Binding Beauty of Chores

By Grady Ward

December 18, 2024

I was one of twelve people huddled around a wood stove in the middle of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains in the depths of winter, desperately waiting for a pot of snow to melt.

We'd had a hard day trudging up to Section House, a rough-hewn cabin from the 1800s at the top of Boreas Pass, 12,000 feet above sea level. The ascent had gone well despite some broken ski bindings, a few tears, and mild altitude sickness. Clear skies and strong sun made the winter feel less harsh, and we arrived in good spirits just in time for the sunset. But now it was dark, and I could feel the group's concern rising like a tide — waves lapping imperceptibly higher and higher — as the pot full of snow remained stubbornly solid, defying the roaring fire below it.

I felt responsible. I had convinced friends and family to fly across the country. I coordinated food, transportation, gear, and a hasty Zoom call. Foolishly, I was the one who thought two liters of water per person would be enough. But it wasn't, and now we were parched and stumbling over the rough floor from lack of water and too little oxygen.

The raucous conversation we'd had on the sunny ascent had simmered down to two topics of muted discussion: whether drinking the alcohol we'd brought would alleviate or worsen our dehydration, and whether we should prioritize the water (when it came) for our parched lips or for the food we still needed to prepare.

Deprived of access to the comforts of modern life, I was struck by how reliant I suddenly was on these close friends, and how uncommon that is.

Modern Forces of Abundance and Distance

Automation: replaced, scaled, unseen

Nowhere is the distance that technology creates between people clearer than in the case of automation: the process by which technological systems scale the effectiveness of human labor, or replace it outright. Our homes are filled with gadgets that enable us to be more comfortable with less effort. Small personal automations like thermostats, dishwashers, furnaces, and robot vacuums are ubiquitous, each increasing physical comfort through diminishing human effort.

Automation in the household changes the relational dynamics of the people that live there. Because it reduces the amount of labor needed to make a home comfortable, it makes it easier to live alone, and reduces the number of ways that cohabitants need to cooperate. When you can't rely on a machine to do the dishes, you have to become closer to your roommates, through collaboration, conflict, or both.

But automation facilitates our comfort far beyond our control or view. Nowhere is this more dramatic than in food systems, where the physical activities of machines have steadily augmented and replaced human labor. This has enabled an explosion in the abundance of calories and flavor, but done so through complex supply chains that diminish the need for, and proximity of, human labor. A few generations ago, most people ate food that they and their community had cultivated, prepared, and served. Today, through mechanization at every step, including production, packaging, and delivery, our food is indirectly impacted by more people than ever, but we know a decreasing number of them.

Modern comfort and abundance are enabled through three forces: automation, professionalization, and collectivization. The good these forces produce comes with side effects. As we outsource more to markets, governments, and machines, we become less reliant on the folks in our proximity for our comfort. These are the same people who have historically given us a sense of purpose and belonging. This trend weakens interpersonal and social bonds, which have historically been strengthened by necessity. A group sourcing water from the land is a small kind of time travel: back to a time when existence required constant struggle, only eased through the strength of small communities. Melting snow for drinking water is swimming backward through the strong and accelerating current of progress: it's slow, but it helps us see the water, and where we're headed.

These three forces –– automation, professionalization, and collectivization –– take needs that used to be met through small cooperative groups and meet them through impersonal, opaque mechanisms. Two centuries ago, folks relied on their kin and the people in their community that were physically proximate to sustain meager material comfort. Necessity was the cement that kept communities bound together. But modernity increasingly makes it possible for people to live lives that are more and more comfortable with less and less reliance on, or even interaction with, known others. The same systems that provide abundance in increasing volumes are diminishing interpersonal reliance as they do so.

This is important because interpersonal service feels like the glue of human relationships and communities. Giving and receiving help, and performing routine chores is something that brings people together. Friendships are differentiated from acquaintances in part by whether or not the participants are comfortable asking each other for things, and whether they feel comfortable giving it. Communities that form around and serve a need — whether it's a physical, economic, or spiritual need — are more persistent, strengthened by the necessity that attracts people together.

As a simple example, consider how people who live in adjacent dwellings become neighbors. Neighbors make small requests (can you look out for a package, take in the cans while we’re away, hold a ladder) and give small offerings (alert to an open garage, shoveling the sidewalk, walking a dog) to one another. These actions form a network of communal care that slightly inconveniences every individual, while constructing a whole — a neighborhood — that is stronger and more resilient than the components considered individually. Relationships, friendships, communities, roommates, and even families are forged through this same force: service is the key binding agent in human relationships.

Service and chores bind us to other people because they're actions through which we communicate vulnerability, appreciation, and belonging. When we ask others for help, we are expressing vulnerability, and we communicate that we consider ourselves to be part of the same group. We affirm that belonging when we serve others, and we explicitly prioritize the needs and wants of those others.

In contrast, the forces that enable modern life (automation, specialization, and collectivization) meet our needs through impersonal means. In doing so, they remove the possibility of the personal connections that used to be forged through service.

Necessity is the Mother of Connection

Back in the hut, eventually, the heat from the logs began to melt the snow in the pot, and water began to trickle out of the spigot at the base. At first it was painfully slow. The first few ounces that dripped out were filtered and distributed to a waiting line of empty bottles, then quickly drained into thirsty mouths. But as it started to flow faster we reanimated like a sponge — the group's rigid tension transformed to eager action.

In addition to the water assembly line (collecting snow, keeping the fire roaring, filtering melt-water, and filling water bottles), newly invigorated folks tackled newly possible tasks: splitting wood for kindling, cooking dinner, and cleaning dishes. Over a few hours we worked to refill our hierarchy of needs — each person finding something useful to do, or relaxing and chatting when there was no task to be found. We established order without any orders, cooperation without coordination. Though we'd been cold, thirsty, hungry, and nervous only hours before, that night we got into sleeping bags in a warm house, with bellies full of pasta and alcohol, jovial conversation ringing in our ears, and jugs brimming with filtered water scattered throughout the hut, more snow melting over a roaring fire.

In the middle of the night I put a log on the fire on the way to the outhouse, but I didn't realize until the morning came –– and I woke up to the surprise of a comfortable temperature –– that I was only one of many to do so.

Water and Interdependence

Hi, I'm Grady Ward, a software engineer living in Colorado. I spend my spare time outside, reading, or tinkering with wood, code and plastic. Projects, essays, poems and the fastest algorithm for Bananagrams at https://grady.dev.

We welcome Letters to the Editor. Send your thoughts, comments, and responses to jeanluc@thehartandthecur.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

3,143 Pieces of America

An interview with Danny Zimny-Schmitt

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Should I Bring Wine to a Playdate?

By Carrie Radford

Corazones

By Jude DeLorca

The Hart & The Cur

We weren't the first people to be thirsty in log cabins in the West –– the history of the American West is fundamentally shaped by the scarcity of water (I heartily recommend two great books on the subject: Cadillac Desert and Rivers of Empire). As American farmsteads creeped further westward, naturally available water became an increasing constraint on expansion. Uncommonly wet years on the Great Plains in the 1870s and 1880s raised false hope for farming in the West, but by the time many settlers arrived, water was scarce, and folks found themselves barely scraping out a living on the land they hoped would make them rich.

For the settlers that stayed, collective solutions met the needs that nature did not. Eventually, large scale reclamation projects financed by the federal government captured and distributed water at massive scale. The West as it exists today is only possible because of massive collective action that supported settlement of the terrain unthinkable by individuals alone. Yet, the West remains a symbol of the American dogma of self-sufficiency.

Our culture venerates the independence of the cowboy, the migrant, the pioneer, and the tycoon: self-sufficient mavericks that made something from nothing, without reliance on government or others. The West is the setting for many of these narratives - a rugged landscape only tamed by great individual effort. However, this is a cultural fiction, the real history of the West and its settlement is one of deep reliance — on water systems, on rail lines, on imports, on close-knit communities. This cultural reverence for independence has led us to remember it in places it never existed, and it is this same reverence that has blinded us from recognizing how our social ties are weakening, and how dire a problem that is.

Everywhere you look, people are choosing relationships that are less demanding, and thus, weaker. Families are becoming more geographically fragmented, in part because a comfortable life can be achieved without reliance on kin. Social and religious organizations have dwindling membership, as the needs for belonging and ritual they meet are increasingly served through activities that demand less of their participants. Informal patterns of anonymous interdependence (like hitchhiking and free-range parenting) are now seen as reckless. The vitality of neighborhoods is dwindling as folks put down shallow roots. Across America people are un-mooring themselves from their families and communities –– a slow motion disintegration of the social fabric.

All these declines stem from a lack of necessity. More and more of our material comfort can be satisfied by technical marvels, market mechanisms, and government systems. Today, it’s nearly possible to achieve a comfortable life without ever offering unpaid value directly to others, or receiving unaccounted value directly from them. Automation, professionalization, and collectivization enable new levels of material comfort through impersonal means, without imposition or extension. But the imposition and extension built up interpersonal bonds –– atomized comforts are devoid of the nourishment of human connection. We’ve traded interpersonal dependence for impersonal abundance.

There is a profound emptiness in abundance achieved in isolation. Loneliness isn't merely a lack of stimulus (boredom), contact (isolation), or purpose (malaise) –– instead, loneliness involves being proximate to others yet feeling disconnected from them. We yearn to be useful, to have an impact, but the systems of modern life erode our power to help others and change our environment. The complexity of today's world increases the emotional distance between people, and our lives are increasingly governed by systems that are often beyond any one person's understanding, ability to fix, or capacity to change. How can we rebuild connection within systems where we're of less use to one another?

Creative kindness, not reactionary imposition

While adversity makes communities stronger, the answer to this modern problem isn't to reintroduce struggle into our lives. I don't advocate anyone returning to the 1800s, though I found the service and cooperation of Section House to be refreshing.

Rather, as automation, specialization, and collectivization fulfill more of our physical needs, we must invent or discover new acts of service, rather than trying to reclaim challenges from the forces that obviate them.

The services we can perform for each other are not memorialized in a fixed list. Instead, our capacity to support each other can adapt to the time and place that we live, and it can evolve to better reflect the needs of a modern life shaped by new challenges.

Parents can rotate childcare. Writers can form accountability groups. Neighbors can create tool registries and libraries. Researchers can organize study sections. Friends can offer to help each other with hard emotions. Students can join study sessions. Colleagues can swap shifts. A skier can take their friends' kids skiing. Two people can share housework. Workers can form unions. Peer groups can plan regular hangouts. People can throw surprise parties for each other. Someone can play matchmaker for their friends. An audiophile can share their recommendations. One friend can help another with their resume, while another helps find job openings, and yet another assists with practice interviews. We can all share food. We can all share space. We can all share recommendations. We can all share care. We can all listen.

We all have unmet needs. The key is identifying them in ourselves and in others, and experimenting with trying out new forms of support and reliance. This approach requires creativity, patience, and humility, but it's evergreen. In every time and in every place, people can make each other's lives richer.

Even as we enjoy the rising tide of impersonal abundance, we must find the creativity and vulnerability to try new ways of helping each other. The answer to "what do we owe to each other" may be different for every time, place, and person, but I am convinced that that debt is the source of lasting value.

I wrote the short version of this piece shortly after the trip that inspired it. Since then, though I’ve stayed close to tap water, I’ve experimented with creative service and I’ve learned a few lessons along the way.

Strive for reciprocal exchange: For most people, reciprocal exchange is more welcome than gifts. Soup-swaps, where you make plans to trade your excess weekend cooking with a friend, are more fun and connecting than dropping off leftovers. The exchange provides variety and unlocks motivation that a simple gift wouldn’t.
Fill a real need: You can’t help out where someone is content. I offered to dog-sit for free for a friend, but she dismissed the possibility because she adores her dog-sitter. For an action to serve, it needs to fill a real need, from the perspective of the recipient.
Digital doesn't cut it: Technology is a poor conduit for interpersonal connection. While digital interfaces are great for sustaining relationships over distance and time, I've found they are not strong conduits for expanding the richness and depth of relationships.
Be bored and brilliant: I've come to recognize that distraction is anathema to interpersonal connection. Traveling my city without earbuds has given me the chance to take family photos for innumerable tourists, help a woman find the nearest hospital, and hear a friend's exclamations when he saw me from a block away. You can't be open to what your ears cannot hear (metaphorically and physically).
Find and build third spaces: I've learned to appreciate communal space. Regular events provide people with the scaffolding for fuller lives, and deliberate participation and regular attendance are small acts of service that support the longevity and vitality of third spaces.
Curation is an act of service: Recommendation is a quick and powerful form of connection and provides a real service: curation. Social media is full of slop these days, "best-of" lists are full of affiliate links, and Google results are all clickbait. I've been intentionally trying to curate my media intake based on the recommendations of my friends, and offering my recommendations when I know the other person well enough to think they'll enjoy it. This is going very well.
Be vulnerable, be honest: Finally, I've come to accept that service requires vulnerability: the humility to ask for help and the grace to accept it. Unidirectional service is the domain of the impersonal savior –– it keeps distance between people –– only reciprocal care brings people together. For my part, I've been working to be more honest and vulnerable with friends about the things I'm struggling with, and I've been delighted by the support and deepening of my friendships that has resulted.

Coda: a few months later

Professionalization: a human is just a tap away

Where we still rely on other people, our reliance is increasingly structured and mediated by labor markets. When a sink clogs, most people call a plumber or a landlord, rather than relying on a handy family member. Rather than asking a friend for a ride to the airport, many folks request a stranger take them on an app.

We're increasingly relying on markets to obtain help from others, including historically unpaid labor like shopping, cooking, and cleaning. This has many benefits — it is more efficient and scalable for those who can afford it; it more equitably recognizes the economic value of domestic labor; and it can be more reliable than our immediate social networks.

But by reducing a human interaction down to an economic one, it reserves these services for those who can pay. It removes the emotional dimension of interpersonal service that used to accompany these tasks. It boils "what do we owe each other" down into numeric terms. In a world where we outsource more of our needs to markets, we interact with more and more people, but do so in ways that are less and less meaningful.

Collectivization: reliant yet disconnected

Nowhere are the trade-offs between abundance and interpersonal connection clearer than in the public sphere. We collectively provision an increasing volume of goods and services — water, power, gas, roads, schools, police, to name just a few. Like automation and professionalization, collectivization replace reliance on the immediate and known community with reliance on an impersonal government — composed of people, yes, yet acting as an impersonal, formal actor.

Despite the communitarian spirit embodied in publicly provided services, the actual experience of interacting with these systems is profoundly impersonal. The scale of municipal services and their remits for equal treatment and efficiency demand the trappings of bureaucracy: policies, meeting minutes, numbered forms, formal review processes. Many are so complex it can be hard for any individual to fully understand how they operate, let alone advocate for their modification.

Though these systems enable comfort for more individuals (often with unparalleled efficiency), they don't create emotional connections between the beneficiaries of public services and the people making them possible. The extension of most services to the public is an unalloyed good, but the means of that extension typically replaces a personal reliance with an impersonal one. Collectivization demands we exchange reliance on people that we know for reliance on systems we must trust. That has costs.