Apart from some of my books, which I love and have a habit of hoarding, my entire worldly possessions have been regularly and ruthlessly culled and can now be squeezed into one car in an undignified fashion. Decluttering or minimal living has become an increasingly popular – cult-like, even – response to the rise of consumerism. Economies and empires have been built by us buying crap we don't need. In Australia alone, we spend about $158 billion a year on non-essential "stuff". James Wallman, author of best-selling book Stuffocation, declares that clutter "is the material equivalent of the obesity epidemic."

"We have more stuff than we could ever need – clothes we don't wear, kit we don't use, and toys we don't play with," Wallman writes. "But having everything we thought we wanted isn't making us happier. It's bad for the planet. It's cluttering up our homes. It's making us feel 'stuffocated' and stressed – and it might even be killing us." At the extreme end of the spectrum, there is compulsive hoarding, a disorder that goes well beyond the collection of cherished keepsakes. Hoarding was recognised in the 2013 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and is said to affect about 1 million Australians. It is a sickness, but many of us are sick of the uncontrolled accumulation of crap in our lives. "The more chaotic, abundant and junk-filled a society," philosopher Alain de Botton said recently, "the more its tastes in interiors will incline towards the minimalist, the austere and the tidy."

Letting go of stuff we don't need or no longer use becomes a spiritual purging of the past. "By handling each sentimental item and deciding what to discard, you process your past," writes Marie Kondo, author of the best-selling The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, It is also a decluttering of our minds. "The more turbulent someone's inner life is, the more tidiness appeals," de Botton said. "It isn't tidy minds that go for tidy exteriors. It's chaotic minds." Kondo writes: "When your room is clean and uncluttered, you have no choice but to examine your inner state."

The inner state of some declutterers though is decidedly unhealthy. "Do we just assume that decluttering is a good thing because it's the opposite of hoarding?" says Vivien Diller, a psychologist in New York, tells The Atlantic in a new feature. "Being organised and throwing things out and being efficient is applauded in our society because it is productive. But you take somebody who cannot tolerate mess or cannot sit still without cleaning or throwing things out, and we're talking about a symptom." A symptom, at the other end of the hoarding spectrum, of the lesser known compulsive-decluttering. "Any behaviour can technically become a problem when it starts having an obsessive and compulsive nature. Even [otherwise] healthy behavior," Jennifer Baumgartner, a clinical psychologist in the Washington, DC, area who has worked with patients who suffer from obsessive-compulsive cleaning, tells The Atlantic.

Healthy decluttering is not compulsive, perfect or about creating clinical, austere, comfortless lives. It is choosing the things that, as Kondo puts it, "spark joy". Apart from essentials, I keep my Lucy Vanstone ceramic plates and mugs, a Luke Sciberras ink artwork of a squid, some vintage Reidel champagne glasses, a few favourite dresses and shoes, my bed and my books. These things spark joy. They're not much, but having less makes me feel lighter, like there is less chaos and, oddly, more independence, because I no longer feel dependent on "stuff" to fill me up.