When do you clean your apartment?

I propose that you clean it when it passes a certain threshold of dirtiness. At the beginning your apartment is immaculate (0% dirty). As time passes, the dirtiness level increases. Clothes get tossed over the arms of the sofa, papers scattered across the coffee table, debris tracked onto the carpet. Dust blankets the mantle and stains adorn the toilet. When the amount of filth becomes too much to bear (let’s say, 40% dirty), you pull up your sleeves and clean. Then you’re good for another while until the dirtiness level passes your threshold again. This is a perfectly fine self-regulating dynamical system.

Not everybody has the same threshold. Suppose your roommate Rebecca has a threshold of 30% dirtiness. What happens? You’ll never clean the apartment. The dirtiness level can never reach 40% without reaching 30%, so Rebecca will always clean the apartment before you get a chance.

(Well, not never. If Rebecca’s out of town for a while the dirtiness level can certainly reach 40%, tripping your filth fuse.)

At some point Rebecca will say to you, “Take out your headphones. We need to talk. No, Lauren, this is serious. Why don’t you ever clean the apartment? Why is it always me who has to do that around here? Why do I have to force you?”

You’ll stammer for a bit.

“I understand your frustration. But you have a lower dirtiness threshold, which is why my threshold has never activated while we’ve been living together”, you will not manage to say, because it sounds stupid, like some kind of sophisticated excuse you just made up to rationalize away your laziness.

No explanation will do. You’re just lazy.

“Look, I’m sorry. I’ll try to be better about this,” you will actually say.

“I will be better about this”, you will add, unconvincingly.

Both of you know who’s being unfair. It’s not her.

Or maybe she might decide, hey, if Lauren’s not going to do her part, so be it. Let her wallow in her own mess. And the dirtiness level will creep past 30%, onward and upward, and she’ll find it increasingly hard to disguise her discomfort.

And at 35% dirtiness, maybe she can’t take it anymore and she’ll confront you.

“Hey. Have you noticed how dirty this place is getting?”

“No,” you will not say, because, you know, she does have a point.

“Well, if you think it’s so dirty why don’t you pick up the broom?” you will not say, because that would be beyond tactless.

“Yes, but it hasn’t passed my dirtiness threshold, which is why I haven’t cleaned it” you will also not say, even though it is true, because that’s weird.

“Sorry,” you will actually say. Then you’ll walk over to the closet and bring out the vacuum and do the duty expected of a roommate. But you’ve already failed.

The traditional solution to this sorry state of affairs, to buck the rules of the dynamical system, is to rotate cleaning duties between the two of you. Naturally, Rebecca will be the one to propose this, otherwise she’ll never get you to do your fair share of cleaning.

But if this toy model of dirtiness thresholds holds any water, this solution is poetically unsatisfying. It leaves some itches unscratched.

“When you go off and live on your own, is your place going to turn into a pigsty?” a meaner, more assertive version of Rebecca may ask rhetorically. But of course, you’d clean! If only the dirtiness level hit your threshold! But she has no way of knowing that. (Even if she believes in the threshold model of cleanliness, she won’t be able to determine what your threshold is. She’ll only know it’s higher than 30%, and could very well be 100% or some ghastly level like that.)

Or perhaps you, or a shallower, more insecure version of you, may come to resent her. How she gets to look like the competent one, the one in charge, because she cleans voluntarily at her threshold, while you look like the lazy one, the immature one, who has to be forced to clean, who, left to your own devices, would let a sparkling kitchen devolve into a dumpster, even though you’re not really like that! All because her natural threshold happens to be lower than yours.

I don’t have a better solution. Sorry.

Being a human is hard.