Marie Kondo embraces chaos in the name of children

Marie Kondo, who became a billionaire by telling us that the only way to be happy was to empty the redundant homes, and therefore of everything, and keep socks, panties, and utensils (books too), has succumbed to entropy, even as she piles excess clothes, books, and collectibles in the corners of rooms. Under beds and inside carpets, do not iron, fold or fold. Her (three) sons scrambled over her priorities, shortened her days, and exhausted her energy. Thus the hegemony over Chaos no longer interests her, or rather she cares but does it differently, no longer banishing it, but sitting on it, inside it, diving into it with pleasure as we all do. The only thing that matters to her now is spending more time with her children, she said, and she said that when she introduced her next book, which contrasts the previous one, the 2018 bestseller (The Magical Power of Cleaning, Vallardi), reviewed by the New York Times as a guide to miracle within everyone’s reach. gospel. He’s changed his mind now, and his new philosophy is Curaci, a quieter acceptance of disorder (the book is called Marie Kondo Curaci at Home: How to Organize Your Space and Achieve Your Perfect Life): a very Italian compromise, a mediation between simple obsession and the build-up of compulsion.

You will remember the moment when Marie Kondo, the guru without looking like her, fell into our lives telling us that to be happy we must let go of the superfluous, dismantle it and throw it away, mercilessly, in defiance of nostalgia and fetishism, spirituality and, once done, a clean-up The big ones, we’ll have to continue arranging the few remaining basic physical possessions. That was four years ago, before Covid, before what little lightness of heart was left was lost forever, irreparably. Fake news had good health, and magical thinking, too: We were already naïve enough to believe that a thirty-four-year-old Japanese girl had found the key to happiness and that happiness was putting us in our drawers. We still love happy fairy tales, happy nights for rebellious girls, of course, but above all guides to soft, private, and individual revolts. The environment was less demanding, and we settled on the idea that in order to do good for the world, it suffices to do good for our home, our sofa, our bedside table. And indeed, it arrived, candid, clean, precise, combed, perhaps fireproof, and told us that we lived in excesses, that living surrounded by things that reminded us of the past, and also made dust, anchored us in the past, made us grey, and destabilized us. I suggested getting it all out and down and interrogating every little ghost, every letter, every record, every book, keeping it close and understanding, in a few minutes, what vibrations it gave us back, and proceeding to get rid of them if those vibrations were negations. And he convinced us. We all have at least one friend who has applied the Kondo guide and he has also come to tell us that he has become better, more sensitive, deeper and more spiritual.

As long as the world is confined to the house due to Covid and things become important, moving, lively and friends, and it has become important to redefine spaces and get new and additional spaces in apartments that have become cramped, because they have been. Dormitories they ended up in squares, offices and restaurants. And we all re-discussed priorities and we all had to focus on the essential, visible or invisible, after a year of forced mass incarceration, and just as I quit things, we quit work, from toxic relationships, from pollutants. Cities – or at least we tried. And we became (a little more) radical, just as she wanted us to be, while she loosened up, and I did it as a mother, knowing that this is a world that does not forgive those who change their minds, unless they do it in the name of the children, because this is a world that regards children as incompatible with the absolute.