It’s important to be very rich but have almost no items in your home. This will confuse vengeful spirits that come looking to destroy your possessions.
Also, if you have too many items in your home, helpful ghosts may be unable to find you, as clutter interferes with their echolocation.
Have you ever owned anything? This is why you cannot forgive any of your former lovers. Things like “having chairs” is preventing you from living your best life, and also you should throw away any item of clothing you’re not currently wearing. If it’s not on your skin, you don’t really love it, do you?
I am going to teach you how to get rid of clutter and live so abundantly that you will disgorge fruits and sheaves of wheat and minimalist mid-century furniture with clean lines every time you open your mouth. Urchins will caper after you in the street in a perfect spiral pattern. Your life will become so abundant, you’ll be like a human gift basket from Harry and David – the one with the spiral tower of chocolate-dipped pears.
Kitchen
- How many of the spices lining your pantry have you ever actually used? “Most of them?” Get rid of them. Every one. If you’re not using a spice right now, it’s not important. Your lymph nodes should be covered in turmeric 100% of the time, but you don’t even know where the lids to your Tupperware containers are, do you? Look at the moon. That’s all of the spice you need.
- How many of your spoons produce deep joy and fulfillment in you when you eat groats with them? Two, at most. Give the rest away on the street while dressed in strips of linen and crying hysterically. Hold the remaining two spoons against your belly and laugh as hard as you can. Harder than that. Spoons should make you laugh from your knees.
- What’s in your kitchen cabinets? Pots and pans and handheld graters and hateful trash that’s preventing you from calling your estranged sister. Throw them all away. Replace them with a single sunflower seed.
- Your kitchen floor should be a single bone from a roan-red veal calf that was struck by lightning. Anything less is unacceptable clutter. Get rid of it.
- Possessions are 100% fatal. Turtles don’t keep anything they can’t use, and they helped Charles Darwin discover the Galápagos Islands. Throw away all of your grandmother’s jewelry. Now she can sleep in peace.
- Only consume apples that really speak to you.
- Thank every item in your refrigerator deeply – kiss each one of them softly and slowly with your mouth – then prepare for each item a small Viking funeral. Set them adrift on a blazing ship into the waters of a very cold lake. In the future, when you are hungry, eat your memories. The only thing that belongs in your refrigerator is mindfulness.
- Place every cloth napkin you own in a sacred circle on the cleanest table you own (tables should be either a rock from the sea or a book that is enchanted by one or fewer spells). If the napkin does not rise up of its own volition and perform a flawless Japanese tea ceremony for you, you were not meant to be. You should burn it, along with all of your professional regrets.
- Empty your cupboards. You are ready to nourish yourself now.
Living Room
- Chairs are rigid and static. Chairs lack suppleness. A chair is a frozen emotion. Every chair in your house is a locked-up resentment you sit on every day. Get rid of them. You don’t need them. Throw them out the window. You’ll find you’re now several inches taller, and that the chairs never even hit the sidewalk – they evaporated several stories down, even if you live in a first-floor apartment. They disappeared because you’re capable of forgiveness now.
- Replace your couch with a pile of the least frustrated lentils you can find; no more than seven lentils.
- The only furniture you need is a single smooth stone that reminds you of your mother.
Bathroom
- If you have ever used a lotion, even once, get rid of it. Messy applicator tips are preventing you from practicing forgiveness. From now on, the only lotion you need is total acceptance of life on life’s terms, and also a bottle of argan oil you have made yourself (you can produce argan oil by letting go of anger)
Bedroom
- Throw away everything in your dirty laundry hamper. If a piece of clothing really mattered to you, you wouldn’t let it get dirty.
- Discard all the old eggshells and severed doll’s head and menstrual blood and dirt you keep in a shoebox under your bed. Why do you even save those things?
- There is no need for a bed in the truly de-cluttered life. You should hover gently several inches above the floor in perfect harmony with your surroundings during your yearly nap, like a seahorse.
- Free all of the old lovers you’ve kept shackled in the crawlspace at the back of your closet. Let them take any pairs of shoes you haven’t worn in the last calendar year with them.
- If you’ve ever used them to hold a smartphone in bed, consider getting rid of your hands. They clutter up the arms.
[Image via Firstwefeast]
Tags: advice, decluttering, live so simply that you are a pure flame within the heart of the star, simple living
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Dial-A-Modernist
Thank you for sharing this important advice. I'm going to hover in my empty house and send you positive energy.
I suspect it's also all those articles that want us to get rid of useless clutter, like books, and in which rich people talk about how freeing it is to have fewer possessions.
I think she was thinking they would take seriously and follow them. That would be entertaining.
I was going to pitch something about trying to do Maire Kondo's book's process for clutter…but this is basically it only 900% better. Mallory, not only are you a hilarious vivacious beautiful angel, but telepathic as well!
Am I correct in assuming that if my sofa is larger than 7 lentil widths, it is spiritually oppressive?
This is so funny, I love this so much, thank you!
I feel like I just read something from the advice column of the Night Vale Daily Journal.
Have to get to work on the hutch now that you have elaborated the path to mindfulness and the fullness of an uncluttered life. Twitching my soft bunny nose with thanks. Don't want to remove my paws as I would then be a shut-in rabbit. LOL, LOL, LOL.
Thank you for your post, Paige. I'm glad to hear someone whose response echoes my own.
Why divorce? Take the money you saved by not buying her book, and go out for some pizza with the kids to celebrate your near-miss of Marie Kondo's suicidal system.
FlyLady's a lot easier and more helpful to me. You can join her free email group. Known in the real world as Marla Cilley, she summarizes her system in her book "Sink Reflections."
Yes, I have gotten rid of things out of frustration and have regretted it. What books like the one so beautifully satirized above don't state is that "Less is more" is often not true. In many instances, "Less is less."
This needs to be a Portlandia sketch.
Seriously hilarious. Just saying.
I love how ONLY the shoes not worn in the past year get thrown out. That leaves atleast a dozen pairs to go with the one outfit left.
I am dying this is so funny!! Would you PLEASE consider writing about having gratitude and eliminating negative people from your life? Oh you're being shot at by police? Just practice gratitude. Or you have cancer? We can't be friends anymore because you're so negative you bring me down.
Comic gold. I posted this on Facebook and 3 people have commented that it's the funniest thing they have ever read. My wife and I barely made it to the end amid the convulsive laughter!
This is truly one of the best "declutter your life" articles I've ever read…no…truly the best. The only one that really speaks to me. I was reading this for the first time early in the morning, and I was howling so loudly my husband woke up and came into the living room to find out what was so funny on the news. It turns out something horrific was on the news, but in my turmeric-soaked levitating reverie, I had let that go. THANK YOU.
This is one of the best parodies ever! Soooo hilarious.
Every sentence is sharped-elbow jab, a feng-shi fu. Keep up the wonderful work Mallory.
AWE some. :)) tytyty
I don't have any spoons that make me laugh from my belly–but this post certainly did.
This has become one of those posts that I reread every few months.