[Kurimo]

C'mon really...? People need to be told it's nice to not have a house laden with junk? That's worth Trademarking a name?

Guess lots of folks were never told to clean up their crap growing up. What's next? A book deal for some weirdo who starts a movement about using bidets to get a really clean butthole to "center your rectal chi"?

The nonsense people will subscribe to in order to pursue a quick fix for the struggles of being an adult never ceases to stupefy me. No matter how organized you get, the reality: life == hard, never goes away. Accepting the challenge with dignity is much better than giving all your money to trendy cult-figures like this one.

Oh and: clean up your crap!

[the_watcher]

> People need to be told it's nice to not have a house laden with junk?

No. People are aware of this, but sometimes would like help with sorting out what they should and shouldn't keep.

> No matter how organized you get, the reality: life == hard, never goes away.

OK. So does this mean no one should look for help and guidance with the parts of it they feel they struggle most with?

[hondo77]

>> People need to be told it's nice to not have a house laden with junk?

> No. People are aware of this, but sometimes would like help with sorting out what they should and shouldn't keep.

Some people are aware of this. Packrats are not. Believe me, I was married to one.

[j_lev]

Absolutely. The biggest criticism of KonMari from Japanese is "no duh." Even the techniques for things like folding and arranging clothing so you can see everything at a glance are common knowledge among Japanese. Baffling.

[mmatants]

People need to be reminded of obvious things. In this case especially because there is active pressure to collect things - from your typical BigBoxCo flyers, sales, TV doorcrashers, buy-one-get-one events, etc. I know too many people who are simply drowning in junk, so if it takes a half-cultish trend to get them to unload - then so be it.

[sien]

It's a bit like obesity.

For most of human existence the ability to find sweet and fatty things and eat them as much as possible and put on as much weight as possible kept you alive. Now it hurts you.

Similarly with stuff for most of human history stuff was expensive, you kept every good thing you could possibly get. Then in the past 60+ years stuff has dropped in price amazingly and keeping everything is no longer a good tactic.

Space has become more expensive that stuff in places where you can get good jobs.

A huge proportion of people reading this could go out and buy a caravan or a new car in cash. Few of us can afford a good place with much space in SV or NYC or Sydney or London.

[nsxwolf]

The amount of work required to fold and put away laundry is absolutely insane. Especially in a household of 5. It's more efficient to just stuff everything into any drawer that has space, and rifle through all your drawers and closets when you want to get dressed.

[slavik81]

My life goal was to keep both clean and dirty clothes in baskets. Take from the clean basket, wear, put in dirty basket. Run dirty basket through wash. Dump cleaned clothes in clean basket. No more time spent folding, organizing or even putting stuff away.

My girlfriend was not a fan of the system when I described it. Alas, I still need to fold laundry.

[mlashcorp]

There has to be a better way ...

[chadk]

My family of four solved that by just HANGING everything.

We use one of these http://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00578QVGC in my kids room. On the top bar is the out of season clothes, and on the bottom bar, which is at an accessible height to my girls (4 and 6), we put the in-season clothes.

This works really well since little kids are way better hangers than folders. So when I take laundry out of the dryer, I basically make a pile for the kids clothes and then yell at them to hang everything up. They love it and it saves me lots of folding time. Plus, no wrinkles!

We got rid of our space-stealing dresser and just have a little plastic set of drawers for socks and underwear, which probably could just be in stuffer bags hanging off the clothesrod now that I think about it...

[nradov]

There is a clothes folding machine available now. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/06/03/this-600-la...

[nsxwolf]

I've seen that. It looks like it is just as much work to take things out of the dryer, turn them inside out if necessary, and load them onto that machine. And separately deal with types of clothing articles the machine can't handle.

It's a lot like a dish washer. By the time you scrape and pre-wash and load all your dishes, you could have just washed them and put them on a drying rack. The real value of a dish washer is it serves as that drying rack. Most kitchens don't have a lot of dedicated space to dry dishes.