On Puttering

I wanted to tell you how much I like doing the dishes. Not that I do them particularly often or especially well. In fact there is a sink full of dirty dishes in my periphery as I write this. No, I just wanted you to understand why I like doing the dishes. It’s well established that the things we spend most of our lives doing are – generally speaking – the least recorded or reflected upon. This is particularly true of the banalities that fill the valleys between the more prominent features of our daily topography. Our jobs, hobbies, organizational affiliations, and other modest successes form the ridgeline of our experience, and the external world identifies us by that distant contour. An introduction at a party or a social media profile can tell you this person is “a lawyer who fishes and attends church”, or that person is “a kindergarten teacher who knits and supports such-and-such social agenda”. With this rough outline in place, we giddily color in the rest of the picture using our personal crayon box of experience, prejudice, desire and jealousy. So, if we are known at all, we are known only vaguely by these external silhouettes, and almost no attention is paid to the small moments that fill the vast expanse of our internal landscape. To say it another way, nobody ever asks whether you like doing the dishes. 

Take for example that these party introductions never begin with an accounting for recent chores accomplished. Did the person in question do the dishes or mow the lawn? And what level of competency, consistency, and good cheer did they bring to these activities? When you consider how many relationships have been ruined or sustained by these humble activities, such questions are arguably the most practical of opening salvos. In this context, it’s genuinely remarkable that “chore chat” is relegated to the same abysmal conversational status as: traffic talk, the description of minor maladies, Peloton routines, and celebrity-endorsed diets. Like sex and table manners, chores are something we rarely discuss but care about deeply. To illustrate the point, consider our (American) obsession with immediately identifying how a new acquaintance makes a living. And why? Do we really care whether he is a dermatologist or an attorney? I mean, nobody has ever complained about their neighbor’s compulsive doctoring – “eight hours a day he’s out in the yard with that f-ing stethoscope”. But ask a table at any suburban dinner party how they feel about their neighbor’s leaf blower situation, and you are likely to stir up some intense emotions. And, again, how many cliches of relationship destruction are connected to these same simple acts? The roommate who never does the dishes, the spouse who never puts the laundry in the hamper, the coworker who abandons moldy containers in the office refrigerator. The list of offenders is long, and we could achieve a near-universal agreement on Code of Hammurabi-level punishment for these people. 

What’s more, this particular type of task – the everyday, unobserved, autopiloted task – has a lifespan parallel with ours, they evolve with us as we age. Those mandated chores of childhood become a harried necessity of busy midlife and – finally – a comfortable meditation for the unrushed evenings and weekends of later years. But this emotional evolution does not apply to all of our mundane chores, only to the lowest, most mindlessly mundane end of the spectrum. Understanding how this works requires a more specific taxonomy of the types of work we do. For the modern worker – especially those of us whose primary work products are saved as digital files – we can imagine the entirety of our labors as a four-tiered ziggurat. The pinnacle of our work is likely the professional execution of our expertise. This expertise is often the culmination of years of expensive education. Through this work – with any luck – we receive remuneration (if not renown or satisfaction). Slightly below this level, through the fortune of talent or the force of practice, we may develop a craft. Woodwork, baking, sewing: these are the ancient jobs of our ancestors which we approach with lower stakes, better tools and – generally – less skill. No doubt the physicality of these crafts provide a tangible pleasure only weakly imitated in the simulacra of our digital user interfaces. But, at the same time, these crafts are not always a relief from our daily grind. They require mental effort, following directions, or – heaven forbid – math. They are best approached on a Sunday morning with a fresh mind and a light schedule. Below this level lies tinkering, the fumbling and fiddling with mass-produced objects that occupy so much of our living environment. Hanging a curtain rod on drywall anchors, rotating the tiny hex wrenches of prefab furniture, disassembling a robot vacuums to remove pet hair; these tasks often feature late-night obscene mutterings aimed at multilingual axonometric engineering diagrams. Finally, the very base of the chore pyramid is made up of autonomous puttering. Sweeping, vacuuming, weeding a garden bed, folding and ironing, washing and drying. These are the tasks best accomplished with a podcast or a record running in the background. 

Office work, crafting, tinkering, puttering; together these four categories of choredom occupy the majority of waking life for the modern adult. But puttering – alone amongst the four – seems relegated to a lower caste, unseen, unmentioned, unliked (at least on social media). Think about your (online) friends with their LinkedIn updates on employment anniversaries (expertise), their Instagram pics of sourdough bread (crafting), and their Facebook essays on home redecorating (tinkering). Where are the pictures of satisfyingly full dustpans, of garbage cans neatly arranged at the curb, of fragrant and freshly mowed lawn, of hot steam emanating from a carefully organized dishwasher? Where is the on-line puttering? Like children after a certain age, the images of puttering are expurgated from social media via some universally-understood self-censoring mechanism. And this is truly sad when you consider how it provides a unique sense of – what is the word? – mindless-activity-joy, sweet-relief-from-thinking-tasking, satisfaction-of-doing-without-consideration… at any rate, it’s a German word. 

Perhaps this notable absence is due to puttering’s association with drudgery and the associated snobbery of the bourgeois class. Puttering does not imply status and is therefore a poor candidate for a status update.

But when we sweep puttering under the rug we ignore a deep reservoir for colloquial language… “They mopped the floor with her and hung her out to dry. She reaped what she sowed, and now she was all wrung out. She started from scratch, it was a clean slate. Now she’s back on top and milking it for all it’s worth…” As something we experience universally, regularly, and bodily, these daily chores provide a particularly sticky material for metaphor. This common and visceral nature of puttering makes it a loaded subject for the visual arts. The pure everydayness of all that bathing, washing, chopping, darning, hoeing and seeding creates a sentimentality for the ordinary. This is a strong contrast from the portrait-based art of patronage. The anonymous peasant, shepherd and maid are avatars for the simple, the rustic, the uncomplicated. Like the Garden of Eden, putterning – at its most desirable – represents a virgin land, untouched by the complications of group emails

And this is the profound attraction of puttering, it’s pure unconsideredness. That feeling of truly, finally, turning off your brain and plunging your hands into a sink full of warm, soapy water. In that moment – without thinking about it – you know two things simultaneously: first you know that this task will require absolutely no thinking from you, and second you know that nobody else in the entire world is remotely interested in what you are about to do. Washing the dishes does not inspire FOMO, YOLO or LMAO. It is nothing. This final observation leaves me deeply conflicted. On the one hand, I think this is the moment to embrace puttering. It is endlessly fascinating, with infinite niches and subgenres each containing physical, phenomenological, tactile, material aspects as well as issues of gender, class, culture, race and history. It is a cornucopia filled with cornucopii, a fractal replicating its intricacy at every scale of perception, a Zen Koan so simple it becomes profound. From a practical perspective, a true embrace of puttering culture would be a tremendous job-making program. Imagine the potential for influencers, TV product inventors, mindfulness gurus, and doctoral students. On the other hand, shining the klieg light of the contemporary hive-mind on this topic seems like a mortal violation of anthropological ethics – like the entire crew of the Star Trek Enterprise beaming down to a stone age civilization for a dance party. It’s going to mess things up. I don’t know about you, but I can’t live in a world with sexy ironic dusting Tik Tok memes. So let’s agree to forget about it. Sink back into the dreamy, opiated luxury of whatever menial task you were enjoying. Enjoy the weekend/evening/early morning.