Observations About the World, Part Twenty-Five

Photograph of the Atlas globe

Cleaning |
Monday – March 9, 2026

Lately, cleaning or the habit of cleaning has caused much controversy, especially on the internet, and while I attempt to not pay too much attention to the noise and the nonsense going on online, I did feel that I had to share this observation about the world, read "Observations about the world series". I've written about routines and "dealing with time" in the past, and in that post I very briefly mentioned cleaning, and since I didn't feel compelled at that time to write more about this subject, I felt that it simply was time for me to try to explain why I believe that the entire subject of "cleaning" is quite silly.

    See, most people seem to believe that cleaning is a chore that you either have to do when you "feel" like it or when you've scheduled that it's time for cleaning. Of course, this is a completely nonsensical way of understanding cleaning, or rather why cleaning has to happen in the first place. If the world was completely perfect and every movement was completely nonexistent, would cleaning be a necessity in this world? Of course not, but that world would be a world without essence, and world without form, and truly a "clinical world" would be a world of complete uniformity, perhaps even complete egalitarianism. Cleaning is not merely a task, a chore, something that is annoying, cleaning should come with the realization that the world has to be put into balance, that justice, if you will, has to be served, and in this context justice surely refers to a good conscience, but truly to a skillful approach to the world and to life in general. A child is not asked to clean his or her room because it's paramount for him or her to learn to clean; no, cleaning is a ritual, like anyone else, that has to be mastered, and in this sense a room or an area, substantive and material though it may be, that can be said to be clean is an area that has been purified, and purification serves a very important purpose that goes well beyond the corporeal and the immediate. Also, it's true that any child should learn to accept the responsibility of fulfilling certain chores, but this seems lost on most moderns because of their lack of a sense of something complete. After all, does individualism promote a sense of cosmic fulfillment? Of course not! The only thing individualism has ever promoted is compartmentalization and division, and rectification through division, and this lowering of every substance down the the lowest level surely doesn't promote anything in the connection to cleaning.

    Yes, I've decided, so fat at any rate, in this post to compartmentalize cleaning to the modern conception, and really if you live in one of those monstrous apartment complexes, I guess cleaning becomes a very individualist pursuit, and truly your home becomes a prison, and in that context I can understand how cleaning can appear rather pointless and even forced. But then there are material reason to clean out the world, such as reducing the likelihood of propagating diseases, something that the ancients were quite aware of, but in only cleaning a well defined area, without the cosmological connection, the ritual that is cleaning, the sacred ritual, is lost and replaced by yet another modern source of "stress" and anxiety, and truly it seems that cleaning, to a certain extent at least, has become a competition of sorts. Where is the sacred in this? But like most things in the modern world, the substantive cannot be allowed to remain essentially within its own domain, it has to be quantified and brought down to the lowest level possible. I guess it could be said that cleaning, again "cleaning" in the truest sense of the word, is even democratic and the postulates of egalitarianism, feminism, and humanist demands that within the modern household the "chore" that has become of cleaning has to be carried out by the husband and the wife equally. Of course, in traditional societies people understand rituals such as cleaning and in those societies cleaning and other rituals take on a far more metaphysical character; apart from that, cleaning is also something that is mastered, as I previously mentioned, and this means that cleaning becomes a part of the very fabric of the act, because cleaning is something that is performed in traditional societies – truly there's such a thing as a qualified cleaner in his own right.

    Apart from the obvious and permanent and very painful dissonance between the traditional and the modern, the sacred and the profane, there are of course, as I also previously mentioned, very many corporeal and merely profane reasons for cleaning, and yes the prevention of disease is important, but many moderns, in this case psychoanalysts of different specializations, do also tend to claim that cleaning can create a "healthy" habit or routine that can promote a more stable life, because in their view stability, which comes from routine, promotes overall mental well being, and this is of course true and really doesn't require much "research" to understand, and anyone with some amount of intellect and intuition would understand this, but the modern course of action is of course to assume and to impose complete ignorance on the past. Sure, if you suffer from mental illness, it could be that this illness, really this disordered mind, could benefit from structure and routine, but take the opportunity to understand why structure promotes a healthier mind: it is because structures provide essential information about the world that you are finally able to cling on to the world, to orientate yourself in the world, that your mind becomes in itself purified and cleaned, truly cleansed of all the noise that keeps out the signal of life, and this is a good start for anyone that seeks to understand the importance of hierarchy. Could you clean if you didn't segregate, if you didn't discriminate, and why would cleaning matter if you had no sense of hierarchy? Wouldn't the world become a veritable chaos without this sense of hierarchy, thus the impulse to clean, to truly restore the scales of the celestial order? Indeed, in your modern life cleaning sounds annoying, but truly cleaning may just be the last ritual with some faint connection to the heavenly and to the primordial, and in this sense the psychoanalysts have reached a profoundly true insight in a very quantitative and roundabout way – really an artifact of the modern mentality.

Reginald Drax – March 9, 2026.