I am oddly proud of this click-bait-y headline, but I won’t bury the lede: It’s chores.
Wait, wait, here me out! This is something I have stringently tested, a hypothesis I wanted to prove wrong, desperately, so I have done my due diligence, and the conclusion keeps repeating as valid: Chores make you happy.
Your mind is at its most peaceful when you are in motion. Your thoughts are most content when you know what you’re doing, when instructions are clear. Your body releases endorphins when you exercise. You are your most fulfilled when you get to exercise creativity and make things. All of these are part of doing daily chores.
“Marie,” you say, exasperated, “I know you are a parent now, must you?”
I promise I came to this conclusion long before I became a parent. I was actually still a teenager, fresh from a lecture from my dad about the importance of chores, “Chores aren’t some fifteen minutes you have to get through! Chores are your life. This is life. Doing chores.”
It sounded bleak, but as I cleaned my room, I realized I felt better than I had all week, and that good feeling lasted longer than the good feeling I’d have gotten from a nap or a half hour episode of The Transformers. What Dad meant was I didn’t stop daydreaming, I didn’t stop LIVING because I was doing work. This was another part of my life and could be enjoyable.
“Ah ha! But, having a bunch of chores to do makes me miserable!”
Yes, the not-done chores are a mental weight, a misery. Having too much for your limited time to do? Worse. Too many chores and your life isn’t your own, you resent them. They take up mental space they shouldn’t so you feel like you’re doing them all day instead of the fifteen minutes you actually spend on the dishes and wiping the counter. (The dark side of Dad’s quote.) I admit, this was my experience with chores most of my life, before I married a man who was tidier than me and he took over the bulk of the work.
(I also suffered from untreated depression, which became treated depression during this Personal Journey, so when I talk about level of happiness, I’m talking about an increase in the achievable level of happiness, which thank Gort is higher and more sustainable now. Better living through chemistry.)
I found that more free time didn’t make me happier. I festered under the weight of Not Getting Enough Done with it. Part of that was the I’ve Got All Day problem — if you have all the time in the world to do something, there’s no reason to start it, and so after a whole day of “after this game of minesweeper” you find you have done nothing, and you have to add self-loathing to the list of things making you miserable.
I realized recently that on the most stressful days of my life – when all my work projects seemed to be going backward and the writing wasn’t coming, the happiest I felt was doing my morning chores. For one half-hour a day, I knew exactly what I was doing. I was brushing my teeth, getting dressed, making tea, and packing my bag for work.
First, I had to give myself credit for getting these things done. You do something every day and it becomes invisible. I had to say “Hey! Today I got to work on time! I made tea!” Then, fresh on endorphins, I added more chores to my morning. I got a dog who needed daily morning walks and her food bowl filled. I started keeping plants alive.
The creativity angle? I choose a different route every morning for the dog. I trim and move the plants.
I started making the bed every morning. I used to just let it be a pile of blankets and spread them out as I was settling down. It’s weird how much happier I am to take that minute and make the bed. And I arrange our stuffed animals and pillows aesthetically, usually so the two teddy bears look like they are cuddling. It starts the day good.
And true happiness comes from completing tasks, checking things off.
Don’t rob yourself of that.
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