In this post, we relate Marie Kondo's book on tidying up, Dunbar's number, and non-existence (abhava in Sanskrit [1]) as a means of knowledge.
Marie Kondo's book on tidying up [2] has two interesting and, in our opinion, main observations:
- One must keep items that spark joy when one is in a calm state of mind and holds the items in one's hands.
- The items that are discarded using the method above give us knowledge about what we did not understand about ourselves—that is, which items we thought we would like at the time of purchase but did not end up liking.
First, we observe that both of these observations involve emotions; i.e., we keep the items that spark commonly positive emotions and reflect on the commonly negative emotions inspired by the discarded items.
Now, we analyze these observations using only the mind; that is, we remove emotions (i.e., the body and senses) from them and look at them only from the point of view of the mind.
Dunbar's number is defined as follows [3]:
Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.
For observation #1 by Marie Kondo, Dunbar's number tells us that we have a cognitive limit as to how many people one can maintain stable relationships with. We observe that this is due to a limitation of the mind, similar to [4][5]. So, when observation #1 is viewed only from the point of view of the mind, it becomes the cognitive limit on how many products one can remember and use consistently without forgetting about them. We have simply replaced relationships with people with relationships with products in Dunbar's number's definition.
For #2 by Marie Kondo, we recall the idea of non-existence as a means of knowledge that we discussed in a previous post and have written about extensively [6][7][8]. When we look at it from the point of view of the mind, #2 is essentially saying that the non-existence (abhava) of the discarded items can be a means of knowledge. This would approximately be the Vedantic school's interpretation[6] of Marie Kondo's two observations, in our opinion.
Thus, in this post, we made observations from Marie Kondo's book on tidying up and tried to understand them using only the mind, relating them to Dunbar's number and non-existence as a means of knowledge.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abhava
[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life-Changing_Magic_of_Tidying_Up#Overview
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
[4] https://m-chaturvedi.github.io/blog/029/
[5] "The Humble Programmer" by Dijkstra: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html
[6] https://m-chaturvedi.github.io/blog/062/