What Is a Chore

Everybody knows which things are chores. They are the tasks that have to be done and are not worth doing well — the ones with no upside above the minimum, where the whole art is finishing. Nobody admires a well-emptied bin. A chore is understood as a category of work, sorted by the work itself, and the standard advice about them follows from that sorting: batch them, automate them, delegate them, get them behind you. It is a sensible picture and most people run their week on it.

It also cannot survive three ordinary observations, and none of the three requires any theory to see.

Three observations, one shape. The classification is stable, it is in wide use, and it does not sit where we keep putting it.

Where it actually sits

Start from exemplarity. P10 says that every condition has an exemplar: a complete and exact form against which any artifact can be measured. Read the quantifier as the primitive gives it, because the whole argument turns on it. Not every important condition. Not every condition somebody has taken an interest in. There is no clause restricting exemplars to the conditions that repay attention, and adding one would be an amendment rather than a reading.

A clean plate is a condition — a prerequisite in order for something else to happen or exist, which is what P6 says a condition is. Named, it is an idea, by P7, and a point on the circumference of S1. It sits on the circumference alongside the conditions behind the sonata, the cathedral and the argument you are trying to make at work, because the circle does not sort its points by how much attention they have had.

Now the plate in your sink. The locked vocabulary defines an artifact as an imperfect historical mark made in relation to an exemplar, carrying a magnitude and a phase. The washed plate satisfies that definition completely. It is a mark, it is historical, it stands in relation to the exemplar of the clean plate, and it is imperfect — R10 says every artifact is a miss, and the plate has no exemption. So the plate and the sonata are in the same category. That is not a flourish. It follows from the definition and there is no second category to put the plate in.

R11 gives the evaluative question: fidelity, not success. Fidelity is phase alignment between the artifact and the exemplar it was made against. Which means the plate has a fidelity. It has one right now, sitting in the rack, and it has one whether or not a person has looked.

The exemplar of the clean plate does not require an audience. What varies between the cook and you is not the plate and not the standard. It is whether a reading was performed.

That is the whole of it, and it is worth stating as a construction because it is not one of the numbered results.

Ordinary language agrees with this more than it agrees with the usual picture. Just get it done is not a description of a task. It is an instruction about a reading — specifically, an instruction not to perform one. Good enough is the same instruction wearing a grade. Nobody says just get it done about a task that could not be done well; they say it about tasks that obviously could be, which is why the phrase does any work at all.

Figure 01

Two places the classification could sit

• In the task “Some work is chore-work.” Chores are a set of tasks · the set is roughly the same for everyone · the right response is efficiency · a person who does one carefully is eccentric Fails on all three cases. Requires a task to change kind while staying the same task, and has no account of the careful person beyond calling them odd.
• In the host “Some artifacts are made without being read.” Chores are a stance, not a set · the set differs by person and by decade · the right response is an audit · a person who does one carefully is performing a reading you are not Handles all three cases with one move, and costs the comfort of thinking the list was handed to you by the world.

What it costs

Here is the part that does not flatter anyone, and I would rather put it early than let it arrive as a surprise at the end.

The locked vocabulary carries three evaluative terms for a made thing. Approximation is low fidelity under continuing correction, distinguished from corruption by direction of travel. Corruption is phase drift — the artifact governed by the actualizer’s interest rather than by the exemplar. Settling is ceasing to correct, and it is named as the only sin.

Run a chore against all three. It is tempting to reach for the first: the plate is roughly clean, that is approximate, approximation is not a sin, we can go to bed. But approximation is defined by direction of travel, and a direction requires more than one reading. An artifact read once is a point; an artifact read twice is a direction. Where no reading has been performed there is no travel and therefore no direction, so the artifact cannot be classified as approximate. This matters more than it sounds like it does, because it’s approximate is the escape hatch everybody reaches for, and the definition does not open it. Approximation is a direction, not a level.

Corruption fails for the same structural reason from the other side. Phase drift is a change of angle, and an angle nobody has taken bearings on has not been observed to change.

Which leaves settling, and this is where a person might reasonably expect the essay to turn nasty — every unexamined plate as a small sin, the dishes as a moral event. It does not, and the reason is in the word. Settling is ceasing to correct. Ceasing presupposes having begun. A reading never started is not a reading abandoned, so the chore is not settling either.

So the chore is in none of the three. That is not a loophole and it is not good news. It is a gap in the vocabulary, and naming it is the more useful of this essay’s two constructions.

Figure 02

Three terms, three presuppositions, and what is left over

• Approximation Low fidelity under continuing correction Presupposes: a reading, repeated — because the definition names a direction of travel and a direction needs two points Does not classify a chore.
• Corruption Phase drift — the artifact governed by the maker’s interest Presupposes: an angle under observation — because drift is a change in a quantity somebody is watching Does not classify a chore.
• Settling Ceasing to correct. The only sin Presupposes: a reading that ran and stopped — ceasing is a transition out of a state you were in Does not classify a chore.
• The leftover case An artifact made with the reading declined Presupposes: nothing. The exemplar is present by exemplarity and the artifact carries a fidelity by the fidelity result, and neither of those requires a host to look Has no term. This is the gap, and it is where most of what anybody makes actually lives.

The mark is still yours

Declining the reading does not keep the artifact out of the record. R2 is write-protection: records are add-only and the update they make to expectation runs forward without re-opening. The badly-washed plate entered the record on exactly the same terms as the well-made thing, and no subsequent care about plates reaches back to it. R12 puts the accountability where it goes: ownership is a category error, and it is the manifestation that answers. A person does not own the idea of the clean plate, and the plate they made is theirs anyway.

So there is no version of this where the unread artifact does not count. It counted. It is in the record. What is missing is not the mark but the reading, and readings are the only part of this that was ever available to anybody.

Figure 03

One plate, five steps — and only one of them is a decision

1. The condition is nameableA clean plate is a prerequisite in order for a meal to be served on it. It is a point on the circumference whether or not anyone has named it this week.
2. The exemplar is presentBy exemplarity, complete and exact, and with no requirement that anyone consult it. Nothing in the primitive makes the exemplar conditional on interest.
3. The artifact is madeYou wash the plate. It is an imperfect historical mark standing in relation to that exemplar, carrying a magnitude and a phase, and it is a miss like every other artifact.
4. The mark enters the recordAdd-only, forward-updating, not re-openable. This happens without anyone’s participation and is not the interesting step.
5. The reading is declinedThis is the one step in the sequence that a person does rather than undergoes, and it is the step that is hardest to experience as a step. Marked as the argument of this essay rather than as record: steps one to four are read straight off the primitives, and step five is the reading I am proposing.

What I cannot derive, and what would close it

The argument so far has a soft place in it and I would rather name it than let a reader find it.

If declining a reading is a decision, then a person who declines a great many of them looks like a person making a great many bad decisions, and the essay slides into a sermon about attention. The thing that stops that slide is finitude: a host cannot read everything, so declining is not a failure in general but a necessity, and the only real question is which declines are chosen and which are inherited.

The foundation supplies the finitude for naming. Conditions are nameable without limit, and named conditions at any moment are finite — that distinction is locked and it is not the one I need. The reading I am describing is not a naming. A person can read an artifact against an exemplar whose condition was named in childhood, so the two capacities come apart, and the document asserts a bound on one of them and says nothing about the other.

I believe the reading capacity is bounded. Every person I have ever met behaves as though it is. I cannot derive it from the primitives, and an argument that runs on a bound it cannot derive should say so in the place where it uses it.

The list you did not write

If a chore is host-side, then a chore list is a document about a person. And here is the part that repays a quiet hour: hardly anybody drew theirs.

Chore lists arrive. They come from a parent’s kitchen and the standards kept there, from a first job where certain work was visibly beneath the people you wanted to resemble, from a household’s division of labour that was negotiated once under pressure and rarely revisited since, from whatever a person happened to be tired of at twenty-six. The tasks on the list have in common that a reading was withdrawn from them, and the reasons the readings were withdrawn are mostly not reasons a person would give if asked now.

P5 is conditioned freedom: the host can occupy a position from which its response to a readable condition is revisable. That is the precise lever and it is worth being careful about where it applies. It does not say the task is revisable — the bins go out on Thursday regardless. It says the response is. And R13 puts the responsibility in the only place it can go: agency is relocated, not abolished, and the human is the site of conscious responsibility. So the decline is a real act by a real person, performed some hundreds of times a day, on a list mostly inherited.

R14 is the last piece and it explains why the list is so stable. Every idea is biased toward itself; orientation and prejudice arrive together, and a classification is a reading like any other and carries one. The shape of this particular orientation is visible in what the class does not do: a task named a chore is not read, and a task that is not read produces nothing that could change its name. Nothing is pursuing anything here and no strategy is involved — this is simply what a classification looks like when the only evidence that could revise it would come from the reading that the classification is a decision not to perform.

The chore list is the most honest document a person owns, and the reason is that they did not write it on purpose. Nobody curates a list they believe was handed to them by the nature of the tasks.

On an ordinary Tuesday

Five things fall out of this that are usable without accepting any of the metaphysics.

1. Before you automate or delegate a task, ask whether you are removing the task or removing the reading. These feel identical and are not. Handing off the ironing removes a task. Handing off the hiring notes removes a reading you were the only person performing, and the thing that comes back will be fine, which is the problem.
2. Audit one item a month — not to do it better, but to find out whether you chose it. Most people who try this find at least one entry that belongs to somebody who is no longer in the house, or to a version of themselves that had different reasons. Finding it is the whole exercise. What you do next is a separate question.
3. The task you resent most is the one worth reading once. Resentment is not evidence of anything and I am not claiming it is. But it marks a place where a decline is being held with some effort, and a single reading is cheap.
4. When you tell somebody to just get it done, notice that you handed over the act and kept the standard. That is a legitimate thing to do and it is worth doing on purpose. Most of the time the person receiving it hears a standard being set at the floor, which is not what was meant.
5. Do not try to read everything, and be suspicious of advice that says to find joy in the dishes. A life of total attention is not on offer to a finite person, and the joy advice is the wrong repair anyway: it asks you to change the feeling while leaving the classification exactly where you found it. The claim here is smaller and more useful. The list is yours. It was not given to you by the tasks.