in Frugality, Productivity

Marie Kondo & Hoodies

To start — full disclaimer, I haven’t read Marie Kondo’s book and what I do know is the short general philosophies of KonMari from various article headlines and skim-reading I’ve done. Frankly I’m not even sure what KonMari is so there’s a lot of assumptions going forward here.

I think that getting rid of things that one doesn’t need or find joy in anymore makes sense to me. I’ve always been a messy person. I’m not sure why because my Mom was generally pretty tidy — I guess I get that messiness from my Dad. But really the messiness shows a state of mind, at least it’s in my case anyway.

That’s not to say that I’m messy all the time and in a situations. There’s been some studies showing that a messy work desk is a sign someone has high intelligence or something like that. (My desk is messy.)

I think Ms. Kondo was really trying to get at is not hoarding. Messiness is the symptom of something else which is the psychological desire to hoard or keep something that no longer needs to be there. Then it’s just clutter and messiness is somehow different than clutter I think.

I’ve been decluttering my apartment – both my partner and I. I’ve done the “spring cleaning” sessions throughout the years and I seem to still have many garbage bags full of clothes to donate. I think in the last few months i made a real breakthrough, I just got rid of stuff. I helped that I did it in cycles or rounds. First cut was just anything that I didn’t like. The second cut was more clothes and then on and on it goes.

I think the cycles of getting rid of stuff helped because I applied slightly different criteria each time and it helped me from being too overwhelmed.

Now I just have hoodies. I’ve also bought some nice hoodies in the past few months and I’ve started just wearing the same or similar clothes to work and outside of work. I’m not sure the “Steve Jobs wardrobe” is the right way to do it or if I’m trying to mimic it, but I like not having so much clutter and less choices I need to make about what I wear. Now it’s just between the gray hoodie or the black one.

Here are some hoodies that I recently bought. One I bought in San Francisco in Hayes Valley. It’s a nice hoodie made with untreated cotton.

Some other ones from Lululemon.

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