Pens galore. And this is after I did an exercise in tidying á la Marie Kondo in The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up. I thought pens would be an easy category. They’re fairly cheap (unless you’re a pen snob like me) and they’re easy to come by. There’s no scarcity of pens in my little part of the world. But, for many reasons, I found this process surprisingly anxiety-producing.

I wouldn’t say that I necessarily have sentimental attachment to many of these pens. My reluctance to throw ones out that “didn’t bring me joy” stemmed from a few reasons, one of which was practicality. While pens are not expensive, they’re not cheap either—for someone who makes as little money as I do, anyway. I find that my writing process is incredibly different based on what pen I’m using and my weapon of choice is almost always the Pilot G2 pen series. It’s almost painful, when I need more, to pay almost ten dollars for four pens. Especially when, in my world, ten dollars is incredibly hard to come by. While not every Pilot G2 pen I have brings me joy—I dislike the 0.7 and 1.0 widths, while I used 0.5 and 0.38 depending on my mood/how fast I need to write/whether I care, at that moment about being neat, etc.—it would have been incredibly impractical for me to throw any of those away. They aren’t just going to sit there. They may not bring me joy, but eventually I will use them. And while Marie Kondo might say in her book to throw them away now and buy more later, I’m never sure if I’ll be able to buy more later. This was one of the largest reasons I disagreed with a lot of what she said. I took a lot out of it and there’s much of value in the excerpts we read, but she’s largely catering here to a certain class and I’m not part of that. Constantly being reminded that what she has to say in a large part doesn’t include me is incredibly off-putting as a reader. While my emotional response to this in particular is silly, I find it hard to get past.

I also found that because pens are in some way a temporal item, in the way that the ink runs out, and because I use them often—if sometimes not often enough to warrant keeping them by Kondo’s standards—it just seemed impractical to get rid of them. Because I often splurged for fancy pens, like fineliners from Staedtler or Stabilo, it seems incredibly dumb for me to throw them away. When I bought them, I knew it was a splurge. I knew that they weren’t practical on a day-to-day basis, but I bought them in spite of that. It seems silly to me to then get rid of them on the same grounds.

But at the same time, I do understand that a lot of what Marie Kondo has to say does have value. There are many things I took from the excerpts that I really want to continue putting into practice in my own life—such as, when applicable, doing the joy test to get rid of things that are really superfluous. But I do think that my standards of what is necessary and what is not are different than Marie Kondo’s, based on the fact that we clearly occupy different class structures and the fact that we come from different cultures. I do think she has a lot to teach me about being a more mindful consumer, or simply confronting what it means to be a consumer.