Your life is full of shit. It’s one thing to make this observation about life, but another thing to build the world’s fastest self-help genre and publishing power trend to match the likes of hygge. But that’s exactly what the decluttering movement, closely linked to the life philosophy of minimalism, has managed to do in just a few years.

On first impressions, decluttering is quite attractive. I myself have at various times in my life dipped my toe into the practice, deleting all the unnecessary apps on my phone, or purging personal belongings. But I’ve always lacked the discipline to follow through fully. The only time I’ve ever come close to a truly minimal life was when I had to stay in my room for a week with only a travel bag of clothes before all my stuff arrived. I distinctly remember feeling incredibly zen during this period, though in hindsight that might have been to do with the inescapable hell-hole of a Cambridge term not having started yet.

“As it turned out, minimalism had minimal impact on my life”

It was with this experience in mind that, having painstakingly set out my life only a week earlier, I packed it all up in boxes and stuffed it under my bed. Marie Kondo, one of the art’s most celebrated practitioners, suggests to begin with clothes. On this matter, fate had dealt me a blessing in the guise of a curse. Due to staff illness, there was a humungous pile of dirty, dirty clothes in Emmanuel College’s free laundry service that all Emmanuel students get free every week for free, and my own loose assortment of sweaty garms was caught among it. Step one was complete without a moment’s thought.

Next up, books, papers, and miscellanea. I don’t actually have a huge amount of stuff. But what I lack in content, I more than make up for in the inventiveness of my cluttering. For context, my room looks like this:

If you showed this picture to a minimalist, they would probably tut and shake their head like a perturbed nun. So out go the strategically placed £15 zines along with the decorative copper bowls, and National Geographic world map.

Finally, my wallet, which for some reason was full of Sainsbury’s receipts for rice pudding(?). Along with a load of old ticket stubs, I chucked away a few membership and loyalty cards that I’d never used. With little more than some debit cards and IDs, it was time for a difficult decision between my organ donor card and my Labour Party membership.

The choice is stark. One of these items entails a direct and powerful moral statement, a commitment to a more generous world, and something which could one day have enact a tangible good in this pain-filled world. But then the organ donor card might save somebody’s life.

I guess there was never any competition really. The great and noble march towards socialist brotherhood continues. I have kept the red flag flying. 

This is the bit of the article where I talk about all of the c r a z y things I got up to in my c r a z y week of minimal living, but for the fact that, as it turned out, minimalism had… minimal impact on my life. I didn’t really find the clothes thing that difficult, since I wear the same trousers, coat, and shoes every day (all blue). I didn’t miss my books all that much, since I only ever read the cover and blurb anyway. Beyond that, the impact was more annoyance than anything else. Let me list the hilarious things that happened to me in my week of minimalism.

• People asked me why my room was so depressing (one said that I looked like I was squatting) and I had to explain to them that it was because I was writing a column, which when I said it out loud sounded really stupid

• I got irritated that I had to go to YouTube on Safari when I wanted to listen to music on my phone, because I’d deleted both the Spotify and YouTube apps

For these minor nuisances, there didn’t seem to be a huge boost in my general wellbeing. Perhaps this is one of those intractable problems of Cambridge life. No matter how many material objects you remove form your bedroom, there’s only so far you can declutter your soul.

Minimalism seems like an odd thing to advocate as a universal ideology of life. Its problem seems to be that it isn’t sure what its limits are. Supposedly you are allowed to keep items that are sentimental to you or which regularly bring you joy. But what if you have a lot of shit that makes you happy? What if you like to live in a place where you are swathed in the warmth of good memories and reminders of who you are?

In its weak form it doesn’t seem to state anything more than the obvious (though often difficult to follow) maxim of ‘don’t keep shit you don’t like’. Or the ‘take the goddamn trash out’ rule as I call it. But the pleasant balanced lives of its advocates allows minimalism’s dumber edicts to go unchallenged. Take what Kondo says about books: “if you haven’t read it by now, the book’s purpose was to teach you that you didn’t need it”. This is neatly phrased nonsense. I have many books that I want to read one day; the fact that I have not yet read them is testament only to my addiction to Facebook and awful reading pace.

Watching a minimalist documentary on Netflix, two ex-city workers and self-professed former consumerists tell me that I should love people, not things. It’s watching these dudebros talking about how liberated they feel that I finally understand what minimalism is useful for. For people who are genuinely base materialists, buying shit they don’t care about for what it symbolises about their status, I imagine this holistic rejection of ‘stuff’ would be quite beautiful. But that doesn’t mean that others shouldn’t maintain their perfectly healthy relationship with the inanimate. After all, what’s so inhumane about loving things? The strong form of minimalism seems to be like chemotherapy, but for being a dickhead. A useful strategy in curing an affliction, but a heavy-handed one which does not limit itself to the unhealthy area.

In its purist form, minimalism just falls within that category of self-help and spirituality which essentially springs from a desire for non-existence, to reduce the self to a trivial residue. We are all weighed down and burdened by things we don’t need, and a good clear-out is often cathartic, but in taking common sense to the point of dogma, minimalism throws the baby out with the bathwater