Man or woman, young or old, stay at home or working, married or single, living in a family or all by oneself, everyone must know how to do housework. Housework is a genre which encompasses a wide range of diverse, time consuming, focus dissolving multilayered chores. These span tasks like making the bed to cooking breakfast, arranging books, papers, bags and clothes, cooking to washing, sweeping, cleaning and dusting, man management to gadget maintenance, payment of bills and salaries, planning for savings and arranging for spending, the taxes and insurances and a host of other things. Taken together, the list can be formidable. If one was to list out the tasks under housework that we are to do each day, then it would be clear that we are required no less than a good four hours, a lot of sweat and sheer exhaustion to finish these. Yet, such jobs need to be attended to and done.

Housework is important only because our homes are the spaces which give us that firm Archimedian spot from which we can move the world. Thus, the house must be built on solid grounds. It is the space from which we propel ourselves to conquer the outer world; it is our greenroom in which we, as social actors prepare to face the audience. The better one is at housework, the better are the prospects of one’s life in the workspace. A good career can only be supported by an organized home.

Housework, raised into artistry in the early days of political liberalism came under attack with the rise of feminism, on one hand and communism and decolonialism on the other. In all the above mentioned the inner space becomes more truthful than the outer space; humans defy the claims of the wider world, the mainstream and cling on to their private spaces, like crabs in a well pulling one another back from climbing out. The entire politics of existence is then to protect this inner space from invasions from the world outside as well as against impulses of humans to graduate out of the closed space towards larger participation. Paradoxically, the neglect of housework belongs to this zone of protection of the inner spaces.

Since housework slips into a protected space, it is no longer looked upon as being of service to anything other than itself. Hence, to saddle woman to housework is read by them as being incapable of straddling that space. Housework then starts to get looked upon by women as conspiracies of patriarchy for demeaning them. It was indeed once a division of labour between women and men, in which the former was supposed to find her world; in the later days of liberation, women learnt to regard housework as a patriarchal conspiracy and so much conflict is kicked off over sharing of housework. Housework becomes a burden for those who are not trained in it; that housework is a patriarchal norm is a social construct, that housework must be done well is a technical need. Should we dissociate patriarchal ideas from housework and purely treat it as a technical need, we will free ourselves of social domination and instead find a sense of liberation in completing tasks.

The social media is agog with advertisements of adult ADHD in which one is shown with heaps of unfolded clothes lying strewn all over the room; this is nothing but the outcome of one not adept at the science, craft and art of housework. The lack of knowledge of housework leads to ADHD, this is the key takeaway from the story. Housework must be done, not as something, as a phenomenon striated with structures of domination but as a matter of fact, task to be done for that is the steppingstone for organizing the rest of the day.

The inner collapse of the inner spaces that is a property of politics of post coloniality, post modernity, post feminism, post patriarchy, post structural and indeed post capitalism, in which suspicions of the outer world withdraws people into inner spaces which are hermetically sealed from the outside world. The space of the house, spaces inside institutions, offices and other places of work or even leisure become protected zones, to be protected against any demands upon them and responding to any demands within them towards progress or improvement. Such mentalities give rise to the frog in the well attitude in which the inhabitants are veering themselves away from reality. Any discourse that refuses to engage with reality traps itself into sets of beliefs and notions, loses rationality and sinks the human power of reason.

Reason moves send; reason understands facts in themselves to discover a whole new set of facts that extends the horizons of human understanding. Housework needs to be treated as a thing that can extend the human towards the world, free her of anxiety and attention deficiency and thus raise productivity of societies and bring peace and calm to the self.

The inability to do housework is the basic reason for the ADHD syndrome, it is the foundation for procrastination, of letting go of command over one’s everyday life; few alcoholics or drug abusers are found who can do household tasks with elegance. The lazy husband who lurks about shirking work is the guy who has never been trained in housework. The angry and complaining wife is the one who is inept at housework. Marriages break fundamentally because of the lack of acumen of housework. When I just started reading story books in school, I read a story by Enid Blyton about a lazy pixie who picks up a shoe that pinches him till he has done his housework. This pixie used to be peevish and sour, cynical and rude to the world and people avoided him. As a result, he became lonely and desolate. But as soon as he, harassed by the shoe that pinched whenever the pixie relented, became neat and organized, he became a changed person and his social relations improved remarkably. The story had a deep impact upon me and since then, I started to see carefully whether a grip over household chores made a person different from the ones less capable of attending to washing clothes, cooking, arranging papers and so on. On the face of things, I have always been right. Those who are attentive to home tasks live longer, stay fitter, healthier and happier.

There is definitely a scientific explanation behind this and which is that tasks well completed leaves the brain free of anxiety; it is like a post work out stage in which both the body and mind having engaged, attended, worked at and completed tasks are now in the physical mode to do more and more work.