Vacuum Cleaning and Meditations

As a continuation of the opinions I made in my article "UniversityGPT: In Defence of Gen-Z" I would like to expand on a topic that interested me. I could not find the placement for it in the first article as it would have made it far too convoluted and lengthier than anyone would have cared to read. I have called this article "Vacuum Cleaning and Meditations" because of the fact I clarified the ideas of the piece whilst vacuum cleaning. The entirety of that point will make sense as we read on into the main arguments.

Again, as this is an opinion piece, I hope we can remain civil about the arguments presented whether we agree with them or not. Anyone attacking the characters of anyone else, AI generating vague replies, or those of you who leave self-promotions to unattributed AI content will be reported to Vocal with immediate effect.

Thank you,

Annie.

Vacuum Cleaning: An Opinion

An Introduction to Vacuum Cleaning as Meditation

I think we have all figured out that the act of mindfulness means to be quite literally 'in mind' of the present situation we are in. An act of meditation in which we think about where we are and what we are doing. In other theories regarding 'mindfulness' we can also be meditating on ideas or future plans we would like to undertake. It has futhermore been cited as one of the most important things we can be doing in this modern time in order to ground ourselves and bring ourselves back to reality.

I wanted to investigate the "why" of this whole situation. Why is it that the word 'mindfulness' popped up on the radar about a decade ago and the term 'practicing mindfulness' in my own childhood and teen years was basically unheard of? Well, there's a simple answer to that which we require to take a deep dive into: the growing automation of mindful activity in everyday life. The everyday life of human beings naturally contains activities in which we require to concentrate on what we are doing at the present, but on top of that they are also enjoyable and take some pleasant time. Brushing the floor and vacuuming is one of those tasks. We cannot go on our phones, nor can we stare at the television. We cannot go on social media nor can we watch YouTube. We must, if we are to clean effectively, concentrate on a meditative task at hand.

These tasks often don't require too much effort or brain power, but the only way we can do them is if we are careful about doing them. If we want to clean our floors, we need not make a huge effort of it, but we can understand it will take some of our time. We may listen to music, we may muse on thought, we may simply enjoy the soft sound of the vacuum cleaner as it glides across the floor with soft pushes. But, we are being mindful.

Enter the automated vacuum cleaner.

Without the requirement for human input, this vacuum cleaner is robotic and sweeps your floor without you needing to lift a finger. You can now doomscroll as much as you please and spend that vital extra twenty or so minutes on Facebook, Twitter or, if you have a special kind of brain-rot: TikTok. Of course, I'm being sarcastic. But you get the point. Meditations in everyday life were there. But since we have given into surplus automation, we have lost the essence of meditation and now must cower before the mindfulness and wellness middle class women who do pilates on the weekend and only seek to make money out of the mentally ill.

But don't worry, you don't need to throw out your washing machine because it is automated. Until about the middle to the end of the 20th century the balance between automation and actually doing things was quite safe. However, in the last perhaps fifteen to twenty years, there has been a shift in which Generations Z and Alpha are growing up without them, especially now as more people have access to more forms of automation than say the average human being did in the 1950s.

We have seen countless articles about how the robotic vacuum cleaner has improved the mental health of lots of people. That may be true and more power to them. But for the average person perhaps not suffering with clinical depression, or the average person who does not suffer from a lack of sleep because their two-month-old keeps crying in the night - the robotic vacuum cleaner is one step further into the mindlessness of the modern day.

How Has This Happened In Other Places?

Clothing

Well, we can definitely talk about the death of the high street (I'm not sure whether the USA has high streets but it is pretty much a street where the clothes shops are plus maybe a few cafés). The rate at which people are shopping online is sky-rocketing. I recently read a book called Less by Patrick Grant which is probably not that great but makes one very clear and terrifying point.

The point is just this: some years' ago we would go to a shop and buy our clothes and anything we needed. The act of having to go would make us think about what we were doing and how we were going to spend our money. (Of course, the act of sitting on a bus or walking to the shop or even taking a car is a low effort activity where we still need to be mindful of our surroundings and pay some attention to what we are doing). We would then go into the shop and feel materials, look at the clothes on a mannequin and then have to take them to the till. (All of these things are low effort but also require us to be in the present moment and meditating upon thoughts).

The weird thing is that even though the high street is pretty much dead, these actions are still widely available as shops still exist. However, the choice of how to shop has come down to clicks on a phone screen without very much thought put into any part of that process. We perhaps therefore, have about an hour or so of 'mindful' activity cut out of our day just by not going to a shop and choosing to buy our clothes online instead.

Cooking

Cooking is quite a mindful activity in which we can spend half an hour to an hour getting together ingredients and making something to then eat for a lengthy amount of time. This would include the preparation and the cooking of the food, followed by washing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen. Another good mindful set of acitivities which are fairly low effort (though I have to say myself that I do dislike cooking mainly because of the smells that are produced). I say fairly low effort because in the modern world where we are at work for more hours than ever before in human history, it is often difficult to cook. Do not think for a second though that companies do not absolutely capitalise on work misery.

Uber Eats, Just Eat, Door Dash and a number of others seem to have capitalised on this very work misery in which the burnt-out worker comes home and doesn't have even a morsel of energy to cook (I am really referring to myself here - because sometimes that is really the case). Offering a quick fix which on the surface seems cheap but underneath is more expensive than the quality of the food they provide, food delivery services like this are being used more and more because of the fact they are easy to use.

I don't know whether any of you remember how you would have to phone the place you wanted to order from and give them your order from a menu that was posted through your door. But it was higher effort than clicking a button. But being on the phone would make you more mindful of what you were ordering because of the fact you could quite literally see everything on the menu as you were ordering (which is a whole new analysis about why a lot of these restaurants split their stuff up into separate pages) and the conversation would last a bit longer than simply a few quick clicks.

Be that as it may, the act of cooking and cleaning up after yourself actually makes you want to finish your food because you've spent so much time making it. If you want to take this a step further then you want to look at the questionable impact of watching YouTube whilst eating. Eating is also something mindful that has become encroached by automation. Some younger folks can simply not eat without something on.

Conclusion

Hopefully I can do something more with this point because I want people to understand how Gen-Z and beyond has basically been raised to not think and thus, blaming them when they hit the start of adulthood (university) for not being able to think is a design created by the world around them from education to automation. I want to do something more with this point but I think this is a good place to end the second part of this series.