Cleaning

I like when the robots clean for us.

That's our friend, the DeeBot.

It's almost therapeutic, to have it buzzing around in the background while you're doing other things.

My favorite part is to wipe off the counters and just deliberately spill everything onto the floor, knowing the DeeBot will scoop it up at some point. (And I admit, I've done the same concept with whatever random debris I might be holding, rather than walk it to the trash.)

Usually I don't support having clean floors. It seems wasteful. You don't want your home to have anything unpleasant about it. But that there might be dust and dirt and debris laying around doesn't seem to actually matter, other than vacuuming it up is a standard we all generally live by. It seems similar to keeping a lawn. A lot of work for no real purpose other than just to show people you jumped thru the hoops, and this signals that you're respectable or whatever.

But with the DeeBot, now I can be the person with clean floors and also maintain my integrity.

Cleaning in general

In my experience, a lot of people are weird about cleaning. It can show up if you live in any kind of shared space environment.

My first experience with this was in college, when we lived in a "suite" of, I think, 6 different rooms and a shared common area.

I get home one night, and this one girl informs me that they were at dinner and voted on a new policy where we'll all take turns being the designated cleaner for that week. (They already had a majority, so it didn't matter how I voted.)

Besides the questionable nature of thinking my life should bend and weave based on what they talked about at dinner and how many people raised their hands.. my first thought is basically "..why?"

Keep in mind it's a campus dorm. It's setup as a "suite", but it's a dorm. Staff comes in and cleans the common room and bathroom just as they would any dorm. So the basic standards that everyone would agree we need are already being met.

So the only purpose of the weekly cleaner would be to do over the top things like dust behind the television, or pick up the clutter other people leave around.

So obviously things like "let's all agree to pick up our mess" would work better. But she wasn't grasping this and was insisting that they already had the vote and that's just how it's gonna be.

So I'm just, "nah".

(It's so cute how they wanted to be little statists, but didn't realize that it doesn't work without guns and armies behind them.)

There are probably some versions of me that would have gone along with this. (Like, if I was asked how I felt about it, rather than made to feel I had no choice.) Still, I didn't spend that much time at the suite. I wouldn't "lounge around" as much as others. So I could see where this is going. One week out of six I clean up after them, is basically how it would work.

"...no, I'm not doing that"

You guys can do it, but leave me out of the rotation. I'll just pick up after myself, and let me know if there's ever an issue. (Was my basic response.)

And she's just lost for how to respond to me. It was like she didn't realize this was possible, like there's a glitch in her perception of how things work now.

And of course they all thought I was selfish and this and that etc. #projection

Even the little wannabe tyrants that they were, they probably would have realized that you can't go out to dinner and pass a rule that everyone has to be in bed by 8 o'clock. Like whether or not you appreciate that voting just shouldn't work like that, it would just be obvious that something about what you're saying isn't right.

But when cleaning is the topic, people very easily become weird and statist.

---

At the time I didn't know anything about voluntarism and bigger philosophical concepts and how morally bankrupt most people are -- and how they can feed off and reinforce each other. And so probably a part of me wondered if I was just being strident and selfish or something.

It's just easy to wonder that when it's [everyone else] who thinks one thing and [only you] thinking another thing. But at the same time it also seemed kind of clear and obvious that they were in the wrong, so I didn't worry too much about that.

Blenders everywhere

The funniest part about that whole thing is I guess they didn't realize that I was serious that I wasn't going to be a part of the rotation. (They even bitched and moaned about it, and I thought it was settled.)

And so I came home one night and apparently there was a party. Used blenders laying around, cups everywhere. "Hmm, ok."

It's still there a day or two later. "Hmmm. Ok."

And eventually they ask me when I'm gonna clean it up.

🤣🤣🤣

And of course they didn't get the answer they were hoping for.

I was really happy about this aspect of it, because it pushed it to the point of basically a perfect illustration of why my objection was reasonable. That you should be able to throw a party and somebody else cleans it up for you. That the "weekly cleaner" would just be a tragedy of the commons sort of thing where now 5 people out of 6 have incentive to be lazy and messier than they normally would be, and worse for everyone overall.

It's my firm belief that cleaning brings out the inner statist in people.

Most people are normal.

My philosophy with cleaning is that it's not really rocket science: That you should basically clean in proportion to how much you make things dirty. (And personally I try to err hard on the side of making sure I clean a little bit more than I need to, just to be sure.)

So I do want to point out that most people, in my experience, are totally normal and have a normal attitude towards this stuff.

It's just that to whatever extent they do have an inner statist that wants to get out there, cleaning will often be how that manifests.

I guess it's like the microcosm version of climate or one of those issues where it's sooo hard for them to see how it might get done without them being busybodies about it.