Everyone forms part of a household. Whether you live alone or find yourself sharing a house with four other people, you are a participant in a household.
Some households are relatively organised while others find themselves in a constant state of entropy; however, most household participants do not devote any significant amount of time to planning, organising and maintaining the functions inherent in a household.
There are many ways to organise and run a household. Here I will provide a basic outline of one possibility of running a household.
It’s useful to think of a household as a game comprised of various systems.
It is important to see the household game as a whole, consisting of various independent systems. In the household game you may have the kitchen system, the bathroom system, the bedroom system, the toilet system, the vacuuming system etc..
The participants of the household adhere to rules and roles – specific to each individual system - which are necessary to maintain the systems’ optimal functioning.
The aim of the household game is to produce and maintain an environment within which all participants are able to function with some minimum level of productivity, and hopefully one which participants find enjoyable.
Aims may vary amongst households. The important aspect of the aim is that all participants must agree that the aim is sufficiently meaningful and reasonable to justify the effort required to achieve and maintain the aim.
The household game consists of systems, which consist of rules and roles; and in order for the household game to fulfil and maintain its aims, all participants must follow the rules and adhere to their roles, or the game will inevitably devolve into entropy.
A rule will here be defined as an obligation in the form of a process that must consistently be performed by all participants. For example, a rule may be that once a participant is done eating, food scraps are deposited into a trash bag and the plate is placed on the right-hand side of the dish sink.
A role will here be defined as a designation which obliges any assigned participant to consistently abide by a rule (perform an obligatory process). For example, John is assigned the role of taking out the trash. Sarah will not be responsible for this process because it is Johns’ role.
Again, participants will only follow the rules if they agree that the aim is sufficiently meaningful and reasonable to justify the effort required to follow the rules.
Therefore, firstly, the aim of the game needs to be made clear to all participants, and all participants must agree that this aim is sufficiently meaningful to justify the effort required to participate.
Secondly, the rules and roles of the systems must be made clear.
A system head needs to be identified for each system.
The head will be responsible for creating the rules and designating the roles which ensure that the environment created within that system adheres to the main aim of the game.
The system head communicates the rules and roles to the rest of the participants who then have to decide whether these are reasonable.
Once system heads are nominated for all relevant systems comprising the game, all rules have been communicated, roles have been assigned, and these stipulations are agreed upon, the maintenance of the systems come into effect.
It is the responsibility of the system head to keep track of the resources necessary to the functioning of the system, and to ensure that depleted resources are timeously replenished so as to not disrupt the smooth functioning of the system.
It is imperative that all participants adhere to the rules for the various systems in order to avoid a gradual decline into entropy.
The problem is that the avoidance of rules, presented as micro-processes, do not immediately present themselves as threats to achieving and maintaining the aim of the household game. However, as more and more of the rules are violated, the effects of the violated rules on the environment quickly start to compound which, almost out of nowhere, creates a toxic environment.
Inevitably, the continual violation of rules will result in one of the following scenarios:
1. The quality of the environment keeps deteriorating to the point where one of the participants are no longer able to function, or reasonably remedy the environment by themselves. They get so frustrated that they eventually address the problem with frustration and anger.
2.The quality of the environment keeps deteriorating to the point where one of the participants find themselves in a situation which requires the quality of the environment to be restored to normal quickly, and without compromise. This person then has no choice but to take on the responsibility of restoring the environment, often at great physical cost. Should the rule avoidance continue, the process may start repeating almost immediately after the necessity of a normal environment is no longer present.
This formulation for the functioning of a household may be too ‘cold’ or ‘mechanical’ for some people.
The intention here is not to take the fun out of living, but rather to illustrate that it may be beneficial to take a step back and put some real thought into how we run our households.
After all, the first step in fixing a country would be to improve the condition and functioning of the households contained within it.
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