For a polished version of this blog (LLM based, bear with me) - Cleaning (Polished Version). Give it a read and let me know how it is, compared to this version.
Cleaning. Cleaner. Vacuum Cleaner. Floor Cleaner. Roof Cleaner. Pool Cleaner. Dish Cleaner. etc. My opinion on general people’s view on cleaning is that - As a profession, it is an easy and very underpaying job maybe, doesn’t require much intelligence or knowledge. Just tools. I respect the profession really well and if it were to be paying enough I would honestly consider it lol.
Jokes apart I don’t really know how much I love cleaning others’ stuff, but I really like cleaning and ordering my things. Not only physically but in every other places - like devices, notes etc. I would be the most organized person in the world - if only I had the time and the effort to organize things matched the output and return value I get (which is just a shot of happiness usually). I don’t really know if this topic deserves a special blog or is there enough content to even write about this. But then I realize that I have free will over my blog - I can write anything I want and this is something I want to write/talk about frequently.
State Machines
“State Machines? Are you serious? Why are you like this?” You might ask me and that is a very valid question.
Fortunately, this is not about Languages, Computation and Complexity. This has nothing to do with Computer Science either (I mean technically, everything is a computation but yeah). I just added the title for fun. In this section, I’ll talk about cleaning things that are in my vision or surroundings that belong to me/used by me.
In my childhood, I wasn’t really a fan of cleaning things - I always used to just scatter things away, use it and wouldn’t order things properly. Usually I liked it, that the things are scattered some times, it gives some sense of ‘everything is reachable and close by’ . My mom usually scolded me on a regular basis, alongside my sister who also gets it more or less at the same frequency.
When I was around 8th standard, that’s prolly the latest I remember, from where I started to take care of things and started cleaning my things occasionally. Every now and then I got some appreciation from my mother and I slowly started enjoying it.
But then when I started preparing for JEE, that’s when cleaning became and important deal for me. At the start, usually this was the case - I see all my books lying around disorganized, and then I feel overwhelmed by the amount of things I need to cover. It worsened when I brought new books and I started slacking while the books slowly accumulated dust. Not to mention, my study room was a big dust generator (and I had dust allergy that time). It magically generates unholy amounts of dust within a week of cleaning, that it would require another round of big cleaning. (If I were to ask my mom about this magic, she would probably say “That’s so normal, why are you yapping”).
Since I had lots of books and I had my own rack for books, I had to arrange it neatly and get that sense of happiness, and I did and it worked pretty well. In fact, it also kinda encouraged me to study at initial times. I was very motivated to study on well organized table over a cluttered table.
(Of course, very different from others ).
Coming back to the State Machine - The point I wanted to make is that, on one hand, cleaning slowly became one of my hobbies but on the other hand it also reflected my state of the mind during that period. In my case, I believe that my state of mind and how clean my everyday environment is, are kinda correlated. This might be different for different people, as I have observed people not clean/order things at all and still perform the way they usually do. This is also a single way implication. ‘If my mental state is not good then my surroundings don’t look good either’ . The other way isn’t necessarily true. I can be well and good, and my room could messy still.
How did this implication even arise? I think it’s mostly due to instances rather than causes. For example, If my room was cluttered, then I didn’t have interest in studying, which resulted in me slacking, which then affected my mood since I wasn’t productive enough and so on. There were also visible traces and forensics of those instances that strengthened the implications. It was none other than only thing that falling for me - My hair. These days, I’m not really stressed (I think I should be stressed about this?) and I don’t really find that much hair around my place (atleast that’s the reason I believe), but usually during my JEE preparation, I used to shed a lot of hair and I could see them clumping up like crazy near my study table. Them clumping up together was an indication of stress, therefore it being present was another instance of . That’s how the implication arose.
I was actually able to make good use of this implication sometimes. Since the contraposition of this statement is equivalent, whenever I was stressed or depressed, I tried to fix it by first fixing my surroundings. I clean, reorder and arrange my things properly. I used to think that this would waste a lot of time (which it did), but then after cleaning, my mental state always got better regardless. Slowly I used this strategy to kinda lighten up myself at times. Even now I use this technique at times and needless to say, it has helped me greatly sometimes. It doesn’t fix my stress or depression/sadness by itself, but it gives a push for me to forget about or get distracted and start locking in. Unfortunately, this technique works only when I do it on my own, it is kinda counter productive when my mom notices my environment’s pathetic state and asks me to clean it. So yeah, the State Machine was my mind that could be somehow configured (or its output was) based on how ordered my surroundings was.
College Scenario
When I first came to college, my room was big enough to grant me a side that was almost as big as my study room and it was just for me, unlike the one I had during school time, where I had to share it with my sister. In my first year, I was rarely depressed/stressed so I didn’t really needed a conscious cleaning often - occasionally I cleaned my room only for the sake of cleaning. I rarely folded my clothes or properly aligned bedsheets or my things.
Things changed when I stepped onto my second year. The room was double-sharing, which was supposedly built for a single person to live. Naturally, the room felt very congested and is now no longer divisible into sides that one person can completely use independently of the other. And I guess I had a very ‘responsible’ roommate whom would ‘obey’ my words instantly (Fun fact: I chose this roommate willingly). At the start, I used to clean the room for both of us, thinking that my roommate would do it out of guilt atleast the next time. It felt like he never bothered. So, I slowly started telling him to clean the room now and then. Whenever he left for home, usually his bed would be in a completely cluttered condition and it kinda annoyed me sometimes, but then I was helpless and didn’t say much - sometimes I silently arranged it myself and pretended that it was never cluttered. Even after multiple times of me explicitly asking him to clean, it felt like he rarely took it to his head. Eventually I gave up and I started cleaning my side alone and started following a new strategy: ‘If it isn’t visible to my eyes, it isn’t dirty’ . Worked pretty well to be honest.
During the even semester of my second year (the semester of peak stress and depression, I guess), at one point I reached a state where I didn’t want to do anything - I didn’t feel like studying, I didn’t feel like talking to my friends, I didn’t feel like playing my favorite games or listening to my playlist. I didn’t want to scroll reels. All I was doing was just lying in my bed, thinking why I felt like this. A good turning point that fixed me during this state was the following thought:
“Look how pathetic you and your surroundings look, for the silliest thing that has happened in your life. Look at this pathetic guy (myself) lying in his bed, not being able to do the bare minimum - to keep his surroundings ordered and neat. Look at how he’s lying hopelessly for such a small thing. Weak and pathetic as always.”
Usually my thoughts are (or atleast how I process them) mostly like a two-way conversation/monologue (I will dedicate a blog on my thought processes, I desperately want to write about it). In short, at any point of time, there are multiple thoughts/voices that kinda interact and come to a conclusion. So when this thought came to my mind, I realized that this state was something my past self would never wanted my future self to be at. The thought provoked my ego and ideologies - I quickly woke up from my bed, I hastened to clean my table for one more time, folded my clothes, swept my room fully and took a bath. It didn’t resolve much, but it now gave me a good space for to grind again, and that’s how I recovered quickly from that point. I wouldn’t say that this completely helped me (would be a disgrace to the people/things/mindset who/that actually helped me), but this was the starter point.
Today, I’m sitting in my table and writing this blog. I just cleaned my side of the room and started locking in again from my yesterday’s depressive episode. My current roommates rarely or with a good guarantee I can say, almost never cleaned their side of the room. I’ve told them also multiple times, but yeah my words in this context never gets enough respect. I’ve stopped caring enough about this in general, so yeah all good for now.
Other forms of cleaning
Notes
Organizing and reordering my notes - I did this multiple times during my JEE preparation. I was a big fan of taking notes and writing (literally). I believed that it increased my retention and watching me craft those letters is such a good feel. It took so much of time and effort to make such neat and tidy notes, but I would say it was definitely worth it, especially when the exam was very near.
Even now I like writing over typing things. I really really like taking notes - especially with the pen I currently have. To the point I bought a big set of the same pens (The pen is LINC Maxo, if anyone is interested) so that I can continue having the joy of taking notes. Although I don’t really have the time to organize them, but it is not required and my notes are just good enough I believe.
Devices
Deleting old files, useless photos, ordering playlists, organizing my study materials, (wish I organized my codes also like this, but apparently I’m very poor at it, or in other words, skill issue), organizing photos in my phone and laptop is something I do regularly and occasionally. Every semester, I change my IDE color, I change my phone’s wallpaper and phone’s theme (same for laptop), to give myself a fresh feel and new start. I usually do this around the corner of vacations during a depressive episode to lighten up my mood. Again these take so much of my time, I do think they are worthless, but regardless I do it for the ‘shots of happiness’ . While doing this organizing, I also get to see the progress over time (especially when clearing useless photos) and get shots of nostalgia as well. I do some of these when I get bored. Even in clash of clans, I have a very organized layout just for farming this silly short lived sense of orderliness.
Mental State
This is something that gets cleaned constantly, or in fact every single step of time/thought. Filtering loads of useless and intrusive thoughts has become a habit and routine. For me, at this point, ignoring them is good as filtering them - For now I don’t really ponder about such things (I’ve realized it’s useless) , and it’s more or less pointless to fix the root cause. Gaslighting is one good strategy that just works pretty well all the time. Fixing ideologies here and then, ordering my thought processes and decision making, considering other perspectives, amount of effort and time per thought/decisions are all something that now happens automatically after the amount of practice and experiments I’ve done with myself. Not the most perfect, but it is good enough to keep me going.
Final Thoughts
Interestingly, this was actually a bigger blog than I thought. At first, I never intended to finish it in a day, but yeah I got some time to structure on what to write, so I guess I was able to finish it in an around two hours or so. I’m thankful to the person who motivated me today to start writing again. To end this, Cleaning as a hobby is very special and close to me. I wish that, at any state of time, I don’t become incapable of cleaning my own surroundings. Oh yeah, talking of this, on the other hand, a very bad person in terms of cleaning my internal body - As I said, I still follow the heuristics of ‘If it isn’t visible, then it isn’t dirty - which I believe should be changed, before the effects start clumping up and come into action. I talked about cleaning now and I just saw my bed and it looks like this
Yeah, it is cluttered, but for a good reason - to prevent myself from sleeping/lying in my bed and wasting time. After all, if your bed is more cleaner than your table, would you still like to study over sleep? 🙃