Almost two weeks after renowned de-cluttering expert Marie Kondo’s show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo hit Netflix, it’s still all anyone can talk about.
Well, not everyone. If my relationship is anything to go by, just under 50 per cent of the population don’t urgently care about sparking joy and organising things. My partner is one of those people.
I’ve brought up watching the Netflix makeover series based on the Japanese author’s best-selling book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing together a couple of times in passing. As of today, it’s still sitting unwatched in our ‘trending’ section.
There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about my partner’s indifference towards watching a show about tidying and organising. It’s no different to me not wanting watch things I don’t really care about, like Bird Box, House of Cards or the tennis at 1am.
But for many of the women I work with and share group chats with, Marie Kondo-ing has infiltrated our lives in a way that goes deeper than liking a TV show.
Haven’t watch Tidying Up with Marie Kondo yet? Check out the trailer below, post continues after video.
How much women care about Marie Kondo, and how little many men do, is the perfect example of the mental load we carry everyday, regardless of whether it’s forced upon us or we willingly pick it up.
A mental load can be defined as all the life admin things you think about on a daily basis. In an article for ABC, Leah Ruppanner pointed out most of us carry a mental load of some description – about work, household responsibilities, financial obligations and our personal lives – but how heavy that burden is and how it’s carried within households is not always equal.
Mums and single parents arguably carry the heaviest mental loads, akin to carrying a sack of cement bricks as opposed to one full of rock melons. As Australian journalist and author Caroline Overington put it in 2018, “the answers to the life-essential questions – when baby last ate, or what baby should eat next, or when baby needs to go to sleep, or have medication, or whatever – all that stuff is stored in [her] head.”
Like when you’re asked if you had a ‘boys’ look’ for something, we’ve been conditioned to work within a domestic structure that dictates women know where things are and men don’t. Which is why various people in your life – your partner, kids or parents – ask you “where’s the …?” or “how do I…?”, even when you have no bloody clue yourself.
