TV

Netflix’s ‘Tidying Up With Marie Kondo’ Is Sparking Joy All Over The Internet

by Amanda Yeo  3 January 2019
Tidying Up With Marie Kondo

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

It’s a new year, and with a new year come new year’s resolutions that most of us will give up on in less than two weeks. Fortunately, magical organisation fairy Marie Kondo is here to help with at least one resolution: The resolution to stop sleeping in a nest of clothes and miscellany like a burrowing rodent.

Netflix released season one of its new series Tidying Up With Marie Kondo yesterday, kicking off 2019 by having the titular household sorceress show us how to stop being such damn disasters. Over the eight episodes, Kondo visits various American families and helps them to declutter and organise their homes using her famous KonMari method.

This method involves many tiny boxes and unfamiliar new folding strategies but is most well known for encouraging people to get rid of anything that doesn’t “spark joy” in them. “You feel it when you hold a puppy, or when you wear your favourite outfit,” says Kondo in the first episode, translated from Japanese. “It’s a warm and positive feeling.”

Tidying Up With Marie Kondo tries to take the stress out of cleaning by teaching you a simple method of tidying and empowering you to try it. It isn’t the most exciting or riveting reality television show (that honour goes to MasterChef Australia), but it is soothing viewing that could actually inspire you to make a change in your life.

In fact, many binge-watchers infected by Kondo’s enthusiasm and relaxed approach to cleaning are now attacking their closets, pouring all the determination that January 1 bestows into applying her KonMari method.

Of course, some have been more successful than others.

Tidying Up With Marie Kondo presents cleaning as not just a matter of organisation, but as something that can have an impact on your mentality and interpersonal relationships. In the first episode, a young couple with two small children improve their relationship by having a place for everything and getting rid of several garbage bags full of clothes. Because life is better when you aren’t arguing about where to put your 200 coathangers.

Seeing a pair of pants spark joy in a woman also sparked a conversation in my family about the things we choose to keep and discard, and how we approach tidying up. I am slightly afraid of what I will return home to today.

Tidying Up With Marie Kondo is very gentle, optimistic viewing, and perfect for getting you in the mood to try living like a human being in 2019. But if you’re going to watch it you should be prepared to handle the cleaning fever that may overcome you, as well as to seriously consider whether your underwear sparks joy.