On Hausarbeit

How much time do we spend on doing housework over a lifetime? (A very mundane subject, I'm aware - but the general concept of work / labour is something that I have become very interested in lately)

Instead of going down the good ol' philosophers' route of asking "What is housework", I start by asking a similar but relevant question - what counts as housework?

We can draw a distinction between the more tedious type of housework (e.g. doing the dishes, taking out the laundry, wiping down surfaces, vacuuming) and the less tedious type (e.g. cooking, tidying and arranging stuff, doing the weekly grocery run). A general rule-of-thumb is that we're far more likely to enjoy the latter but loathe the former type of work.

For the sake of comprehensiveness, one may even wish include what one might call 'digital housework': organising/clearing personal emails, deleting useless files on your Desktop, backing up phone data, or calculating your monthly expenditure. But for the sake of simplicity, let's leave these complications aside for now; let's assume we're only concerned with the more tedious type.

Assuming we spend an average of 7 hours a week in total - one hour every day - then that is equivalent to 365 hours a year.

Assuming a lifespan of 90 years, and taking 20 years off for the beginning and end years where (for those born lucky) we may expect others to do the housework for us, we will be spending 25,550 hours throughout our whole life - equivalent to 1064 days or 34.9 months - on tasks like this. Using the same base of 90 as our lifespan, housework on its own would take up 3% of it. Yes - 3 per cent - that's a lot, since it is an activity many of us would like to rid ourselves of.

Perhaps to some of us, the idea that housework is both time-consuming and a displeasure is neither a surprise nor something worthy of concern. One might say that this idea isn't worthy of concern since - very well yes, 3 per cent, but what can we do about it? It is almost impossible to avoid housework, one might argue, as avoiding housework would result in either or the conjunction of the following situations:

• it is immoral (leaving the work for someone else to do it instead)
• it is expensive (paying someone else to do the work)
• deterioration of living standard, with likely subsequent impacts on your psychological and physical health  

It is not unknown in history that technological innovations and streamlined work methods can significantly reduce housework volume, most notably the invention of the washing machine and well-known principles such as 'soak your dishes before rinsing'. The washing machine, the dishwasher and vacuum cleaners etc., have in particular contributed to the liberation of women from their traditional domestic roles and introduced the concept of leisure time to the masses (hitherto only familiar to the well-off and the nobility).

From our perspective as individuals, however, these innovations come neither easy nor often; even if you are a particularly bright engineer, the time and effort you are investing to produce a mechanism for reducing housework itself incurs an opportunity cost. One might also suggest that we have reached such a stage in domestic technological innovation that we are already faced with diminishing returns to scale in the time-savings that we can get with household gadgets.

Taking on the two assumptions that housework is ineliminable and essentially painful, I have a non-ground-breaking two-part solution to the ancient problem of there is too much housework and I hate doing it:

1. Understand the other aspects of housework, such that any work is not seen purely as a means to an end, but an end in itself. For instance, cleaning could be understood as an activity which on its own strengthens discipline and one's identity as a self-reliant un-materialistic individual. Buddhist monks and ascetics are generally inclined to view tedious work in such light.
   
2. Embrace the idea that housework is an ideal multi-task activity for the mind and body. As the body works, the mind reflects, imagines, dreams and philosophises. If one struggles with spontaneously coming up with mental material, listen to podcasts and music and allow your mind to travel and wander, as your body carries out the routine.

One can only hope that this makes the 3 per cent of our lives slightly less meaningless in our pursuit of meaning in what we tragically deny as our meaningless lives.

...

...but what of those who do housework as work?