marie kondo derail / decluttering chatter!

Discussion in 'General Chatter' started by rats, Feb 1, 2019.

  1. rats

    rats 21 Bright Forge Shatters The Void

    yeah mercury that's what makes me uncomfortable too i think, when it's white dudes on HGTV no one gives a shit but the moment a woman of color talks about a way of choosing possessions that is very informed by her culture and cultural values (i read someone from a japanese girl that i'm friendly with and that sort of animism thing is definitely very japanese) everyone starts talking about how awful she is for telling someone to get rid of books that don't make them happy to own

    and as an academic i saw SO MUCH OF TWITTER just like "that's not what academics are supposed to do!!! hoard books even if you never read them!!! real literature doesn't have to spark joy, it can make you depressed too!" which like, yes, but that's not what 'spark joy' means, as can happen when things are being translated to different languages, she never said to toss depressing books or to toss all your books period, there's a specific line that idr if it was in her book or in an interview where she was like "you can keep a ton of things, one client kept a like 3 bookshelves full of books because we went through their overall collection that was taking over their living and mental space and donated books that they'd read and didn't necessarily feel the need to keep around, books that they started and didn't enjoy enough to finish, etc." aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa apparently i have a lot of feelings abt marie kondo sorry folks
     
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  2. rats

    rats 21 Bright Forge Shatters The Void

    i am definitely biased though because i was absolutely a mini hoarder because i was afraid to throw things away for some reason even if they were literally broken trash (i used to keep broken phone chargers, like broken to the point of not even working if you jiggled them, ??? why) but her general philosophy helped me to realize a whole bunch of stuff that im finding hard to articulate rn but that definitely helped me to realize that if something used to make me happy but doesn't any more, doesn't mean i need to keep it around just for the sake of sentiment
     
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  3. Mercury

    Mercury Well-Known Member

    OH MAN THOUGH people get so incredibly weird about books! A friend of mine recently went pared down his collection (and this was before the internet was having conniptions about Marie Kondo) because he had way more than he could ever catch up with (PhD student!) and it was depressing him. Cue some of his acquaintances losing their damn minds that he would ever dare get rid of a book! He never said one word about what anyone else should do with their books, but him just mentioning that he pared down his own personal collection of mass-market paperbacks that he would probably never read was practically heresy.
     
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  4. chaoticArbiter

    chaoticArbiter an actual shiny eevee (destroyer of worlds)

    ....I've never understood that, cause like, okay
    I have a book and I'm not reading it and I'm not going to read it in the future, or I read it and I didn't like it, or something
    why would I keep it?? someone else could be reading that book and getting enjoyment out of it. it's not. doing anyone any good just hanging out on my shelf forever.
     
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  5. Aondeug

    Aondeug Cringe Annoying Ass Female Lobster

    This is the aspect of criticism of her that bothers me. I hear lots of bitching about minimalism or minimalism adjacent things, but I don't hear names named usually. Kondo gets very specifically named though and words are put into her mouth. So while I can get kneejerk reactions to her, especially if one's had her methods used against them abusively, I'm very ehhhhhhhhhh about the current outrage towards her because a lot of it feels like 'EW THE EVIL FOREIGN WOMAN IS FORCING HER INHERENTLY EVIL FOREIGN WAYS ON US,' type shit. And there's this aura of 'If we can just kill the witch the evil of minimalism will be gone!' Especially when her shit is being heavily misrepresented and the very Japanese nature of her method is kind of just...ignored. By a lot of the bitching I see.

    People are getting very defensive of her because a lot of people are being disgustingly ethnocentric and bigoted in how they use this woman as some sort of fucking scapegoat for minimalism that we can all set on fire.
     
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  6. chthonicfatigue

    chthonicfatigue Bitten by a radioactive trickster god

    BOOKS ARE FOR SHARING I DONT CARE WHAT ANYONE SAYS

    Like yeah I've had someone not return a book I loved, but that meant they loved it too, right? And that's a win. Go. Read.

    I always pass on my books if I can, unless it's one of my very treasured collection of gifted hardback first edition Discworld novels, or something with a limited cover, or an out of print edition. Everything else? Fair game tbh.
     
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  7. rats

    rats 21 Bright Forge Shatters The Void

    thats exactly my philosophy - i used to really love the artemis fowl books as a kid, and i held onto them for ages because of that even though reading them no longer gave me that rush of "hell yeah". not long ago i realized that if i donated them, some other kid may get the same joy out of them that i used to, so why not?
     
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  8. Mercury

    Mercury Well-Known Member

    A lot of people treat books as objects of reverence to the point that it's less about what's in the book so much as it is that It's A Book and Therefore Important By Virtue Of Being A Book. A lot of those are people who treat being a Reader and Owning A Lot Of Books as a defining personality trait to the point it might be their entire personality. It's the ~intellectual~ version of being defined by the stuff you consume.

    I kind of get it on one level - I remember when I could afford as many books as I wanted to read, had read everything in the library that had interested me, and had read the books I did have so much they were falling apart, and at the time and place I was then being a kid who read for fun was considered weird, so I was very defensive about my books! But, yeesh.
     
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  9. Aondeug

    Aondeug Cringe Annoying Ass Female Lobster

    In terms of books...I get weird about losing them personally but I try to keep that to me personally. Because it's my personal bullshit that doesn't necessarily apply to everyone else. I love having lots of books though, even if I don't read them through very often or at all, because I like the aesthetic of a personal library. I just like how books look and feel and smell. So even books I kind of hate I take a sort of joy in having because I mean. It's a book. Look at these qualities of it and look how I can organize it and my other books. I can take it out and tell you stories about how I fucking hate the god damn thing and then it will inevitably get reshelved or reput back into my seemingly chaotic hell piles of books. So books serve like dual purposes as like things to actually read for information or entertainment and also like aesthetic art pieces for the sake of being books at all.

    I also don't really need my books to be in like perfect condition, though I do like the feel of new and well maintained books. I like books 'with history'. So beat up old things are lovely. I like coffee stains, I like dog earred pages, I like finding little cards and notes in their pages from former owners. There's this copy of God Stalk I've borrowed from the school library that I really wish I could make mine and keep around because I like how it 'feels'. I already have an ebook copy of the book, so I don't really need a physical copy per se but it looks so nice and smells so nice and feels so nice. I could sit down and organize it with the rest of my fantasy section and it could be one part of my Kencyrath collection...Alas, I cannot just steal it and it must go back and I'll have to find my own copy of the thing. Since I do want a physical copy.

    Books are romantic objects with history. They're like people to me. I love them dearly.

    It's like collecting toys or photos of trains I guess but with books? It's also related to one of my earliest memories, which was looking at the books arranged on these shelves in my childhood house and thinking that they looked nice. All in a row like that.
     
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  10. Mercury

    Mercury Well-Known Member

    It occurs to me - minimalists are all about "you have to get rid of stuff", but Marie Kondo is, as I understand it, saying things along the lines of "you don't have to keep stuff". Which is an entirely different approach and, I feel, one that can be very freeing if you've gotten in to the habit of feeling like you have to keep stuff for Reasons. Poverty, for instance, can really get a person stuck in that mindset long past the point where it's helpful.
     
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  11. seebs

    seebs Benevolent Dictator

    Once while moving, i found an object. it was an EGA video card (think "one step below VGA", so, "not as much video as 640x480 16-color"), for the ISA bus. None of my computers ever actually had an ISA bus, exactly, but some of the Amigas could use such a thing if you got an x86 plugin board for them. Which I never had.

    The reason I think this makes me credibly an electronics hoarder is that the card had a sticker on it saying "BAD".
     
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  12. Elph

    Elph capuchin hacker fucker

    I used to be on the Konmari hate bandwagon, because my mother had read her stuff when it first came out, before the Netflix show, and the way my mom explained it to me sounded like Los Angeles rich white lady bollocks. But that's presumably because my mother spent decades surrounded by Los Angeles rich white lady minimalism and crap like that (and then we were immersed in Steve Jobs' Silicon Valley pseudo-Buddhist minimalism when we moved north), so when she heard people raving about the basic premise—having vastly misunderstood the basic premise—it sounded like that exact same kind of bollocks. Still, that's another case of putting words in someone's mouth. I'd kind of been ignoring all the internet wank about Marie Kondo until I read that same article about ethnocentrism and Shintoism and how no, she doesn't want you to get rid of your books, thank you very much, and now I'm absolutely on Team Marie.
     
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  13. palindromordnilap

    palindromordnilap Well-Known Member

    It's actually interesting how when it's a dude telling 20something white cis boys to clean their room, he practically starts a cult.
     
  14. palindromordnilap

    palindromordnilap Well-Known Member

    That actually reminds me that I need to figure out what to do with the computer of unknown age (but it's got a Slot 1 Pentium III, so...) I found in the trash a few months ago. There's got to be something.
     
  15. Chiomi

    Chiomi Master of Disaster

    I have maybe a box of books, because the ones I keep are all weird small press runs or things I'm in or signed or have been in the family. All of my books fit into the two shelves in the side of my desk and the shelf built in to the end of my bed.

    But my roommates . . .

    So, Tristan likes books. Used to have a few hundred, but we've moved a bunch and she's less attached. I think she's got maybe 8 shelves total now? But the other roommate has at least a few hundred - I'm not sure, because the bookshelves that cover one entire wall of what used to be a dining room are stacked 3 deep some places. And it sort of baffles and horrifies me. Plus, because I'm bad at reading paper books, she'll recommend something and then hand me the book and then I'll hold it for a minute and then she'll go 'Right, I also have an epub' and then I hand it back to her.

    So I'm predisposed to be a fan of KonMari, but it's also nice that it's being discussed more, because I felt free to give away some things that I'd been holding onto mostly because they were gifts.
     
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  16. Everett

    Everett local rats so small, so tiny

    my mom got me one of marie kondos books a yeqr or two ago and its ironically been sitting on the side table in the living room, often hidden under a bunch of clutter that i dont actually want, and my landlady has already given me a lecture on cleaning up

    so im thinking i should read the book but i also saw a thing that was like "white people Dont Get the konmari method"
     
  17. Jemmy

    Jemmy Don't Do A Hit

    ever since ebooks have become easily accessed and affordable, ive pared down how many books i buy by a lot. this is great bc half of the books that make me happiest are also large enough they could be coffee tables by themselves
     
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  18. Striped Stocking

    Striped Stocking Fashionable legwear

    Would you mind explaining what about a large number of books is horrifying? Geninuely curious, as someone to whom books are very much comfort objects. Hundreds of books just sound great to me because theres almost certainly going to be some i havent read yet in there. And while I buy mostly ebooks for reasons of speed and money, paper books are still good and special.

    More on topic, Im actually glad to hear that Marie Kondos philosophy isn't that kinda awful minimalism I heard it was. I love both books and clothes as comfort objects, so the idea of throwing out either if theyre not unusable or unwanted upsets me. (Even then I would donate anything not broken because trashing something that could be used upsets me, which is definitely growing up poor damage)
     
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  19. Aondeug

    Aondeug Cringe Annoying Ass Female Lobster

    Convenience is like the one reason I like and use ebooks. So I can just cart around massive amounts of books and paper. There's also the ease of Perfectly Legitimate Means and creating massive shared libraries with others. Or legal massive shared libraries online! Or why I tell people to Never Ever Buy Buddhist Books. Chances are you can find those online for free in some legal net library and temples often offer the things too (though it is polite to donate).

    But I just...really don't like the experience of reading on screens? The physicality of physical books makes it easier for me to manage. They're also not like internet capable so my stupid ass isn't prone to going LOL LET'S LOOK UP CAT VIDEOS WHOOOOOOOO as I am with ebooks on my phone or laptop. I know I can like set up things that prevent me from doing that on the internet, but my dumb brain is also like 'Well, we're the one who set that up soooooooo...bye restriction, hello cat videos!' The jump from 'put down book, pickup laptop or phone,' is apparently significant enough to keep me from doing that.

    I do like obsessively organizing my digital texts though. Honestly, organization alone is like. At least HALF the point of texts for me.
     
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  20. TheOwlet

    TheOwlet A feathered pillow filled with salt and science

    I'm another one for just enjoying books as physical objects. I like the weight and the Texture and the smell, i will legit stick my nose into books because it makes my brain purr.
    I like reading stuff online, but if i wanna get really lost in something, i pick a paper-book. They're just way too soothing comfort objects to me.
     
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