![]() ![]() In a lecture titled “Labor, Work, Action,” Arendt discusses the contemplative and the active life, examining what it means to act. You may know her as the brilliant political theorist who wrote the famous work “The Banality of Evil,” but before she explained the actions of totalitarian governments, she wrote brilliantly on phenomenological themes. More than any other movement or method, phenomenology seeks to study our ordinary, everyday existence as living, embodied beings in the world. I suppose if it were going to happen anywhere, it would happen in a phenomenology class. I have found many strange answers in philosophy classes, but none on so mundane and so profound a subject as making my bed. ![]() The epiphany struck, of all places, in my phenomenology class. Unless I was really accomplishing something that endured, I just didn’t think making my bed was worth it.Īlthough I can now wax quite eloquent on the futility of bedmaking, I didn’t really know why I hated making my bed until very recently (a few weeks ago, as it happens). The rewards are transient, and you have to keep working to keep reaping them. I wanted a lasting sense of accomplishment, but there is no lasting accomplishment when you make your bed. I didn’t realize at the time, but I couldn’t stand my work being undone. There is no lasting benefit to making your bed, because the benefit is made to be undone each night. Every day, over and over, you have to keep making your bed to keep reaping these rewards. You may sleep better and enjoy your room more, but this only lasts a day and then you have to do it all over again. I suppose all along I wasn’t looking for any old reason or purpose to make my bed I was looking for a very specific kind of reason.Īll those good outcomes people told me about had a problem: they only last until you inevitably sleep in your bed again. These were all good reasons to make my bed, yet I wasn’t satisfied by any of them. I was told that my room would feel more homey and comfortable if my bed was made, that I would sleep better in a made bed, and that I would accomplish more if I started off the day by making my bed. As it happens, people frequently did give me such purposes, if I only I would accept them. The actual process I didn’t mind, as long as I could think my way into some frame of mind in which the process had purpose, so that the task could gain shape, form, and direction. I wasn’t completely against the idea of making my bed (like I said, it’s a fairly innocuous task), but I never could find a compelling reason to bother. Making your bed isn’t a task it’s a way of life. Why did I feel this way? Because no matter what I did, no matter how many times I made it, I would always have to make it again. Making my bed always felt like labor lost, like pointless effort expended on a black hole of blankets. She just didn’t seem to grasp the dreadful monotony of it, the endless cycle, the futility. I never managed to clearly articulate to my mother precisely why I hated making my bed. All through my childhood, I despised making my bed. Why on earth would I hate such an innocuous task? And yet I did. You don’t have to get your hands dirty, you don’t have to exert much physical effort at all, and it only takes a few minutes. When you make a bed, you just shake out and smooth your sheets and your blanket. It’s a funny thing to hate, because making a bed really isn’t a particularly terrible task. ![]()
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