I will not let AI do my dishes

This morning, something stirred within me and prompted a sorting out of my closet. I folded some things more neatly, separated beach clothes from others, colour-coded hanging items. I pulled out a floral yellow skirt my mum made for me and felt it could do with some ironing. As I pressed out the creases on the ironing table just outside my room, I thought, ‘why does this feel like an act of love?’

And I supposed that the reason it felt like that is because it is. There’s something about taking a second to care for the clothes that I wear that feels, naturally, like care - like a gift of reciprocity. It had me thinking about the delegation of household chores in this part of the world to low paid help, every single day - the disservice that is to ourselves, our homes, our public spaces, our health.

I read a tweet someone shared about how, if nothing else, we need AI to do all the menial background work for us so that real humans can do the real work. The real work I assume to mean the hustle and grind. I would like to whole-bodiedly disagree. I wanna say the real work is the work that sustains life and spirit, the work that comes from a place of love and somehow, somewhere in the background, fosters even more of that love. I look around me and I see so little of it playing out; there is beauty in the world and few people seem to notice it. Sometimes though, I see a man squatting by the side of the road on my way to class, surrounded on all sides by the cats he is feeding, and I think okay, all is well.

I remember being younger and seeing people throw trash out their car windows, and I knew that they probably did it because they don’t see it making a difference to the existing seas of garbage all around. But I guess I wonder if, before doing anything at all, we asked ourselves, ‘is this an act of love?’ and we only go ahead and do it if the answer is a resounding Yes.