To kick off 2019, Americans are making big piles of all their possessions, holding items to see if they spark joy, and then sending anything that doesnt make the cut to either the trash heap or the thrift store.

The tidying craze is inspired by Netflixs show Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, an extension of Kondos cultishly popular 2014 book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.

Kondos cleaning method encourages people to interrogate their relationships with their things, with the hope of transforming those relationships for the better and making people think twice before bringing a new item home.

This is done in part by acknowledging the role the old object has played in the owners life, thanking it for its service, and then either discarding it or taking it into the future to be joyfully used again.

For KonMari acolytes, decluttering can help them confront and control the overwhelming abundance in their everyday lives, while rediscovering meaningful objects buried beneath accumulated detritus. Episodes depict subjects tearfully rediscovering old wedding photos, and finding a parents diary about being interned in a Japanese-American camp during World War II.

But theres one group of people for whom Kondos guiding principle does it spark joy? could potentially backfire: those who have a compulsive hoarding problem.