How does "death cleaning" help you declutter your life?

Do you really know?
18 dic 2025 5 min
How does "death cleaning" help you declutter your life?
Abrir en Clue

About this episode

Back in 2010, Japanese writer Mari Kondo changed how we think about organisation and decluttering with her bestseller The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Behind the book’s grand title is a simple premise: anything that doesn’t bring you joy should be thrown away.  Since then, a new and somewhat similar trend caught on in the late 2010s: death cleaning. It’s mainly designed for people entering the final stages of their life, and making sure they don’t overboard before passing away. People started talking about death cleaning in 2018, when Stockholm-based artist and widow Margareta Magnusson published a book called The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. Since then, the trend has started catching on. The name comes from the Swedish döstädning: a combination of the word “dö”, which means death, and “standing”, which means cleaning.  How did Magnusson come up with the term? Where does death cleaning fit in alongside other minimalist trends? From what age do people start death cleaning? In under 3 minutes, we answer your questions ! To listen to the last episodes, you can click here : ⁠What is a faecal transplant?⁠ ⁠What is BookTok?⁠ ⁠What is the romance gap?⁠ A podcast written and realised by Joseph Chance. First Broadcast: 12/8/2022 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this episode in English to learn English

Podcast episodes are one of the highest-density ways to absorb English at native pace. How does "death cleaning" help you declutter your life? from Do you really know? gives you natural dialogue, unscripted speech, and vocabulary that actually appears in real conversations.

In the Clue app, every word in the transcript is tappable. Tap an unknown word, see the translation in your language instantly, and keep listening without breaking flow.