What is Unfuck Your Habitat? And why should you do it?

There’s a weird sort of void in the “taking care of your physical surroundings” stuff, in the archaic “how to keep a home” and “how to be domestic” universe. It tends to ignore single people, or people without kids, or students, or people with pets, or people with roommates, or people with full-time jobs, or classes, or other shit going on. It ignores people with mental illness, physical disabilities, chronic pain, and other circumstances that affect our ability to “just clean.” It assumes everyone is married with kids and one partner is around a lot of the time, and has a lot of time to devote to “housekeeping.”

Well, we don’t all live that life. Very few of us do. Our lives are complicated and sometimes messy, and we’re often distracted and overwhelmed. There’s no real shame in that, but it’s something to overcome, at least temporarily. Because no matter what our situations are, we deserve better than to live in filth. We deserve to live somewhere with nice things we love, and to have a clean, calm place to be, when we’re not at work or school or any of the fifty zillion other places we go.

UfYH is gender-neutral. I don’t buy into traditional standards of who “should” be doing cleaning. If you live somewhere, you deserve for that place to be nice and clean and livable, and you should be the one who makes it that way. I don’t care who you are or what box or boxes you check or don’t. I think gender roles as they relate to cleaning (well, in most ways, but that one’s relevant) are bullshit and irrelevant in modern life.

Fuck that. We’re unfucking traditional gender roles here. Everyone plays.

And our homes aren’t the only things that need to be unfucked. Our finances, our jobs, our relationships: there’s no end to the things we can fuck up. The important thing to remember is that there is nothing that can’t be unfucked. You just have to do it. You just have to overcome the compulsion to sit on the couch, on the computer, watching TV, and instead try to do SOMETHING. It doesn’t matter how small! It doesn’t matter if things only get a tiny bit better. Because when we accomplish something, especially something that seemed impossible, it feels awesome.

If you’re not into it, or not ready to do it, that’s cool. We’ve all been there, where inertia has us almost unable to make changes in our lives. But the whole point of this is that you might not be able to do everything, but you can do something. You just need to figure out what and how, and that’s what UfYH is here to help you with.

So jump in. Don’t worry about catching up. This is about doing what you can, when you can. 5, 10, 20 minutes at a time. And then back to your normal life.

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