In 2014, I was a young parent of three young children, ages 12, 10, and 7. Since we’d been a single-earner household all along, money had been perpetually tight. Kids grow fast, and my kids, at least, were never particularly careful with things, so it always felt like I was having to find money for more clothing, shoes, and household goods that hadn’t survived the boys, on top of the usual ongoing expenses. I had a stay-at-home husband who was great at caring for the kids, but who did nothing at all to keep the house at all clean, which meant I spent any time not at work trying to combat the always-looming clutter and dirt that four people accumulate when they’re all at home all the time. (By that time, all three of my kids were enrolled in a cyber charter school, meaning they were effectively being homeschooled with a curriculum that was delivered online. I was the only person in the household who wasn’t here 24/7.)

It wasn’t just personal life that was challenging, either. Two years prior, the company I worked at had been acquired in a transaction that turned out, in the end, to be a particularly ill-suited match for what we did. As a result, my work life was consumed with trying to make this mismatched transaction work, at least to the extent that I had influence to do so. Due to the company’s instability, raises and bonuses were difficult to come by, further exacerbating the belt-tightening.

With all of that as a backdrop for my personal experience, Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up came out in the United States. To say my reaction was derisive is a massive understatement. The blurbs that made it to the news were, to my mind, even more ridiculous. She was saying we should get rid of books, of all things? We were supposed to get rid of anything that didn’t spark joy? I was convinced that Ms. Kondo lived in another reality, one that did not include the life I was living, about 80% of which (let’s face it) definitely did NOT spark joy. I dismissed the book – and Ms. Kondo – outright.

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