Why Being in Charge of Housework is Exhausting

The Mental Load as Unescapable Domestic Affordances

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Dear readers,

Last year, I went to Morocco for a month—you know, that thing where you don’t work for a bit. (Oh, how different our lives can look in a year.)

The walls were white and perfect and I did not feel the need to adjust any furniture or have the nagging feeling of doing laundry. I just was.

Since then, as you may recall, I went through the financial colonoscopy of obtaining a mortgage and the surreal experience of buying a house, meaning that I am now in charge of a house. A house. A fixer-upper, with housemates to fill the bedrooms, and the mental overhaul that comes with being in charge.

The Lady of the House is always in charge of more than a Landlord

Enter my period of accidental domesticity. I’ve been experiencing the thing that happens when you feel like You’re the One Responsible for a House: You notice. Everything.

What’s changed is your impression of what has to, or can, be done in an environment.

Affordances, an idea coined by psychologist James Jerome Gibson, means that our perception of the environment changed according to our possible behaviors in it: perceiving is for doing. The second you need crutches or find yourself cursing your knees, stairs become the devil; when you are about to pee your pants, everything that is not a toilet seems pointless. 

“Affordances are not something that can be simply observed or seen, as they require perception and the ability to interpret the environment to understand what's available and usable.”

Survival demands mastery of two feats with opposing demands: successfully accomplishing a plethora of goals, yet limit how much energy we spend in the process of doing so. Evolution has shaped the way we process information about the world to maximize our ability to do both at once, by selectively and subconsciously paying attention to information that can help us achieve our goals—even warping the shape of things in the world that might help us along our way.

That Floor is Dirty > Writing

Upon entering one’s home after a period of vacation is to enter an environment that is seemingly and perpetually covered in Post-It notes, each screaming DO THIS NOW. YOU REALLY GOTTA TAKE CARE OF THIS. Oh god, wasn’t I going to call that guy to fix that thing? Turning any corner reveals a new reminder of something you need to do.

Domestic affordances are how the expectation of being domestic operations manager, and household supervisor, skullfucks women on a daily basis. There is simply no escape from the cognitive labor of impending tasks, or tending to the needs of those around you—and I say this as a single woman without children. But I did have the bad luck of being born in a place in history when 99.5% of the recorded, written messages, the signs and social cues, all pointed to the fact that this shit is your responsibility.

Cultural evolution is so slow, in part, because these relatively new ideas of egalitarianism are competing against our having come into contact with grandparents’ ideals and cumulative Disney princess narratives—all at the most impressionable ages possible. Mental imprinting is a thing that affects our “priors” for the rest of our lives.

And tracking our productivity, for women or whomever is doing the housework, it’s a losing battle. You never get the satisfaction of crossing “doing the dishes” off of the To Do list because it wasn’t there in the first place.

“Doing the dishes” is never really on the To Do list because Doing the Dishes is always on the mental list. It always needs to be done. But it never finds its way into a Getting Things Done-type productivity program. Computer files, lists of Kindle notes, Bullet journals, Post-Its to track our genius thoughts: we make sure to keep track of these Big Important Ideas.

Ali Abdaal refers to this as mindspace; I say that each new task is like an additional browser tab open in the browser of your brain. “Many browser tabs using excessive computer memory” works as a better analogy because it’s a more concrete, familiar experience to us all. More browser tabs use more memory, making the computer progressively less efficient and functional, overall. Barring a sudden shutdown from an entirely overwhelmed system, the only way to recoup any of that energy is to go around and close each browser tab, one at a time.

One of Abdaal’s revelations in Feel-Good Productivity is to find the joy in work—then it doesn’t feel like work—and limit as many mundane tasks as possible.

So easy! And if you don’t like something, then just gamify that shit.

Focusing on What We Want to Do is a Privilege

Getting positive feedback about our performance—that we’re on our way to achieving our goals—creates what’s known as a discrepancy-reducing loop: the closer we get to successfully finishing things that are meaningful to us, the better we feel, and the more energy or vigor we’re magically able to summon in order to achieve that very thing. We need to accomplish things while being stingy about energy, which is why “positive feeling results when an action system is making rapid progress in doing what it is organized to do.”¹

Video games and puzzles—card games, Sudoku, and mah-jongg—are frivolous cognitive work that doesn’t feel like work for a few reasons.

First, we freely choose them. Even pigeons prefer having a choice over not having a choice—even when that second option has the same value and comes with an additional cost: having to choose between options. Simply being able to exercise a choice is rewarding, in part, because self-efficacy, or having a sense of control over our own environment, is a biological necessity.

In addition to the fact that video games are freely chosen (which is rewarding), they also don’t feel like work (even though, cognitively, they are) because they offer additional incentives. When we finish a project at work, we get an email of acknowledgement, or perhaps a gold star; when we fold our laundry, our reward is two seconds of the calm that follows closing one of those browser tabs.

Simply knowing that we’re making progress towards our goals, that our actions have a specific value, is inherently rewarding.

And yet: the housework is never finished. The browser tabs only close in Morocco.

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Be Accountable

When your environment contains lots of constraints and sudden upheavals, the best way I’ve found to make time for the things that I really want to do is what I call the act of “tethering yourself to the mast”: public accountability, a financial investment in a class, hosting a meeting, etc. Other people—and, yes, ourselves—don’t prioritize personal preferences as much as concrete tasks with sunk costs.

Do you want to start writing a book with me this year?

I am taking my own advice! Sign-ups for my new online writing class are now under way!

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1. Charles S. Carver and Michael F. Scheier. “Goals and Emotion,” in Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, edited by Michael D. Robinson, Edward R. Watkins, and Eddie Harmon-Jones. (New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 2013): 176-195. A. Fishbach, J. Steinmetz, and Y. Tu. “Motivation in a Social Context: Coordinating Personal and Shared Goal Pursuits With Others,” in Advances in Motivation Science, Volume 3. (New York, NY: Elsevier Inc., 2016): 35-79.