The other day, a friend asked me what I was up to up. It just so happened that I got the text when I was kneeling in the middle of my upended room, things strewn on the floor in loosely defined piles. I replied: “I’m performing a Japanese cleaning ritual on my house.” It was a self-amused response, but I was in fact in the process of discovering the magic that is The Magic of Tidying Up. This book by Marie Kondo, a Japanese organizational consultant, outlines a radical approach to de-cluttering. Underlying its prescriptions is the simple idea that your home environment should be a joyful one.

In order to be joyous, the environment you live in not only needs to contain good things but must also practically contain only good things. Getting rid of the useless or bad things is easy, but then there are neutral or somewhat good things. In and of themselves, these are unobjectionable: they are not positively harmful, sometimes somewhat suitable, sometimes even potentially useful. But they are not for that unproblematic. The issue here is not so much that they take up space but that they crowd out and divert attention away from the good things. Their mere presence dampens the positive atmosphere that would otherwise be created by the good things, obscuring and hiding them. Consequently, it’s imperative to eliminate them.

In sorting through my clothes, books, and other stuff, I came to a realization: the hardest task is not giving up things which you previously enjoyed but have come to realize are bad. In these cases, you have changed as a person, so that the allure these things once had has faded. To be sure, the mental process of change itself is difficult, but once that’s accomplished getting rid of the things is strictly a logistical issue.

The hardest thing, though, is giving up things that you haven’t re-evaluated in this way. These are the things with which you continue to have no inherent problem. And yet they don’t meet that threshold of joy or happiness. Despite the inanimate nature of these objects, you feel a strange sense of justice or consideration towards them. “I haven’t sinned,” they plead, “what did I do to deserve this?” I, at least, was racked with a sense of guilt when I took them in my hand. Their inaudible pleas seemed to have a point: from a utilitarian perspective, they should be entitled to stay.

As Kondo explains in the book, these conundrums confront you with a big challenge: getting a clear idea of what you want. And this, I think, is one of the biggest steps to growing up: attaining a clear enough idea of what you want that the “objective” measures of value begin to lose relevance. You transcend the utilitarian logic and the socially imposed metrics and turn inward. That something is simply useful or acceptable is no longer sufficient. Even if it performs a function, serves a purpose, or merely doesn’t offend, you are justified in passing on it. It stays only if it’s good enough: good enough to conform to your vision of happy life.