For those of us lucky enough not to have caught the coronavirus COVID-19 the last 6 weeks have been an opportunity for some much-needed spring cleaning. I have heard a number of reports through the media and from personal sources of people taking their enforced stay at home as a call to arms for rearranging their domiciles. The COVID-19 lockdown has placed all of us inside our houses and apartments for prolonged periods. I am sure that many have looked around at their homes and decided to tackle those jobs long put off. In many ways this global pandemic has been a time out from normal routine and busy lifestyles. These are the consolations of cleaning: COVID-19 style.
Changing Things Around Can Reinvigorate Us
There is only so much COVID-19 news that one can absorb per day and only so much crap that you can watch on TV (what is it with NETFLIX and the proliferation of nasty stories about drug dealing?). Sitting inside our homes and casting an eye over the interior has motivated many people to reorganise rooms. Changing things around can be some sort of replacement for a holiday from the same old same old. Our houses are in many ways a map or model of the inner workings of our minds. Therefore, a reordering of furniture and artifacts does have a concomitant effect upon our self or selves. The consolations of cleaning: COVID-19 style can reveal new things about you. My late mother, who was only about 152cm tall would regularly rearrange the interiors of living rooms, including large 3-seater sofas, entirely on her own. I would come home from school and experience an underlying confusion about whether I was in the right house.
You Are a Collection of Beliefs, Attitudes, Memories & Feelings
Hands up who thinks of their self as a collection of beliefs, behaviours, principles, attitudes, memories, feelings, traits and predispositions? When you think about your identity do you think in the singular or in the plural? Are you, perhaps, a single outer identity, which contains a bunch of the above stuff? We do, I think, consider ourselves to be simpler entities than we truly are. This comes about because we are forced to by society’s demands upon us. We are endlessly defining our identities via online forms in this age of computerised digital records. If you remember that computers are essentially about recording data, you will realise that technology has turned us all into compulsive unpaid digital data entry operatives.
Earnest current affair programmes warn us of the dangers of giving away all of our personal data to corporate entities like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple and their brethren. One day there may well be a reckoning on this score, and we will all come off second best I am sure. Yuval Noah Harari has repeatedly pointed out that we are already hacked human beings and that this will only intensify in the future. Fitbit watches are only the beginning, as the digital realm interacts with the biological data of Homo sapiens. Harari tells us that we will all be relying on apps and their algorithms to ascertain the truth about our likes and dislikes and who we are. Frightening dystopian 1984 nightmares or merely our modern reality?
I invite you to share your experiences of this COVID-19 lockdown and whether you have taken the opportunity to rearrange your house or apartment. How do you feel after your time-out? Are you the same person who entered this crisis or have parts of you been changed by the experience? What are the consolations of cleaning: COVID-19 style?