I'm married and unfortunately for my poor wife I have some kind of hole in my brain that doesn't allow me to notice or care about things being tidy or organized. I'll often get asked why I didn't pick up the trash that was in my path through the apartment or if I noticed the garbage is getting piled up.

I will always do chores when asked, I have no objection to handling the necessary labor of managing a household. The problem is my wife doesn't want to have to ask and I want her to be happier.

I often will try to motivate myself to take stock of each room I'm in before i leave and try to leave it cleaner but after maybe a day or two it's out of my mind. I just don't get any dopamine from things being clean and it's hard to form a habit.

Before I lived with someone else I basically never cleaned until it was severely impacting my daily life, did a big clean that took like an entire weekend, then just let it get just as bad.

How does one break this kind of behaviour? Some kind of shock therapy? Am I a lost cause? My current plan is to write a list of chores and things to check after work before settling in for the night but I'm skeptical as it's not the first chore list I've made.

  • Opposition [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    An obsession with orderliness is indeed a tell of the authoritarian personality. They get freaked out by things that aren't exactly in order. That's why they want everyone to have their papers, to have a 100 foot border wall, and why Peterson's message of "clean your room" resonated with so many fascists. It empowers them. Orderliness and cleanliness are super important to the authoritarian personality, it's why hygiene is given so much stress and disease metaphors are always used to describe immigrants.

    That's the thing about the alt-right pipeline. They're very sneaky. They appeal to where you hurt, where you feel inadequate. They offer a quick, easy solution. Once they've hooked you with the reasonable-sounding pitch, you're in a cult-like environment where you get love-bombed with affirmations. Everyone is really happy you cleaned your room, now you just need to take the next step, which you also get love-bombed for doing. You don't realize you're in it, until one day you're marching with tiki torches.