 I really want to see a movie where a giant ape terrorizes New York City, knocking down old buildings that nobody really likes anymore. You could call it King Konmari. Marie Kondo's best-selling book and new Netflix series have attracted a lot of attention, and perhaps undue ire from people who love collecting books and for whom the idea of throwing them out is tantamount to smashing the pietà with a sledgehammer. Kondo is an organization consultant, someone who people hire when they feel a need to simplify or reduce the amount of clutter in their lives, who has a nifty five-step process which she claims will awaken your sensitivity to joy, to which items in your life actually make you happy and which can be thrown out without guilt. Throwing stuff out is a significant part of Kondo's method. Along with tips on folding clothes and Tupperware storage, tidying up channels a cultural aesthetic of minimalist lifestyle that should sound familiar to anyone. You should only have the things that you absolutely need, that make you happy, that let you focus on the important things in life. Your home should feel uncluttered and open. Every item in every drawer and closet should be meaningful and deliberate, nothing extra. The philosophy that less is more spans many fields from architecture to product design, and it pervades both the theme and the aesthetic of Kondo's show. I mean, just look at the font choice for these transitions. That ain't Jokerman ITC. Minimalism is closely identified with the United States, and while it's true that many of the artistic and aesthetic elements of the attitude owe a lot to American transcendentalists and designers from post-World War II New York, you might be excused for feeling a bit surprised by that fact. The U.S. is also very closely identified with crass consumerism, an over-the-top culture of conspicuous consumption, wealth, and acquisition of stuff. It is just as distinctly American to fit your teeth with diamonds and feel inadequate not having the newest and nicest iPhone as it is to live in a stark log cabin in the woods with only the clothes on your back and a hunting knife that you inherited from your grandpappy. So, what's going on here? How is it that we live in a culture which both encourages you to acquire more and more awesome products and to be ruggedly self-sufficient possessing only the bare essentials for survival? Well, there are a few different ways to answer that question. Obviously, the relationship between people and their stuff is complex, varied, and nuanced in ways that I can't address fully in 10 minutes, but I want to focus on one aspect of that relationship that actually makes a lot of sense, minimalism and wealth. In design, there's a principle called horror vacui or fear of emptiness, generally taken as the opposite of minimalism, a discomfort with empty space and a desire to fill it with something. The term was coined to describe the much busier, jam-packed interiors of the Victorian era, a time when less was certainly not more, but has been flipped on its head in the modern day as a signal of a lower class mentality. Take a look at the layout of these two stores. On the left, we have a very dense display, tightly packed with product, and on the right we have a very open, spacious display, featuring only a single item. If you were to guess, which store do you think caters to the everyday shopper and which one caters to extremely wealthy clientele? You probably won't be surprised to learn that on average, the degree to which a store window is filled with stuff, clothes, signs, whatever, is inversely proportional to the average cost of the products the store sells, and the perceived prestige of the products themselves. There are a number of complementary explanations for why your socioeconomic status might affect your subjective experience of minimalism. Practically speaking, for the wealthy, it's all too easy to fill space with anxiety-inducing quantities of stuff. You could probably acquire all these bags for the price of this one, fill your closet with them, and use a different one for every day of the month, but in the process you'll lose a full closet's worth of storage space, probably not worth the trade-off. Even worse, if you choose to get only a single bag, you're forced to decide which among the 50 equivalently priced, totally functional bags is best for your needs. The far more precious commodities for the wealthy are uncluttered open space, and the certainty that they're getting the right thing, the best thing, without needing to spend a lot of time deciding. This is at least partially why Louis Vuitton doesn't stuff their store windows with every single thing in their catalog. Here is the best thing for you, presented in a clean, uncluttered minimalism, and all that will cost you is money. There's also a moral explanation for the differing valuation of emptiness. Sociologist Dimitri Mortelmans suggests that, in the context of extreme wealth, the restraint necessary to overcome one's horror vacui is treated as a mark of distinction and good character. When you can have it all, it takes a lot of self-control to limit yourself to only a few things, and hoarding stuff you don't really need exudes a sort of deficiency or weakness. Both the practical and moral aspects of how we experience minimalism are used to great effect in advertising and marketing. It's not hard to imagine how that difference might extend to lifestyle choices as well. In her editorial, The Class Politics of Decluttering, New York Times editor Stephanie Land notes that many of the tooted benefits of minimalist living are only really applicable when they're optional, that is to say when you have the resources to choose them freely. Wealthier individuals may feel relieved and empowered to let go of items they don't really need anymore, approaching that aesthetic ideal of only owning a few perfect things with nothing but clean, empty space between them. But for those who are regularly forced to decide what they absolutely can't live without, there's no real respite granted by throwing out boxes of childhood mementos or kudos granted for not buying a new phone. Necessity seems to rob those actions of any sort of spiritual enrichment, leaving only the disappointment of not having as much as one would like. There are also aspects of being compelled to get rid of one stuff that are, potentially, a much bigger deal than having to rebuy another copy of The Name of the Wind. Again. In his famous 1988 paper, Possessions and the Extended Self, researcher Russell Belk makes a compelling case that our personal identity, what we think of as being me, or part of me, is significantly instantiated in our possessions, that we sincerely and reflexively attribute some part of what makes us, us, to the things we think of as ours. The amount of evidence Belk marshals in support of this thesis is really impressive, and I highly recommend reading the paper yourself. Many people have poked holes in it in the 30-some-odd years since it was first published, but there's a reason it has over 9,000 citations. Even if it's only partially true, the implications for the forced culling of one's possessions are enormous. You aren't just choosing what things not to take with you when you move into your tiny studio apartment and leave half of your stuff behind. You're choosing what parts of yourself you have to leave behind. In that sense, the difference between embracing minimalism voluntarily and having it foisted upon you is kind of like the difference between getting a short haircut and having someone say, I'm going to cut an inch off something on your body. What do you want it to be? Now, none of this is to say that an attitude of minimalism can't be useful or even empowering for people who aren't particularly well off. There are practical benefits of a minimalist loadout that can help people move and adapt quickly to unpredictable life situations, and people experience poverty in different ways. Deliberately choosing not to own certain things can be helpful. Also, the pervasive culture of consumerism we inhabit is simply not sustainable, ecologically, economically, almost any way you care to slice it. A more mindful attitude towards what objects we choose to include in our lives might well be a useful antidote to the nonstop engine of capitalism trying to make it feel deficient or empty inside if we don't have a dedicated digital assistant in the bathroom. But examining these facets of the minimalist aesthetic does help to frame Kondo's show in a more nuanced light. Yes, these people have asked for her help in living a more lightweight minimalist lifestyle. And yes, many people find a great deal of satisfaction or even spiritual transcendence in reducing the burden of stuff in their lives. But it's worth considering the motivation and feasibility of that impulse for different kinds of people and acknowledging that some of us are okay holding on to our stuff. Books included. In what way do you feel minimalism is related to wealth? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. 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