Necessary Equals Valuable

Chapter 26

This post is a chapter of the book It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself: Housekeeping In Spite Of It All by Hanne Blank Boyd.

Click here for the full table of contents.

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Things that are necessary are valuable. We need them so they’re worth something to us. The value is directly related to the degree to which they’re needed.

Despite what you may have been taught or absorbed from the culture you live in about household labor being trivial or beneath your notice, that’s not true. What is necessary can’t actually be either. But necessary things are sometimes denigrated. People talk shit about them, as if by saying those things are stupid or disgusting or meaningless or bad then they won’t mean as much. Sometimes we feel like talking trash about stuff we need makes it easier for us to cope if we can’t get what we need or want.

Photo by Stéphan Valentin on Unsplash

Resenting the fact that we need things doesn’t make us need them less, though. Sometimes we really can screw ourselves over when we get caught up in the desire to prove to ourselves that we don’t really need the things we do.

My father was an intelligent man who worked as a college professor. He lived in a house that was never really clean or well-maintained and got progressively worse over many years until it was ultimately condemned by the city because it had become not just squalid but actively dangerous. He resented the necessity of creating a functional, clean living space as a point of pride, explaining whenever the topic arose that housework was stupid, pointless, and something only superficial bourgeois uptight assholes cared about. Liberated, educated, cool, successful people knew better than to waste their time on that kind of petty, “small-minded housewife bullshit.”

When I look at that in the rear view mirror, what I can say about it is that people tell themselves a lot of things to make themselves feel good about themselves, and some of the things they tell themselves are lies. I suppose it made my father feel superior to take the stance he did. He could tell himself he was better than all those dupes and squares and losers who wasted their time on dumbass shit like washing floors, making sure the pantry wasn’t infested by mealworms and roaches, or fixing the leak where raw sewage from the upstairs toilet was slowly oozing into the wall. But by the time the city condemns your house because it isn’t safe for human habitation -- a process that takes several years and lots of complaints from your neighbors and comes with multiple warnings and opportunities to address the problem because in general, city governments would prefer to not have to deal with your squalid deathtrap either -- I’d say you left any claim to actual superiority behind you a long time ago.

I can also tell you that liberated, educated, cool, successful people need living environments that are clean and safe and functional because human beings need living spaces that are clean and safe and functional.

Fortune 500 CEOs need clean underpants and sheets and towels just as much as grade school janitors need clean underpants and sheets and towels. Beyoncé needs to be able to have nutritious food to eat and be able to eat it off of clean plates in a place that isn’t filthy and bug-infested, just like you and your next-door neighbor and her sister-in-law and their favorite bartender at the place where they go once a week to play bingo.

A safe, functional space to live in is a human necessity.