Why You Should Clean Your Own Car
Why spending time taking care of what you own is a great way to feel “more”.
I have owned an SUV for over a year now, and I have never paid for a car wash. It’s true that you could get your car cleaned and vacuumed for just $10 nowadays. It’s also true that my worth as a career engineer in Silicon Valley is too high to spend an hour cleaning my own car.
Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm explained in a public lecture on September 9, 1966, known as the Modern Man and the Future a definition of modern humans’ alienation — “…(it) means that a person has lost himself and has ceased to perceive himself as the center of his activity. A person has much and uses much, but he is little…” and “…He is nothing, yet he feels big when he feels at one with the state, with production, with the company.”
What defines us today that didn’t the people before the Industrial Revolution is the Market. In short, we are made to follow and stay not two feet away from the herd. Because everything is about demand and supply, everything, including a person, bears a price based on this dynamic. Even a person has a monetary worth, and thus he becomes just an object for sale. If you disagree, bear in mind that it went as far as a CEO of a startup company publicly announce he is available for a phone call with anyone who can pay $1000 for him. And what’s more surprising was the feedback was positive. People were okay with him selling off the right to approach him in person for a grand. Simply because he knew there was a demand for his attention as a CEO of a worthy company and he exploited it. How is this different from those hoarding face masks and selling them off on the internet with 10x actual price in the face of this COVID-19 pandemic?
I’d like to think that by taking care of my own car, I’m overriding this alienation routine and establishing a connection with my belonging — one that has been reliably taking care of me and my family. By putting in the time and energy to carefully scrub her off, I had the time to appreciate her and all the work she’s done by getting my hands dirty with the dirt from her. This “getting into the arena” approach is the basis of every relationship and deep understanding of anything, person-to-person, -object, and -world.
If I’ve chosen to distance myself from the dirty deeds because it’s cheap to let someone else do them, I’ve decided to alienate myself from reality. I’d be accustomed to trade anything that would require my work just for the sake of convenience. What is next on the list? Unfortunately, for many parents, their children are.
From my observation and to my surprise, this alienation isn’t unique to a certain class of people who could effort paying to distant themselves from their chores. Many who earned less than I did were not taking care of their own chores. If they couldn’t pay to have someone take care of them, they would just let them be and forget about them. Very often we spend money on stimulants like alcohol and marijuana to temporarily displace the hollow self but fail to see how putting in the work can restore it long-term. It’s stunning how many people find pleasure in buying and using but not willing to put in the work to earn the owning part.
Instead of calculating and balancing every aspect of your life — daycare, gas, car wash, grocery, etc. against your worth and paying others to do things you deem not worth it, try taking control of the small chores and use them as routine to remind you how you’re connected to yourself and the world.
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