11 Tales of Extreme Decluttering, the Marie Kondo Way

For Clara Moore, reading Marie Kondo's best-selling book, "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up," didn't just inspire her to declutter her home—it changed her entire life. "For me, it was a very quick transformation, in a weekend," she told The Telegraph. "I decluttered my life—and my marriage, because my marriage did not spark joy for me." (Moore is now a professional organizer.)

Wojciech Felczak, from Poland, lost 22 pounds by living the KonMari way. Apparently, weight loss is a common side effect.

In the name of minimalism, 42-year-old Naoki Numahata, from Tokyo, limited his 4-year-old daughter to just a handful of toys—a doll, some cars, a yo-yo and a spinning top. They also had just three sets of chopsticks in the house, and no couch.

A Redditor named Cetlas decluttered down to just two pairs of jeans and one pair of sweatpants, because other pants failed to "spark joy." "I just feel like I know what I want, and I won't settle until I find it," they wrote on a KonMari thread.

For Jemima Sonorryan, decluttering veered into a disorder: obsessive-compulsive spartanism. "There was a time when I would get so anxious about excess items I would hurry out to the recycling bin for just a few objects—even if it was nearly midnight," she wrote in Medium. "Neighbours would ask if I was off to a party. I'd have to undeceive them that no, erm, I was actually just taking my empty olive oil bottle and cardboard toilet-roll centre to the recycling bank, because I, um … couldn't sleep with them still under my roof."

Similarly, Annabelle Charbit struggled with obsessive-compulsive spartanism, long before she knew what it was and long before Marie Kondo was a household name. Even after getting help, however, it still remains a struggled. "After years of treatment, "I would rather throw something out and buy it again than keep it," she told The Atlantic.

Kate Washington's decluttering regrets are not necessarily extreme, but still came with unintended consequences. As she wrote in Ravishly, after her husband's surprise cancer diagnosis, the loss of simple familiar things—a red vest—added to her devastation. She wrote, "I had divested myself of the familiar just before I entered a season of my life when that was exactly what I needed."

It took Maria Walley four days to realize she had maybe overdone it, decluttering her closet and reducing it by two-thirds. "It had only been a few days, and everything I wanted to wear was in the hamper," she told The Village Voice. "That's when I started thinking I went too far."

"Marie Kondo stole seven years of my life," wrote Kelsey McKinney. Not on purpose, mind you. In the spirit of KonMari, the writer decided that "[b]ecause apparently I do not know how to read, I not only KonMari-ed my Twitter; I deleted literally every single tweet I ever tweeted."

Minimalism is different from decluttering, but they both begin in a similar place—a rejection of all the things that no longer serve us. Andrew Hyde famously took this to an extreme, shedding all but 15 things—mostly tech and clothes—all of which weighed about nine pounds.

Similarly, Leo Widrich decluttered so much that he could live out of one single backpack. "One bag living has simplified my life in a way that very few other things have and I can highly recommend giving it a try," he wrote in Quartz.