.)

We can choose meanings for them. That's what happens with the stuff we buy, a product of the industrial revolution and our commercialized society: This is my most stylish sweater. This phone is crappy.

Or they can present their meanings to us. This attitude becomes part of our realities when we think in terms of the cold, hard world of science: Mercury and lead are toxic. Quinoa and kale are not.

These are the options we usually think with in the modern world – at least when we think about thinking. But there's a third way we do this as well. According to Bruno Latour, we can also think about objects as having relationships with us: the beloved teddy bear, the cozy bedroom, the intimidating power tool or computer program. I'm not suggesting that there's anything objective about our relationships with things. We do invent those relationships ourselves, of course. But we do this by thinking about them, at least a little bit, in the same ways that we think about the people and animals in our lives.

Kondo's "Magic"

And that's where Marie Kondo comes in.

Where American usually think in those first two ways when they decide what to get rid of, Kondo tells them it's OK to think in the third.

Where her messy clients are used to asking themselves, "Will this be useful?" or "Do I still want this?" Kondo instructs them, in so many words, to ask, "Are we friends?" The idea of "sparking joy" doesn't translate into that exactly, of course, but the question she has them think about is basically something like If this were a person, would you care to have her in your life? Hence the respectful treatment – the careful folding, the thanking. She introduces herself to the house not because it's alive, but to show people that they animate it.

And How Does This Relates to Happiness?

The point I'm making here is that Kondo isn't teaching us anything new. Instead, she's just showing us that it's OK to think about things in a way we secretly, often unconsciously, already do.

When my plants sit on the sill, they're just plants. When they jump to their deaths, that's when they become something more, entities that decide, based on the inscrutable logic of their dark hearts, to complicate my life.

When we think like animists – treating objects the way we treat people, giving them power over their own existences – it can make a person feel like they're part of a world over which they have very little control. Often as not, this isn't a good feeling, so we tend to acknowledge it only when it's unavoidably clear that we don't.

There's a trade-off here. You gain a small sense of control. You exchange it for living in the inanimate, life-depleted world described by science, economics, and some forms of religion.

Is this a bad thing? I don't think so – at least not all the time. I don't think the animists I've known are particularly happier than the rest of us. But they do live in a different world, with a slightly different array of joys and emotional challenges. And it's worth being aware of the decisions we make when we choose to fall in and out of animism. Living in harmony with your things might make it easier to tidy up, for one thing. And recognizing it when you care about things for no modernly-rational reason might be a good thing.

Not only that, viewing your keychain or your glasses as mischievous before you end up playing hide-and-seek with them might soften the dissonance that comes with making the shift to an animistic perspective.

So the next time you trip over your carpet or you're your shirt gets tangles up, put off that flush of frustration and ask yourself: Are we still friends?

Extra Credit:

Hornborg points out that animism is different from fetishism. While animism applies to the natural world, the term fetishism applies to the ways we animate manufactured goods in our modern economy. This is drawn from Marx's idea of commodity fetishism, which has been elaborated over the decades to include the idea that we buy things to absorb their personality power. Clothes can make you look cool, cars show your wealth, makeup makes you beautiful, but it depletes your masculinity.

So if animism involves treating things the way we treat people, then fetishism involves treating people the way we treat things (p. 29).

That's a pithy little insight, and I wish I could take credit for it.

Instead, here's where you can find it:

Hornborg, Alf

2006 "Animism, fetishism, and Objectivism as Strategies for Knowing (Or Not Knowing) the World." Ethnos, 71(1): 21-32.