“When we let go of the stuff that binds us, we will be free”: Decluttering Rituals in Pursuit of Freedom

In the past decade, the decluttering trend—a broad phenomenon that includes movements such as Minimalism, Slow Living, Simple Living, Swedish Death Cleaning, Feng Shui, Underconsumption Core, and Marie Kondo—has gained a significant following in the United States. Despite important differences between these movements, they all draw attention to the perils of overconsumption. Further, these movements believe that by decluttering, ordering, tidying, and cleaning, the home can be transformed into a sanctuary from the chaos of the outside world and provide an oasis from the hysteria of consumption. 

In this paper, I explore how in the contemporary decluttering trend, unnecessary objects in the home are thought to make their owners lives difficult in a host of ways, including draining their energy and robbing their time. The most common way in which objects make their owners miserable is by actively restricting human freedom. For example, Joshua Becker, writing about the benefits of minimalism in his book, The More of Less explains, “Excess possessions have the power to enslave us physically, psychologically, and financially. Stuff is cumbersome and difficult to transport. It weighs on the spirit and makes us feel heavy. On the other hand, every time we remove an unnecessary item, we gain back a little freedom” (Becker 2016). Likewise, Courtney Carver in her book Soulful Simplicity: How Living with Less Can Lead to So Much More, writes, “When we let go of the stuff that binds us, we will be free.” (Carver 2017). The hold objects have on their owners is a powerful form of enchantment. The enchantment associated with these possessions is conceived of as dangerous and harmful because it robs people of their agency.

In order to reclaim their freedom from their possessions, declutterers advocate for a careful set of procedures—what I refer to as “decluttering rituals.” Through decluttering rituals, owners gain freedom not only from their possessions but also from consumerism more broadly. These decluttering rituals are highly variable, but they follow the same structure. Every decluttering ritual begins with an internal process of finding the motivation and purpose for decluttering. Then, there is a methodical separation of every possession into four categories: trash, donate, sell, and keep. This separation process can take many different forms. For example, minimalist Joshua Fields Millburn advocates a thirty-day process in which people get rid of one item on the first day, two on the second day, three on the third day, etc. Marie Kondo takes a different approach by urging people to clean one room at a time and “thank” the belongings before disposing of them. Decluttering expert Claire Middleton suggests a “big purge,” in which everything in the house is sorted in one go. The ritual concludes with reflecting on the transformation of the home and the wellbeing of the family that has occurred. While these decluttering rituals liberate people from their possessions, I argue that this liberation depends on the production and subsequent obscuration of waste. 

Decluttering rituals enable people to establish a sense of mastery and separation from their possessions by categorizing things as waste and removing them from the home. Decluttering rituals therefore depend on displacement—both physically removing the waste from the home, and mentally from people’s conscious awareness. For example, Fumio Sasaki, in the English translation of his book Goodbye Things: The New Japanese Minimalism, writes, “Discarding things can be wasteful. But the guilt that keeps you from minimizing is the true waste…The real waste is the damage that you accrue from hanging on to things you don’t use or need” (Sasaki 2017). By considering “real waste” to be the burden of the possessions, the waste generated by decluttering is rendered immaterial. However, waste has substantial material remainders. In countries that pride themselves on being technologically “advanced,” catching sight of waste signals a kind of failure. The elimination of waste has therefore become a marker of civilized modernity and countries like the United States eliminate waste by exporting most of it across the oceans. Black, Indigenous, and poor communities living in recycling villages in Africa, India, and China are forced to manage the waste and absorb its toxicity (Fredericks 2018; Liboiron and Lepawsky 2022; Strasser 2000; Davis 2022).

These decluttering rituals therefore establish an outside, an elsewhere, including the garbage cans and donation bins, as well as the marginalized people and places tasked with managing the waste. By bringing together Mary Douglas’ argument that cleaning, tidying, and ordering the home are ritual acts that “positively re-order our environment” (Douglas 1966) with scholars who focus on the “gritty materiality of waste” (Hawkins 2005), I argue that decluttering rituals allow people to affirm the boundaries of the self over and against the possessions that once “enslaved” them by burdening others with their possessions. While many theorists have demonstrated the ways in which consumption produces enchantment, whether it be through Cathedrals of Consumption, such as shopping malls and cruise ships (Ritzer 2009), the history of corporations (McCarraher 2019) consumer culture (Lofton 2017), or the affective allure of affluence (Thrift 2010), I argue that contemporary enchantment is produced through decluttering rituals that are intended to free people from their possessions. Thus, these decluttering rituals liberate people from the perceived dangerous effects of enchantment by shifting the burden of this enchantment elsewhere.