Housework is important, highly skilled work

Sometimes I’ll meet an adult who doesn’t know how to do some basic household task. This person is always a man.

Sometimes I’ll meet an adult who doesn’t know how to do some basic household task, like doing their laundry, changing their duvet cover, or using a broom or vacuum cleaner. This person is always a man.

I would feel compassion for these people who haven’t been taught these basic skills — how debilitating to go your whole life not knowing how to do laundry! Except usually, they don’t seem upset about it. They shrug it off. “Well, I’ve always been in a relationship” or “I just hire someone to do it.” Some of these men are in their forties.

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I was interested in basic adult skills from probably the age of three. I was fascinated by grocery shopping. I found a lot of joy in cleaning. When my grandmother taught me to polish silver, I told my mom I wanted to be a maid in a castle when I grew up.

None of this was forced upon me. My older sister stayed in the car when we went to the grocery store and wrote her stories, and no one had a problem with that. I was just innately drawn to it.

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Housework — interfacing with physical objects — is a deep skill, and one I learned so young and so gradually that I didn’t even realize it.

I hardly saw it as a skill at all, until I lived in a house with nine men in their twenties and thirties. One of them did not know how to use a broom, and we had to teach him. One of them got blood on white fabric and immediately washed it with hot water (blood stains should always be washed in cold water). I watched a 30-year-old try to make a cake from a box cake mix; he thought you were supposed to do the mixing in the cake pan, and that the oven would automatically turn off when he was done with it (neither is correct). It made me realize the dozens of tiny assumptions that are written into every recipe — assumptions that are invisible to me because they never trip me up, because I learned the necessary things when I was a child.

Seeing basically functional adults, who seemed smart and competent other domains, struggle with things that felt unbelievably obvious to me, let me realize that I actually had a skill.

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For most of my life, I felt confused about the value of my skill in housework. I knew I was good at it, but it didn’t feel like a ‘real’ skill. I still thought I was supposed to learn programming (ha, glad I didn’t bother!).

A few years ago I wrote a song about how depressingly meaningless it felt that every task I did was constantly being undone, and would have to be done again. (“Clean and dirty all the dishes, wash your clothes while wearing more, / Sweep and mop while shedding skin cells that fall to settle on the floor”.)

(Some people who know feminist theory told me that work that needs to be done repeatedly forever — like cooking, cleaning, taking care of children, mending — is called ‘reproductive work’. As opposed to the ‘productive work’ that men mostly do, where something is produced at the end, like a table or a piece of software. This is a useful concept but poorly named.)

But these things have to be done. People have to eat every day, and someone has to make the food. Clothes have to be washed sooner or later (barring tales I’ve heard of rich boys who just throw their clothes away when they get dirty), and someone has to do the laundry. If a home is not kept well it will grow mold and things will physically fall apart.

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I’ve spent my adult life in the SF Bay Area, where you’re supposed to want to start a startup (and ideally save the world at the same time), and if your startup can’t scale without bound, it is a failure.

This ethos connects to the sense of shame I feel in being a housewife. It feels like you are doing something wrong. You are operating in a non-scalable, non-global domain, and so there is no respect to be had. The Right way to be in the world is to do something High Impact. Raising just two children, or keeping house for just a few people, will never be that.

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Sidebar: All skills are higher status when men do them

Not to beefpost, but something that really bothers me is that when I lived with the Lightcone team, I was constantly doing all the housework alone. They had zero interest. One time one of them fucked up the microwave and decided he was too busy and important to clean it. Another time I tried to teach one of them to use a vacuum cleaner, he watched me vacuum the whole house, then told me he had no interest and I should just do it myself going forward.

One time three Lightcone team members and I punched a hole in a door that was locked from the inside. When the door needed to be replaced, I hung a 70-pound solid core door all by myself. It took hours. Hanging doors is much harder than you think if you’ve never tried it, and solid core doors are fucking heavy. There was no one there to help me support it, so I shoved some Best of LessWrong books under it as shims.

Then Lightcone bought a hotel, and suddenly these skills were Important. Knowing how to use a drill was something interesting to discuss, when they’d never given a shit about it before. Now they know how to hang doors. That work is Important now that it’s for a conference venue that’s supposed to save the world. Even though the skills are the exact same ones they didn’t value at all when I did them in our home.

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The piece of writing that I’m most known for is a guide to interior design. I went to a meetup last month where they were discussing that post, and all the men there kept referring to the author as ‘he’.

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I’ve spent a lot of time on my housework for my entire adult life, but it’s only in the past year or so that I’ve actually felt psychologically comfortable with that.

A few months ago, I told my boyfriend about my high school friend who is both a world-class triathlete and a rocket scientist. He said “Should we get really good at two things?” And I said “I’m already really good at housework.”

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Earlier this year, I had to clean up vomit in the middle of the night. Despite the fact that it was 3 AM, and despite the nature of the task, I was thrilled, because I knew exactly what to do. I got in a kind of flow state, euphoria. I had such a sense of mastery, and I was using it to do something necessary and helpful. It was a highlight of my month.

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I feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t know how to keep their own home clean, even if they don’t see it as a problem themselves.

I have mastery over my environment. I am self-sufficient as an adult, in a way that is as important to me as financial self-sufficiency. If my clothing rips, I can fix it. If a doorknob breaks, I can replace it. If there is catastrophic vomit, I can clean it up so it doesn’t leave a trace or an odor on any surface, even if it’s 3 in the morning. My home never grows mold.

Maybe the traditional heterosexual relationship dynamic, with the man as the primary breadwinner, is a good trade in part because there are two kinds of self-sufficiency adults need, but most people don’t have both. You need to earn enough money to live. But you also need to not have your life physically fall apart.

Yes it is possible to trade money for that, and many people do. This has only become possible on a large scale with the modern economy, where it’s easy to just buy things instead of putting in work to maintain them, and technology like washing machines, dishwashers, and robot vacuum cleaners has drastically reduced the amount of time humans need to spend on reproductive labor.

I still think it’s worth knowing how to do your own laundry.