Housekeeping. Cleaning, The relentless picking up of stuff, and finding somewhere to put it. I am not interested in doing it. I am not amused. I don’t have time for it. So I am not going to do it anymore. That’s it.
Don’t get me wrong. I am generally not lazy. I tend to be the opposite in fact, I work til I drop, doing my share and then some. I have no problem with, and I am actually very good at manual labor. I have worked as a waitress, I have cleaned hotel rooms and toilets, I have flipped houses and done the manual labour myself. I have no problem doing chores as a real job, if you see what I mean. Working hard at a job is fine, because at a certain point you are done, and you get paid. Whereas at home it never ends. Stuff. Picking, up. Wiping. Organizing. More stuff. When chores are such a large part of daily life they take up far too much time, and they are too much trouble, there is too much nagging involved and I want no part of it.
After all the Macroeconomics (and Micro), theory I have read, I came to the simple solution that this, too, is simply a matter of allocation of resources. Where is my time best spent? What would I rather pay for (or just avoid altogether)?
Dumping stuff and not having a permanent, permanent residence turns out to be the best way of minimizing household chores. I don’t have to do chores when we are on the road. For one we have much less stuff, so there is little to pick up or organize or stow away (of course there’s the packing for the next leg of the journey, but that’s just fun). We don’t have to clean since we always rent with cleaning included or stay in hotels.
Yet intermittently we settle down somewhere for longer stretches, when the house owning bug gets to us, and unavoidable the housekeeping creeps up on me. Kids have stuff. I have stuff and unfortunately, I love shopping. It is fun, but it begets stuff. Thus I have vowed to not purchase anymore useless stuff, and whenever I do, it must be useful, needed and pretty. Yes, pretty, because pretty things make us happy. http://www.androidcentral.com/htc-funded-research-shows-beautiful-things-make-people-happier
Also, I get rid of stuff. I sell or donate. I don’t need it, my family does not need it. It does not, make us happy to have a lot of stuff. Some stuff helps, but not a lot. I never want to be tied down by stuff ever again.
The absolutely major perk of travel and “relative budget living abroad” for me is not having to cook. I just loathe it, whereas I just love eating well. I can cook decently, but I don’t like it much (unless it is for a big huge party!) and besides, so many others do it so much better than I do. In Thailand for example, where we can enjoy a delicious, healthy, spicy and fun meal, the whole family eats for under ten bucks, give or take. In France a couple of Baguettes Americains make a delicious lunch for the same ten bucks. Then there’s better fruit and vegetables, tastier, different and less expensive than what is found in cold, windy, snowy gray, did I mention cold, Sweden, and they don’t require any prep or cooking!
Thats my idea of happiness. Not cooking, but eating well and lots of it! The food is better, more nutritious, better looking, more exotic and we are all just that much happier. There is no nagging, no cleaning, no thinking of what to cook. We just enjoy. It is a spoiled life, and we know it, and we worked hard to attain it.