Kondo is dead. It feels like a win, even though my opponent didn't even know I was fighting: after all these years, Marie Kondo threw in her neatly ironed towel. There seems to be a cultural change (maybe Kondo is just playing along with the zeitgeist). In Britain, the term “goblin fashion” was voted word of the year last year, which means allowing yourself to be unashamedly lazy, sloppy, unkempt and hedonistic. The opposite, say, of that best version of yourself and Yes You Can and all those other empty advertising slogans.


But now Kondo has seen the light. Since she had three children, the queen of clean also understands that there is no way to fight the chaos. Her home is messy, she recently said at a webinar, and that's okay because, “I realize now that I think it's important to enjoy time with my kids at home.“No matter how many times you wash the dishes, there will be a new one the next day. You just vacuumed and seconds later, there's another plume of dust in the corner, where the heck did it come from? The child turns around a lot of lego in the afternoon, in the evening you look at that mountain from the couch and thinks: forget it all. After all, life, as in the passing of time, is above all: make a mess. Even in physics, it's a concept: entropy.

A tidy environment It was always a lie. A tidy home doesn't make for a tidy mind or a tidy life at all. As Einstein once asked rhetorically: “If a messy desk is a sign of a messy mind, what is an empty desk a sign?’

What is goblin fashion? There seems to be a cultural change (maybe Kondo is just playing along with the zeitgeist). In Britain, the term “goblin fashion” was voted word of the year last year, which means allowing yourself to be unashamedly lazy, sloppy, unkempt and hedonistic. The opposite, say, of that best version of yourself and Yes You Can and all those other empty advertising slogans.


Loading full article...