Make mopping fun again! (not a chance)
The shape of happiness, part 4
After 30+ years of marriage, my wife and I have arrived at a split in household chores. It’s a somewhat typical gendered split, where I do most of the outdoor work and she does most of the indoor cleaning, but I also do most of the cooking because I like to cook, and I also do the mopping of the floors. Oddly, she vacuums - it’s this sort of understanding that evolves with time - I mean, why don’t I also do the vacuuming? I honestly don’t know. It seems like “floors” would be a category, not “just mopping”, but that’s what happens when you’ve lived together a long time. Not everything makes sense. (It may be that I do it “wrong” - but that’s a story for another day.)
Well, we recently had a series of mopping-related incidents. We’ve always used a typical sponge mop, with the ringers that you control using a lever on the handle - that sort of thing. And I have always found them to be suboptimal. I mean from my days as an Army private, I knew the string mop was the best, but we didn’t want to have a big, industrial mop bucket and I wasn’t mopping an entire barracks. The LHH has a decent amount of hardwood and tile surfaces, but still that’s only a couple hundred square feet. But we recently replaced a sponge mop whose ringer had failed and found that the next mop we bought was basically broken from the get-go. Add that to the fact that our elderly dog has recently begun to revert to a puppy status and begun to have frequent accidents indoors - well, we really needed a mop that was going to do the job. So I went to Amazon to research the status of string mops and if I really had to become an elementary school janitor in a green Dickies jumpsuit in order to get a decent mop. As it turns out, one does not have to go full custodian (sorry, janitor is so politically incorrect). I found this fabulous string mop, with an easily removable (and machine washable!) head, and a spin plastic bucket with a spin attachment instead of squeezing rollers - and it works incredibly well! It gives the performance of a string mop, but at a residential, rather than commercial (or school) scale. You step on a lever and the attachment to the bucket spins the mop and drains the water. It’s pretty remarkable - and clever - spinning instead of squeezing allows you to have a much more fragile system (you don’t need a steal bucket, in other words). The product is called “O-Cedar”, and I bought mine from Amazon, but you can find them in your local Target or Walmart. The literature that comes with the mop claims it will “make mopping fun again!” I stop at that. I wrote a short review praising the O-Cedar system - I have been using it for a few weeks and I still think it’s the best residential-quality mop I have ever bought, and it makes mopping less miserable, but fun? No.
You get me, right? Was mopping ever fun? My wife can cook, and she is a good cook, and an even better baker, but she doesn’t like to cook. Cooking to my wife is like mopping to me. A chore to be finished: the less time spent doing it, the better. For me, I enjoy cooking. Cooking is a challenge - it allows us to demonstrate mastery and competence. Cooking is important - it contributes to other’s well-being, and if done well, happiness. Cooking, especially for other people, is an outward expression of love - it establishes and nourishes the body, but also creates community and connection. Competence, contribution, connection - cooking satisfies the 3C’s of meaning for me. I love to have friends and family over and to cook for them. It is such a primal thing to provide people you care about sustenance and shelter. But mopping? No.
I think there is something in Sicilian genes that makes men want to garden. I don’t really know what it is, but if you have known a Sicilian man in America, especially someone over the age of 50, chances are that man has fruit trees of some sort in his yard. Flowers growing in a plot next to his house. Vegetables stashed somewhere. That’s my father. He’s an amazing gardener. He has a dozen fruit trees in his yard, incredible beds of flowers that bloom all through the growing months, and somehow vegetables and herbs, too. I'm of mixed ethnicity, so I think maybe the Polish genes knocked that particular bit out of my DNA, because I do not enjoy gardening. (Or, alternatively, my sister stole it, because she is a big gardener. Anyway…) And if you are a long-time reader, you know how I am always bragging about the gardens at the LHH, but truth be told, they were all here before I bought the house. The couple who owned the house before us did all the gardening. I have done very little to enhance them. It is mostly an uphill fight to keep them going. The wife was a landscape architect and the husband was a horticulture professor at UNH. I have had landscapers at the house who do not recognize many of the plants I have in my yard. Don’t get me wrong, I love the blueberries and raspberries, and all the various flowers. But it is a bit overwhelming. I regularly contemplate which beds I could just simply mow over in the fall and pretend they were never there. It gives me a quiver of joy to think about it. And yet, I don’t. In the winter, I resolve to be better about it the following year, and then the spring comes and I contemplate having to spread (I kid you not) 20 yards of mulch to clean up all the beds, and I - I just want to pull the covers back over my head and let the snow just stay.
Let me show it to you graphically:
(Let me interpret this graph for you if it is making your head hurt: less gardens, gooder. Now, onward…)
While I don’t like gardening, there is a certain level of happiness I do get from gardening, especially the results - flowers, berries, etc. So as we move along the X axis, adding more gardening obligations - because once you plant something, you have to take care of it, and that is an obligation - initially brings a lot of happiness. The rate of increasing happiness increases at an increasing rate. And then it starts to slow and eventually, when you reach the point where the additional benefits of one more unit of gardening (one more bed, one more plant, whatever) are just equal to the amount of effort required to care for that one more [bed, plant, whatever], you reach Peak Happiness from gardening. That would be the optimal place to stop - Goptimal . But the LHH has GLHH amount of gardening obligations, which takes me past Peak Happiness and down to HLHH. I could be happier if I had fewer gardening obligations, so that I could shift back toward Goptimal . One way I do that is I let some of the beds get overgrown. This isn’t perfect, because it bothers me to see them overgrown. But it’s better than the effort required to keep them at GLHH. Eventually, I am going to let some of the beds go. It’s just hard because I hate to fail, and failing is another source of unhappiness. So I grimly go out and spread the mulch, weed the gardens, etc., even though it does not make me happy.
I was thinking about this graph as I was mopping the floor in our kitchen a few days ago, and kind of chuckling to myself about “make mopping fun again” (No.), when I paused, stood leaning on the (admittedly fabulous and ingenious) mop, and thought, surely I am blessed to have this floor to care for.
And I am. Truly, I know I am.
And yet, I hate mopping.
When we lived in the DC area, we had a tri-level house (do not recommend), with a crawl space instead of a basement. We had all kinds of crap in the crawl space. And it was a crawl space - with a ceiling about 4 ft high. When we moved, the movers had to go into the crawl space and pull all of our stuff out, and if necessary, re-box it, but there were boxes of stuff in the crawl space that had never been unboxed from our last move. The box simply went in, closed, and stayed there for years. I don’t like having people in my house to do work. It makes me anxious. When you are in my house, you are my guest, and I should be taking care of you (see above about cooking). So whenever we have had movers, it’s super awkward. I usually cooked a big pot of sauce and meatballs and served them lunch to make me feel better. But I remember saying to one of the movers who was grunting away, hauling our stuff out of the crawl space, “I’m sorry we have so much junk.” Now, people who do moving for a living are not, generally speaking, wealthy people. He paused, and said, “It’s not junk. You have very nice things. I wish I had so many nice things.” Which was very kind, but made me feel even worse.
One of my favorite Henry David Thoreau quotes is, "And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him." That’s what my graph above tries to show. There’s a certain amount of stuff that we need to survive. Food, shelter, clothing, companionship. Then above that amount, there is a level of stuff whose presence gives us joy. But there is an amount, beyond that optimal amount, at which the additional stuff actually weighs on us, like stones in our pockets. Thoreau is saying that we often mistake more stuff for translating into happiness. But the more stuff we own, the more care that stuff demands. If you own a house, you must mop the floors. If the house has a garden, you must care for the garden. You invite obligations willingly by acquiring things. It’s not that your stuff is junk - it may indeed be very nice things - but you become a custodian of the stuff, a caretaker of the stuff - and that takes time and resources from other worthy pursuits - including leisure.
Later in Walden, Thoreau has another quote that I love and often think of: “[A] man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” In a recent post, I wrote about why rich people are happier than poor people, and why being richer makes one happier. It really boils down to the fact that poor people have more negative experiences during the course of a day (e.g., mopping, weeding gardens) relative to their positive experiences (e.g., enjoying their house, eating their berries). If I were a richer man (or less stingy), I could hire a landscaping service to come care for my gardens and lawn. If I were a richer man (or less wackadoo), I could hire a housekeeper to mop my floor. In both cases, I would have fewer negative experiences relative to my positive experiences. Essentially, happiness is a ratio of your positive experiences divided by your negative experiences:
H = P/N
A ratio of greater than one means you are happy; a ratio of less than one means you are unhappy. A larger value means you are happier; a smaller value means you are less happy. A rich person can afford to let things alone because he can hire someone to take care of them for him. But that’s actually not the solution Thoreau was proposing. Instead, what he meant was “simplify, simplify, simplify” (an actual quote). Be choosy about the things you let into your life. Each thing comes at a cost, and comes with a maintenance tail, so have as few things as you can. You buy a house - a huge expense - but you are only just beginning to pay. Now you have to maintain it. New furnace, fix the drain, replace the A/C, mow the lawn, mop the floor… The bigger the house, the more upfront cost, and the larger the maintenance tail. Rocks in your pockets.
It isn’t just physical things that come at a cost and have a maintenance tail. Obligations of all sorts come at a cost, and often have a maintenance tail that far exceeds the upfront cost. Your job, projects at work, social commitments, community commitments, friendships, marriage, having a family. Obligations are the source of meaning, but one should take care in choosing the right obligations, and not enter into them too quickly.
As with gardening, there is an optimal, or “just right”, amount of obligations. What is life without friends and family and commitments to do and make things and be in the world? We each have a level of potential that we can reach - a level of contribution that we can make - because we are all endowed with gifts ability, resources, and time. Take on too little in your life, and you live below your potential (Otoo few). Below your potential contribution, you can live more hedonistically, indulging yourself, but in the end, you won’t have the same life satisfaction as if you pushed yourself a little more. Make promises you cannot deliver on (Otoo many), and you will be resented by people who counted on you, and ashamed of your failures. Best to be to the left of (Ojust right), but not by too much.
Last fall I took on teaching an additional class, I was on five community organization boards of directors, put on two conferences, did some non-UNH teaching, and still had the regular responsibilities. I was to the right of Ojust right and in the area of Otoo many, I knew it. I was feeling burnt out and I was failing to complete some of my commitments. And I didn’t have enough leisure time to recharge. I was accomplishing a lot, which I was proud of, but I also knew the pace was unsustainable, and I was drawing down on the bank of support I had from my wife. I had to dial back my commitments. Luckily I did and I feel better about where I am now. (Though adding a second newsletter and a new podcast, well… I may not be good at learning my own lessons. We’ll see.)
Where Ojust right is for each of us differs. It takes time for us to figure that out. Some people just have more capacity for obligations - their Ojust right is far farther to the right than the rest of ours. I think a lot of executives I know are like that. They don’t need the down time the rest of us do, maybe they don’t want or need a personal life, and they are better at organizing themselves so that they can keep all the proverbial balls in the air. They are weirdly productive.
Their optimal level of obligations is to the right of normal people. To reach peak happiness, they have to take on more. Telling them to slow down will just make them unhappy - it would pull them to the left of their own Ojust right.
There is a qualitative element to the Ojust right as well. Choosing the right obligations is important. Just having more can make your miserable, but having the wrong ones can also make your miserable, and I think propels you past Ojust right. I think that is the lesson to be drawn from Thoreau’s quip, “it be the house that has got him.” If the [literal or metaphorical] house gives you joy, then you should embrace taking care of it. But too big of a house, too many houses, well, that’s a lot of mopping.
Figuring out what the right amount and mix of obligations is right for each of us is one of the tasks of emerging adulthood (ages 18-29). It is our obligations that give our lives texture and meaning, and it is during this period that we begin to figure out where Ojust right is, and what the right mix of obligations is for us. It is the task of the rest of our lives to carefully rearrange those obligations as our abilities and resources change through the life course to stay at, or just to the left of, Ojust right. If you truly hate mopping - I don’t truly hate it - you should rearrange your life so that you have to do less of it. That might mean either finding the money to hire someone to do it for you, or buying a smaller house that requires less mopping.
I love the LHH. I love living here. But owning a house is an obligation. And obligations are rarely about fun in the moment. They are about sacrifice in service of something greater. The kind of happiness they give you is the reflective, long-term happiness of life satisfaction. I don’t truly hate mopping, but it was never fun, and even with my new mop, it’s never going to be fun. I am blessed to have such nice stuff to take care of. Thanks to the new mop, it does suck a little less.
I really enjoyed reading this. Your graphs were a fun addition.