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 !

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A podcast written and realised by Joseph Chance.

First Broadcast: 12/8/2022

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