The Reverse Kondo

Last week, I came face to face with a real-life example of the sunk cost fallacy, one of the cognitive biases I wrote about in my Money Crashers piece. Based on the recommendations of several YouTubers, I'd ordered a pair of jeans from Fashion Nova in the hopes that they might actually fit both my waist and my butt (despite the 12-inch difference in circumference between the two). Unfortunately, these turned out to be absolutely not what I wanted; they were skin-tight almost everywhere from my belly button down to my knees, except in the places where they bunched up oddly around the crotch.

Even more unfortunately, in my eagerness to seize on what I hoped would be the jeans of my dreams, I'd neglected to check the site's return policy. I wasn't too concerned about the cost of return shipping; the real shocker was discovering that the site doesn't offer refunds at all. The best I could do was return the pants, at my own expense, in exchange for store credit. But since the entire site is definitely aimed at much younger women who like to show a LOT more skin than I do, it was highly unlikely I'd find anything else I liked. Rather than shell out more money to send back the jeans in the almost certainly futile hope of getting something for my investment, it made more sense to write them off as a loss and give them to the local thrift shop, where they might find a new owner who could actually wear them.

Once I'd decided to give away the jeans, it occurred to me that I might as well go through the rest of my closet and see if there were any other items in there that would be put to better use on someone else's back. And while I was at it, I asked Brian if there was anything he wanted to get rid of, and he ended up trying on everything in his side of the closet and ditching a sizable percentage of it. By the time we were done, we had one big box filled to overflowing with clothes to donate, and another small bag of stuff in such crappy condition it was fit only for textile recycling. (The Repurpose NJ boxes we've used in the past are no longer available, but it turns out they offer textile recycling at H&M stores, and maybe they'll have some jeans that fit me.)

Now, if we'd been following the principles of the highly trendy Marie Kondo as we went through this exercise, we'd have needed a much bigger giveaway box. In fact, we'd probably have ended up with almost nothing left in our closets. Her standard is that the only items you should have in your closet are those that "spark joy" in your heart when you touch them, which seems to me like an awfully high bar. I mean, I wouldn't say any single pair of underpants I own sparks joy for me, but I know I'd miss them if they weren't there.

So instead, we hit on a standard you might call the Reverse Kondo. (The Odnok, if you will.) We weren't going to insist that our clothes spark joy, but at the very least, they shouldn't spark annoyance. Any item that we felt bad about every time we saw it in the closet, for any reason—guilt, frustration, disappointment, regret, whatever—had to go.

Using this standard, we discarded:

• Clothes that were either way too big or way too small
• Clothes we'd both received as gifts and never worn
• A couple of sweaters I bought because I loved their bright colors, but never wore because they made me look like a fuzzy beach ball
• A skirt that I used to wear a lot, but no longer felt enthusiastic about
• A couple of wool neckties Brian had inherited from his grandfather and never worn (on the maybe two occasions per year when he actually wears a tie, he prefers a silk one)
• Items that we never wore because they were duplicates of other items we liked better (like Brian's less-favorite pair of beige pants)
• Most difficult of all, but necessary: a dress I'd bought as my all-purpose, go-to dress for any kind of slightly dressy occasion in warm weather. I had, in fact, worn it at least once, so I knew it was useful—but I had to face the fact that I'd never really liked it. I felt unsure about getting rid of something that fit perfectly and was still serving a purpose, but I knew I'd never actually be happy wearing it, and that seemed like the polar opposite of sparking joy.

However, under the same standard, we kept:

• A few pairs of pants that Brian wore only occasionally
• Another couple of sweaters that were fairly shapeless, but so warm that on cold days, I was willing to wear them anyway
• A dress that I hadn't worn in years and didn't consider very practical, but that caused Brian to go "Hubba hubba!" when I tried it on

In short, anything that there was a reasonable chance we would miss when it was gone is staying in the closet. Anything we will never notice the lack of—or feel actively relieved to see gone—is going to a new home. And our closet will be less crowded, but will still contain enough clothes to meet our everyday needs, and our less everyday ones as well.