For me, the very act of everyday living has become very enjoyable and fulfilling in recent years. Doing the dishes, cooking, gardening, sweeping the floor, putting out the trash. Those are not "chores", that's what life's made of. Some of it creative, some not, but the difference is you're simply present in the moment and in the world.
If there were a return to pride in and appreciation of a job well done, there would be no shortage of people willing to do the work, in my mind. The reason most people are so unwilling to do these things is because they feel like it is beneath them, and that doing them is a demonstration of their low status.
The whole modern economy is based on having them feel low status...
People content with their jobs and lives don't consume as much. The whole 1.2 trillion dollar advertising industry (plus tons of non-measured counterparts, e.g. lifestyle articles in magazines, movies etc) is based on promoting unattainable lifestyles as exciting to sell products they associate with them.
Maybe some people. Not others.
N=1. I absolutely don't think maintenance is "low status". I just consider it a waste of human time and resources that interferes with deriving utility and enjoyment from things, but is strictly necessary. It's something to be minimized, both in terms of doing no more than strictly necessary and finding technological solutions to reduce maintenance burdens of products/systems. But when it has to be done it has to be done, I have no problems with it.
It has nothing to do with status. Most maintenance work isn't done in front of people, and not doing it at all signals much lower status than doing it. Rich people may do less of it themselves because they can afford to pay someone else to do maintenance tasks.
Well, parent already said "most people", not all.
(But even if they haven't said "most", one should assume they allow for exceptions in any general statement in a casual conversation. Unless of course they used the universal quantifier and insisted on "absolutely everybody, no exceptions whatsoever". But I digress).
>It has nothing to do with status. Most maintenance work isn't done in front of people
It doesn't have to be to be associated with low status though. It's merely enough that it's considered as stopping one from doing the things they think would raise their status (what they "should be doing" that's not beneath them).
What I meant is, while I can't read minds, "most people" disagrees with the ad-hoc statistical sample of "people I know". What I perceive is people differing in the amount of resistance they have towards doing unwanted things that still need to be done, but I maybe once saw it being considered a status issue.
> It's merely enough that it's considered as stopping one from doing the things they think would raise their status (what they "should be doing" that's not beneath them).
Do people really think this way? "This task is beneath me", "that other task is not beneath me"?
I consider chores to be stopping me from doing things "I should be doing", but it has nothing to do with status; it's just about having better things to do with the time. I hate chores as much now as I hated them in the days I had trouble making ends meet; the only difference is that nowadays I can afford reducing some of them (e.g. I have a dishwasher now, and I can afford a little bit extra to buy something that's easier to clean than the cheapest option). Rich people are able to outsource more.
Maybe the picture is backwards? Outsourcing chores is a status signal in the sense that your ability to reduce maintenance burden is correlated to your wealth. That doesn't mean people hate maintenance because of status - what makes this a good status signal in the first place is that chores are a waste of life.
I think the difference in our opinion is that I see those two phrasings as being more or less the same. "better things to do with the time" I understanding as not very different from "those are beneath me, I'm here for a higher calling".
As opposed to enjoying e.g. cooking and tending the house, and not considering them a waste of time.
Kind of like people tend to look down on garbage men and cleaning persons, even though their work is essential.
> Kind of like people tend to look down on garbage men and cleaning persons, even though their work is essential.
Ok, I've seen people thinking like this; I actively changed the mind of or filtered out people like this from my social circle. It's a proxy for looking down on poor / less successful people. Still, these are jobs associated with less well-off precisely because the tasks are unpleasant, and everyone who can avoid them, will.
(Then again, maybe it's self-reinforcing at this point, and the factor that poor people do these jobs makes for an extra incentive to avoid doing the same, even if one is poor too.)
They do so many foods better than the people who invented them.
You might be considered very low status if you "can't afford to pay someone and you still don't do it", and slightly less low status if you do them yourself.
One is lowly and dirty-ass, the other is lowly-and-clean.
But not lofty and successful as "I'm all about creating, I have staff to do those things, can't be bothered as my time is precious".
To the more well off/elites etc, someone who "can't afford to pay someone" and does those things themselves is still low status. They are not going to get impressed with someone cleaning the house themselves...
You can be high status and poor, or high status and rich, but the former is easier to achieve. This probably stems from a “it is easier to thread a camel through a needle than for a rich man to find grace” kind of mentality, but also relates to values of self-sufficiency. Nevermind that everyone goes to the grocery and only maintains small vegetable gardens.
As someone who likes to make money, I am in a subculture of my immediate social network.
I mean, I do my chores everyday too but I'd muuuuch rather be playing guitar or reading a book. Don't take any pleasure in cleaning the plates.
Interestingly some believe this focus on goals vs just being, is a function of our schooling system. Kids who grow up without formal schooling , function more in “being” orientation vs “doing” orientation.
Personally I Design my life to balance between being and doing. I use a model [0] to map out the important things to me, and review it regularly.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8q5bhuawv1ox101/Balance-template.j...
after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.
I rarely remember the HN articles I read, much less the comments, but today I found myself blaming myself on not doing productive things in my time. Out of memory came this manifesto and this comment of yours, especially the first paragraph. This is something I agree with very deeply, and yet forget about this all too easily: just being has value in and of itself.
I want you to know that your words have made a difference, have helped me remember something that's important to me, and I'm grateful for that.
I'm glad to have sparked something positive in someone else :-)
Tiling my kitchen over two weekends was less inconvenient than finding a tile layer who was willing to a) do the job on a day I had home office and b) show me the layout ahead of time so I could make sure they would do it exactly the way I wanted it done. It's also relaxing to do something hard that has nothing to do with my company's DevOps toolchain, where consequences for mistakes only affect me, my husband and our house.
Now off to re-plant my front yard with an annual (one-season) clover so it, too, can recover it full productivity after a frantic period of overwork. Sure, I could have spent this Sunday learning enough about Spring to help troubleshoot it, but that's what I have colleagues and existing real work projects for.
I guess it's a combination of both work and play being more consumptive/prescriptive. There's no space to put your own stamp on things.
The obvious counter to this is all the what would have been factory workers (in the west) that now seem to have more freedom. To which I would guess that essays complaining about lack of creativity tend to be written by the well off, where as the less well of have other concerns.
When something is easy to do well because all the supplies are easy to reach, in good order and condition (the joy of a new sponge for dishes!) and there is not too much of it and you don't have to climb around other messes it's nice.
We become used to suboptimal situations so quickly, and the bad feelings of stuffiness and annoyance are buried below more immediate issues.
Taking an hour or two and identify/remove the pain points can improve the task experience greatly.
If that's life I may just as well kill myself.
I can't imagine a state of mind where one could find meaning of life in this. It feels a bit similar to finding meaning in death, which I personally consider a large-scale case of Stockholm syndrome.
I don't find washing the dishes, mopping floors, etc unpleasant at all. It's a welcome break. Moreso when it's your _own_ floor, and you take pride in the environment you live in.
Washing the car, for example, I find a good way to connect with the fruits of my labour, a level of respect for the things I own.
Sure, doing it 8 hours a day every day for a full time job with no other sense of purpose would be soul destroying, that's not what most people are talking about I think.
It's interesting, though, because based on those I know, there's sort of a pattern here.
Some people want everything to be a service - take out food, rental apartment, Uber, etc etc. Some want to feel some measure of self-sufficiency. And there's not really much room inbetween, it seems.
I guess? The concept of them not being unpleasant is... alien to me.
> And there's not really much room inbetween, it seems.
I consider myself to be in between. I'm a strong advocate of products over services, because services come with undesirable things like relationships with third parties, subscriptions (vs. one-time payments), and terms of service that restrict what you can do with things. I prefer ownership, but I also strive to minimize any and all maintenance burden related to that ownership, because I consider it a negative aspect.
I tend to find that my attitude towards these sorts of tasks varies depending on how stressed I am. A 60-hour workweek and a commute makes anything like that feel horrible. A more balanced life and it's the opposite, I like cleaning, I've taken the world around me and improved it.
It seems to me that you must have a line somewhere - like gardening for example, is that a maintenance task, or is that different because it's not actually necessary? Decorating the interior of a house?
Changing the skin of a window manager? :P
Just something to think about.
I mean something in between. Not necessarily causing revulsion or mental pain, but still less preferable than doing nothing at all.
> I tend to find that my attitude towards these sorts of tasks varies depending on how stressed I am.
That's definitely true for me too.
> It seems to me that you must have a line somewhere - like gardening for example, is that a maintenance task, or is that different because it's not actually necessary? Decorating the interior of a house?
Depends. I'd definitely prefer for the garden to maintain itself by magic instead of having to micromanage it, and having no other option, I'd probably turn gardening into a set of half-baked electronics hobby projects. Decorating the house? That's a one-off task, a means to an end. Still, while I'd happily decorate the thing in CAD software[0], I'd happily pay someone to assemble and put the new stuff according to instructions. I've assembled and moved enough furniture in my life for that to become boring.
(A somewhat related example that's current for me: Kerbal Space Program. Your first couple dozen orbital insertions, your first couple dozen manual orbital intercepts and dockings, are all super fun. But after a while it gets so repetitive that you wish for a way to automate it. When your goals shift from "let's land on the Mun for the first time" to "I want to send 250-ton spaceship to Duna for long-term planetary studies", you start realizing that doing a dozen launches to assemble it in orbit is a chore, and you don't want to spend the hours required to do it.)
Maybe it's the "mastery" thing? There's this well-known "Frustration/Boredom" chart floating around the Internet, see e.g. [1]. Most maintenance tasks don't require too much skill for good enough results, so with near-zero challenge, repetitive nature, and goal being mostly treading water, it's just one big grind. People probably have different thresholds of tolerance for that.
Another issue is whether this is even self-directed. Living with other people means that you may be asked to do maintenance tasks way before you yourself think they're needed. In these cases, I find the work doubly frustrating.
--
[0] - which I recently did, to accommodate our newborn.
[1] - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Flow-state-frustration-a...
I don't think it's appropriate to say that "life is made of". Admittedly, "life is full of", and if you can enjoy those menial tasks, reach that "zen" level as some say, that's great. In that case it's true that your "life is made of", and if you can enjoy it, much better for you. The less you need to live happy, the easier it's to achieve that happiness.
And in fact, most of us could learn a bit of that. Accept that we have to deal with those things, and at least try to not torture ourselves with it, enjoy it as much as possible (even if in some cases it doesn't seem to amount to much).
All that being said, I think it's also easy to lose perspective when you manage to achieve a certain degree of happiness or comfortability through that kind of routine, or when you deeply believe in that idea. In particular, I believe that's a state that not everyone can reach, and I doubt it's a matter of being trained enough or trying hard enough. Some people just have a natural need to create, or explore, or need to actively fight and try to change the world they live in, or whatever. Sometimes, that comes from inside, in the same way as hunger, or your need to sleep.
This probably sounds hyperbolic. For most people, it probably is. But this is the kind of issue that you can only really understand if you personally live it, because it is a psychological need, and that's very hard to communicate to others who don't feel the same way.
In conclusion: I absolutely believe those who say that they find meaning in a life like this. I actually think that most people can find meaning in a life like this, and I believe the social factor is the most relevant for most people's happiness. But I also believe there's a lot of people who can't find meaning in a life like this, as much as they try, because they have other needs, and trying to supress them it's not only unreasonable, but a nice attempt at torture. I can understand the people that says that they would rather kill themselves. Hopefully this adds a bit more context.
Always interested in hearing unusual answers as to how we might approach this challenge.
And that is the conclusion the writer should have arrived at, from their own arguments:
> all media is created to be consumed.
> I had to start creating.
> (…)
> What’s evil is passive consumption, in all its forms.
If all consumption is evil and all creation is meant to be consumed, then by creating we generate evil. The logical conclusion isn’t to create more than we consume, but to do neither.
I agree, we need to learn how to simply be instead of worrying about how to achieve or get something done.
Unfortunately, "simply being" if you live in the first world and especially the US is consuming.