CHAOS THEORY

What professional organizers know about our lives.

- JENNIFER WILSON

Professional organizers, Carrie M. Lane argues, are "therapists of capitalism."

In 2012, when the anthropologist CarIrie M. Lane would tell people that she was researching professional organizers, most pictured Sally Field as Norma Rae holding up a "UNION" sign on a factory floor. In fact, Lane's subjects were more likely to be sitting on a basement floor alongside empty nesters, helping them discard their children's old toys. One organizer Lane interviewed recalled asking a client, "What does this toy want? Where would it be happiest, most fulfilled? Is it happy at the bottom of a pile, not being used, collecting dust?" More than a decade later, Lane-the author of "More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn't Working" (Chicago)-need not clarify. The job title "professional organizer" is now firmly part of our lexicon, owing to an overstuffed market of how-to books on getting rid of clutter.

At the top of the pile would be "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up," by the Japanese author Marie Kondo, published in English in 2014. Her method evoked the Shinto principle that objects can be inhabited by a kami, a spirit. Socks, for instance, should not be folded into balls. "Do you really think they can get any rest like that?" she asked. She famously instructed readers to pose the question, when deciding whether to hold on to an object, "Does this spark joy?" Kondo herself sparked many things fourteen million copies sold, the Netflix series "Tidying Up with Marie Kondo," intense annoyance (why not ask "Does this spark revolution?" one Facebook post I saw read), and a decluttering craze.