Finding Fun in the Mundane
I hate working on chores. You know, sweeping the floor, doing the laundry, and washing the dishes. They are not difficult tasks by any means, but just the thought of having to do them is unpleasant to have. It is not rare for me to find excuses to procrastinate and not do said chores immediately.
But why do I hate doing chores in the first place? Sure, I may not be accustomed to doing them from an early age, which is an absolute privilege on my part. But they’re not hard to do, and they don’t even take much of my time if I put my mind to it.
The best hypothesis I have is simply because doing them is not “fun”.
You know, like how we never needed that motivation boost to play video games or watch Netflix at night. The same way we tend to gravitate towards things that bring us joy without having to stop for a moment and think, “Damn, I need to get this done.”
This might seem all too obvious for most people. And indeed, when the realization dawned upon me, I was also baffled. But knowing something obvious, and having the essence of that obvious thing ingrained into your cognitive are two very different things.
No sooner after I made a conscious attempt to make my chores more “fun”, I started to tolerate them better. I remember watching Ali Abdaal’s video on Youtube, where he talked about the “fun factor” being one of the most important things about productivity. I wondered for a moment if he, too, at some point felt as stupid as I did, realizing something so obvious that we had always known, but never truly understood.
How did I add “fun” into my daily chores, you might ask? I started listening to audiobooks. Now I’ve never been a huge fan of listening to audiobooks. I would much prefer reading a paperback copy of a really good story on the couch every evening, a cup of piping hot chamomile tea by my side.
But I don’t always have spare time in the evening. And even if I do, brewing a cup of chamomile tea in itself sometimes felt like too much of a chore after a full day’s worth of work. Plus, I don’t have a dedicated couch or nook or anything in my 12 sqm dorm room. I soon learned that if you are only able to do something if all the stars are aligned and all the conditions and prerequisites match your expectations, then you might as well not do that something at all.
So I started listening to audiobooks while I’m doing the mundane chores. Naturally, my brain paid more attention to the narratives of the story I listened to. The chores I do are not that difficult, to begin with — I could pretty much wash the dishes without thinking, after all. Having something else it could focus on, my mind stopped sending complaints about doing a specific chore, and instead consumed the audiobooks patiently.
If listening to my mind complaining about doing the chores feels like watching an unpleasant news program on the TV, listening to audiobooks while I am doing said chores feel like switching off the TV and playing a piece of instrumental music.
After all, listening to fiction in itself is akin to listening to music, in the first place. I listen to the inflection of the words, the melody each sentence gives and the layer of harmony it adds to the narrative. Before long, I am sucked into the story, and I finished doing all my chores without actually feeling like I had done anything.
I’m not saying that everyone should find comfort and solution in listening to audiobooks (although I would encourage everyone to try it). But be it listening to audiobooks, music, podcast, or anything. Finding fun in the mundane is a surefire way to end the mundanity — no matter how painfully obvious it may sounds.
