Marie Kondo has Finally Realized What it Costs to be Tidy – and Like Me, has Decided to Chill the Hell Out

by Zoe Williams

It is with some chagrin that I see Marie Kondo making international news with the bombshell that she’s pretty much stopped tidying at home since the birth of her third child: “Up until now, I was a professional tidier, so I did my best to keep my home tidy at all times,” she told the Washington Post. “I have kind of given up on that, in a good way for me. Now I realise what is important to me is enjoying spending time with my children at home.”

You could almost hear the world exhale in relief at this change of heart: Kondo is perhaps the leading evangelist for order and decluttering, author and Netflix poster-woman for the good life. If she can’t make tidying work with three kids around, when it’s her brand, her identity and her life’s work, the rest of us are just fine. It’s like if anti-cigarette guru Allen Carr had started smoking again. On the one hand, shame, but on the other: what a stunning vindication of human frailty.

‘Marie Kondo is perhaps the leading evangelist for order and decluttering, author and Netflix poster-woman for the good life.’ Kondo on the Netflix series Sparking Joy. Photograph: Netflix

My particular chagrin stems from the time Marie Kondo came to my house, tidied my desk, whose two square feet took her three and a half hours, and told me this very thing – that she’d stopped tidying at home – even taking the time to point out that she had never said this to anyone before, and I still didn’t realise it was news. How could it be? When you have three children and one is a baby, you’re smashing it out of the park just by ending each day not in A&E. Human nature – indeed, all nature – tends towards entropy. People who think they can master chaos just don’t have enough children, or dogs, or interests.

Excerpt courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd. Read the complete story here.