Like me, and many of us, Wilkins hates cleaning and is working through how to make the drudgery more palatable. She's "more likely to make the bathroom less dirty than property clean." Likewise, to take the confessions even further, cobweb strands are clearly visible from where I'm currently sitting in my kitchen.
Wilkins and Haywood raise a long-standing struggle for fairness in this field and pin the problem on daily chores being beneath our dignity, so they explore elevating the art of cleaning and finding personal benefits in the work. These paths might help, but I wonder if it could also help to revere the battle around equity and to lower and ground this regular exertion.
NOBLE AND ADVANTAGEOUS EFFORTS
Haywood has found a way to embrace housework as a method of demonstrating caring. As an artform, it can become a noble pursuit to have a well-kept home. Wilkins writes that our disdain for chores is relatively new as Aristotle recognized that,
"...'oikonomia' or 'household management' contributed to the wellbeing of the community, thereby serving a higher purpose. … It’s not surprising that, in a secular individualistic culture, cultivating servant-hearted humility holds little appeal. Work done in the home might not earn us money, or praise, or even gratitude. But the more we’re motivated by care, and love, the more noble the work is."
Wilkins later states her position: "I can't see our attitudes to the work itself changing any time soon." Instead, she hopes to endure the grind by seeing the work as personally beneficial: "Far from being a 'waste' of time, it could be time spent thinking, reflecting, practising, and learning. It could benefit our health as well." If we hate that the dishes need doing again, at least we can reap some side benefits from it, like hitting our fitness goals by working our wax-on-wax-off muscles. I used this line of reasoning when I had little ones who always wanted to be in my arms. I was getting buff from carrying them around!
However, both of these positions remain aligned with our problematic achievement-oriented society. I agree that cleaning doesn't produce anything that can raise our status. My mom, a math prof, would often tell us, "I don't want She kept a clean house on my tombstone," as we crunched a path across the living room carpet, and it wasn't. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han's Burnout Society implores us to make efforts to step outside of this social structure to see ourselves as relational beings with character instead of as projects to be perpetually upgraded for optimal performance. I'm endeavouring to do that, but what does that even look like? One part might be to see tasks from a perspective of connections instead of competition.
Wilkins speaks to the issue of fairness in domestic duties,
"It’s simpler if you live alone, and either clean up after yourself, or pay somebody to. It’s the experience of communal living – cooking for others, cleaning up after them, having them clean up after us; and the time that this might take from a career – that continues to frustrate, and to divide. … Even if we could make each person in a household responsible for offsetting only the wear, tear, and mess they personally cause … the limits imposed by different restraints mean not every member of a household could take equal responsibility."
If connections are key, then we can take a stance popularized by Marx: from each according to ability to each according to need. The authentic ability and the legitimate need in specific cleaning debates can be a conundrum for sure. To whose standards must we adhere? But at least the famous line opens a door for less accusatory discussions. But, more than that, these dilemmas are an opportunity for managing frustration and developing conflict resolution skills. I wonder if we're losing our tolerance for difficulty by avoiding it, causing us to have less and less patience to manage more impressive issues.
When we outsource our cooking and cleaning, that alleviates a potential conflict immediately, beyond deciding who has to open the door for the delivery guy or housekeeping service. But it's important to notice the loss to our development of skills of negotiation, compromise, decision-making, responsibility, and community, as well as a place for parents to practice gradually relinquishing control over their kids as they trust their burgeoning abilities. It forces us to dive into the complexity of meeting different needs and, perhaps vitally, the acceptance of not getting precisely what we want. We really, really want what we want all the time! Imagine a society or home where we all come to terms with some modicum of contentment with what we need. Chores are a place to struggle through learning cooperation. Maybe it can be less exasperating if we recognize the type of character the work is building in ourselves and our housemates.
COMMON RITUALS
Wilkins raises the concern with our busy lives. Part of the problem is we're in it on our own. Trevor Noah sees this as a problem with how much we've lost sight of the village in our quest for personal independence. We had a community of people to help and now we have to "buy someone" to look after our kids, clean, and cook. This system tricked us into getting individual homes where we don't have any help!
Wilkins says that valuing the altruistic aims of cleaning for others, "would require us to value individual status, prestige, and success less." However, I'm not sure altruism is the right lens for this kind of work. Doing work for others often comes with an expectation of appreciation that might not be forthcoming, which just adds to further resentment. Instead, whether in my rare stabs at real cleaning or my daily cooking travesties, I try to take a "because it needs to be done" position. It just is a thing before us. Physical labour is only a lowly task in kingdom-like spaces. Adhering to this view, hoping to elevate it to noble status or ulteriorly benefit from it, forgets that we're all just animals somewhat divorced from our instinct to sweep out the nest.
In the words of Dr. Helen Wong,
"The thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is, it's not an adventure. There's no way to do it so wrong that you might die. It's just work. And the bottom line is some people are okay going to work, and some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose."
Wanting to elevate the task might be part of the problem. We want to only do exciting things, and there's nothing exciting or uplifting to the daily routines necessary to keep our habitat livable. It can be viewed as the Sisyphusian task of pushing a boulder up a hill, as Wilkins writes, but it can also be seen as part of an ongoing cycle of clean/dirty that we're part of. Instead of an upward trajectory of tasks that don't get the medal we hope for, it's a rhythm, round and round. Needing a frame of reference to make it worthy of our time feels like a fight to deny our profane animal nature. We need to clean because we're dirty. Our shit stinks. We can sweep not because it's good for society or to benefit others or to find inner calm, but because of the dirt that accumulates when we don't.
It might feel hard today to do these tasks, despite indoor plumbing and grocery stores, because we're busy with work and have far more distractions sucking up our time. And there's a sense of 'How come other people get servants?' that might keep us dragging our feet, disgruntled. But maybe we're also out of sync with, and contemptuous of, some of our more animal rituals. Trying to paint it as noble feels like gentrifying a task that's explicitly guttural. Philosophers have spent thousands of years trying to aggrandize ourselves above all the lower animals, which merely alienates us from our nature. We are ordinary and mundane creatures.
We are immersed in a perspective of progress with a straight linear path to success. We like to finish things once and for all. We want to check off a box, to relieve the tension of incompleteness, to finally figure out that sofa issue. It's a whole thing to accept tasks that don't end or progress and to accept the back and forth between struggle and resolution, tension and release, life and death, growth and decay… Cleaning is a way to push back against the tendency for things to fall apart, to continue to fix what's broken, repair holes, clean a stain before it sets. It's an act of choosing to carry on.
Many of us want to mechanize our natural processes, either with robots or with the hope of automating tasks to the point that we don't notice the effort in an attempt to forget the time we spent really getting at the gunk behind the toilet. But, like they demonstrate in Severance, there's a cost to wiping out part of our lives, even the tedious parts.
The Tao Te Ching reminds us to embrace the low places (ch. 8):
The supreme good is like water,
which nourishes all things without trying to.
It is content with the low places that people disdain.
Thus it is like the Tao.In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don't try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present.When you are content to be simply yourself
and don't compare or compete,
everybody will respect you.
Two films that also helped me wrap my head around this perspective are both from German directors and set in Japan: the 1999 Enlightenment Guaranteed and the recent Perfect Days. It's possible to find joy in doing our work well just for the sake of doing it well, not for personal benefit, wealth, praise, or honour, and even though people will immediately dirty our clean floors. The dirtying is a necessary part of the cycle.
JUDGMENT AND SCRUTINY
Despite it being seen as low-status, there's still so much judgment around it. It's like, it's a nothing job that anyone can do, and you're bad at it. Getting away from an achievement-society mentality involves stepping outside of the constant comparisons our brain wants to make. Wilkins and Haywood discuss the gender-imbalance in housework, which isn't my primary focus here as I sweat this issue even without a man in my house. But I do believe part of the scrutiny of our habits might be a means to take down women who try to step out of their lane.
In her excellent book Down Girl, Kate Manne explains,
"When women are tasked not only with performing certain forms of emotional, social, domestic, sexual, and reproductive labor but are also supposed to do so in a loving and caring manner or enthusiastic spirit, patriarchal norms and expectations have to operate on the down-low. Their coercive quality is better left implicit."
We're all judged on how well we're put together, but women get an extra layer that's thick and heavy because it's our domain. And we're swimming in it such that we accept and perpetuate it, sometimes foisting a perfectionism on tasks that don't require quite so much effort. For example, I was at a friend's place for lunch a few years ago. After we ate, her son wiped the table then left. Then her husband berated the effort and wiped it again. After he left, my friend complained about the ineptness of both of them, and washed the table a third time.
I admit a twinge of embarrassment to say that I thought the table looked fine from the get-go!
This element of the problem is clear in any online arena with a question about the right amount of cleaning. For instance, recently The Guardian asked how often we should clean our clothes. The responses range from rotating a double mattress weekly, to waiting until socks can walk to the washing machine on their own, but the comment that can likely capture most of us: "Not as much as some people do and a fair bit more than others." There is no clear standard, so we end up trying to meet the highest standard in our circle. We want validation from others to forge belonging, looking for cues to indicate we're good enough. I think we want to outsource or mechanize, in part, because then it's not our fault if it's sub-par. As an alternative, I'm making a valiant effort to provide the lowest standard for others to meet!
The Tao Te Ching cautions us against judgment too (ch. 2):
When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn't possess,
acts but doesn't expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.
A crumb is not a crime, yet it wraps us up in shame regardless. And shame drives us to extremes: either obsessive or resistant. Avoiding getting hooked in by other people's potential judgment of us seems to require acknowledging and quelling our own judgment that's been developing from social expectations surrounding us for a lifetime. It's no easy task, but it's possible.
Instead of imagining ourselves like Sisyphus, happy by resigning ourselves to an evening's toil of dishes, sweeping, and picking up, it might be more useful to picture ourselves like songbirds, tidying and fluffing up their nest before they break out in song together, watching the sun finally able to shine through our windows. In the place between sterile and mouldy are tiny fingerprints on the fridge door.
