How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing

Davis emphasizes that care tasks, such as cleaning, organizing, and maintaining a household, are morally neutral activities. She explains that morality involves the goodness or badness of one’s character and the rightness or wrongness of decisions. However, care tasks do not fall into this category and should not be linked to one’s moral worth.

She highlights the harmful impact of viewing care tasks through a moral lens, where the motivation to complete these tasks often stems from a place of shame. When people feel that their worth is tied to the state of their home, they may feel like failures when their environment is messy or disorganized. This shame can extend to how they view rest, leaving them feeling undeserving of relaxation if there are still tasks left undone.

Davis introduces the concept of showing kindness to your future self as a way to approach care tasks. She shares a personal story about how she started cleaning the kitchen the night before it was her husband’s turn to wake up early with their children. This act was not out of obligation but to make his morning easier. Davis realized that she deserved the same kindness and began to see nighttime preparations as a way to ease her own mornings.