Colossal wastes of time and the consequences
Humans have control issues. We reside in a basically chaotic universe, where shit just happens, all around us, all the time, and we have absolutely no control over it. Mother nature erupts lava into our neatly organized towns, she moves the ground under our feet and topples our carefully constructed buildings. An asteroid might come along at any minute and smash half of our planet away, creating another moon.
We even have this chaotic streak inside us, echoing the dynamism of the natural world that we are part of. You can see it in little boys, lining their toy cars up in neat little rows until they tire of the order, with a subconscious realization that it doesn’t fit the random universe they grow up in, and so they go on a rampage, impersonating some cataclysmic disaster and kicking them all around until the cars are in an disheveled pile.
One of the silliest things we humans do to install order into our decidedly disorderly lives is make our beds. From the time I was little, I thought bed making was a great big fucking waste of time. Every day people spend two minutes or so making the bed. Hell, say it takes them one minute. That’s ~360 minutes a year, or 6 hours. 6 hours in their year, and the best thing they can think to do with it is arrange sheets and blankets neatly? You’ve probably only got about 75 of those years before you die….and you want to have spent 450 hours of them making beds? Almost 20 days of your life, then, dedicated to this meaningless activity? (And that was with a very conservative 1 minute per bed making estimate…if it takes you 3 minutes…that’s 60 days of your life.)
And the stupidest part is that you’re going to mess it up again, anyway, that very night.
In fact, it turns out that might not be the stupidest part. It seems some researchers have been studying dust mites, which cause people allergic reactions, and they have stumbled on the fact that unmade beds are less hospitable to these little creatures than the supposedly “neater” made ones are.
Made beds trap in more of the moisture you excreted in the night; you know…the drool on your pillow, the fluids from your sexual romp, the sweat from your skin. This moisture makes it more likely that dust mites will last through the day and create the allergens you will inhale when you get back between the sheets the next night.
So, consider that the next time you make your bed. Not only are you well on the way to wasting 20 (or more) days of your life for the sake of some trivial “order” in your bedroom…but you may also be increasing your chance of developing allergic reactions to the air you breathe when you sleep.