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Got chores to do but miss your friends? Invite them to a “chore hang” errand date

Getting things done alongside your bud is a win-win

@EliMcCann

Eli McCann's husband works on his garden while a friend keeps him company.

As you get older, it gets harder and harder to maintain friendships. It’s hard to make time for them as your family grows, bills pile up, and responsibilities keep cramming into your free time. It’s fairly common for plans to get canceled because you have chores that need to get done. However, a buzzworthy post on X stumbled upon a possible solution: invite your friends over for a “chore hang.”

Lawyer and humor columnist Eli McCann (@EliMcCann) shared online that his husband needed to get some gardening done, but wanted to catch up with friends at the same time. So he just invited them over in shifts! Not to ask them to pitch in, but to just keep him company and enjoy a popsicle as he weeded and planted in his yard.

This inspired hundreds of comments on X and Instagram:

“I love this! I’ve needed to go through a costly storage unit for years, but it’s creepy to go alone. So I haven’t done it. I don’t even want help. Just company 😆”

“We all need a friend who will just keep us company while we do our drudgery.”

“This is so me. Like please, sit in the kitchen area while I cook. No, you don’t need to do anything. Not a single thing but exist with me.”

This idea of hanging out with one friend while getting some needed errands or house work done comes at an era of mass loneliness in the United States. A 2024 poll by the American Psychiatry Association showed that one in three Americans are lonely every week. A study from Colorado State University showed that 40% of Americans that were surveyed didn’t feel as close to their friends as they wanted to be. In part, this is due to the fact, according to MSNBC and other sources, that most Americans are overworked, needing multiple jobs to make ends meet and using whatever little free time they have on necessary home tasks rather than leisure or hanging out with friends.

But we need to make time for our friends, not just to make us feel better emotionally and psychologically, but for our physical health, too. A 2023 study from the U.S. Surgeon General showed that a lack of social connection can negatively impact your heart and blood pressure while also increasing your risk of a stroke. That same study compared the lack of social connection as unhealthy as smoking 15 cigarettes per day!

While there are large society-based issues that need to be tackled to resolve this problem, there are small solutions that you can do to improve any loneliness you feel, increase your quality time with friends, get your stuff done, and decrease your risk of a heart attack. Similar to the “errand dates” trend on TikTok, a “chore hang” or whatever you’d like to call it can help achieve all of those issues.

If you have to get your clothes clean, grab a friend and give them a coffee to chat with while you wait for the dryer. If you need to clean out your shed, get a six-pack to share with a bud and offer them any items you were going to put up at a garage sale. Make a pizza and share it with a few friends friends while you dust and clean the rest of the apartment. The worst that could happen is that they politely decline and you end up doing your tasks alone anyway.

Life is a team sport, no matter how much of a solo journey it can become. All it takes to improve isolation is an invitation.

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Mental Health

Therapist and mom helps struggling parents by explaining care tasks are ‘morally neutral'

'It's morally neutral' is my new phrase!

Photo by Richard Sagredo on Unsplash
woman in pink knit cap carrying baby in pink knit cap

Parents can sometimes struggle with the responsibility of keeping little people that depend on them alive, healthy and respectful, while also trying to maintain some semblance of a life outside of their kids. Keeping a house running, the lights on and maintaining relationships can result in balls being dropped due to sheer overwhelm. Care tasks like laundry, sweeping, mopping and even showering can end up getting sidelined. Care tasks are simply things that mean caring for one’s self or one’s space, otherwise known as cleaning or activities of daily living. The goal, no matter what you call it, is taking care of yourself.

K.C. Davis, a licensed professional counselor and mom, is known on TikTok for her approach to care tasks by taking the morality and shame out of completing or not completing these tasks. Davis’ catchphrase is “it’s morally neutral” when explaining that homes don’t need to be immaculate to show you care about your space, they just need to be functional.

Let’s take a moment to face an unfortunate fact that still perseveres in our modern society. The brunt of household tasks and family management is handled by the default parent, and in many households, that default parent is the mother. This is also known as invisible labor as it involves tasks that are expected to be completed, typically go unnoticed when they are completed, but are shockingly evident when they go undone.


@domesticblisters

#strugglecare #mentalhealth #caretasks #childhood

Davis makes caring for your home, self and children less of a moral duty that can make you feel like a failure and more like things that engender feelings of empowerment. She encourages the default parent to even the load by having open communication with their partner on what they need to feel supported.

Davis also spends time explaining tips and tricks that help her get things done, like setting a visual timer. We get to witness how she utilizes this timer in her everyday life through her videos showing how she “resets her space.” In the majority of her videos she encourages people to think of the functionality of their space and making it work for them.

@domesticblisters

Reply to @imhailey000 #strugglecare #mentalhealth #ADHD #cleantok #homecare #messismorallyneutral

According to Davis, functionality is key when it comes to care tasks, and she’s prepared with the tools for transforming a space from chaotic to functional. The focus of her videos is never on cleanliness, which can rub some folks the wrong way (as evidenced by her comment section). Her goal is to give primary caregivers and even single people the permission and empowerment to know that they deserve a functional space, and that care tasks are morally neutral.


In her book, "How to Keep House While Drowning," Davis explains how to be gentle with yourself while also caring for yourself and your home in a way that works best for you. Her gentle approach to care tasks is what keeps people coming back. It’s the validation that we all need.


This article originally appeared on 3.25.22

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Family

Mom has the perfect response to teen son who refuses to do 'girl' chores

What exactly are "girl" chores, anyway?

via Krampus Production/Pexels

A boy doing the dishes.

A 41-year-old mom with 3 boys, 12-year-old twins, and a 10-year-old, pays them $10 daily to do their chores. However, their pay is deducted $10 if they miss a day. The boys have to do their tasks 5 days a week, although it doesn’t matter which days they choose to work.

“This system has worked swimmingly for us since it started, the boys have always complied with completing their chores,” the mom wrote on Reddit.

Her 12-year-old son was getting ready to play Fortnite with a friend and told him he’d be ready in 15 minutes once he finished his chores. When the boys started playing the game, he told the friend he was in charge of dusting and sweeping the stairs, to which the friend responded, “It’s a good thing my parents don’t make me do girl chores.”

After learning what the friend said, the mom told her son that chores are genderless.

man cleaning a floor with a mopsilhouette of man standing near glass window during daytimePhoto by Gil Ribeiro on Unsplash

“I spoke with my son and explained to him that knowing how to clean was not specific to any gender, that it was a life skill everyone needed to know. I also told him that I understood that other families functioned differently; however, in our family, everyone did an equal share,” she wrote.

Over the next 3 days, the boy refused to do his “girl” chores. So, when allowance day came, the two brothers who did theirs received $50, but the 12-year-old who refused only got $20. The mom and the boy's father are divorced, so the 12-year-old called his dad to complain that he got $30 less, and the dad took his side.

“My ex-husband then proceeded to call me and tell me that I’m in the wrong for only giving him $20 and to imagine how it makes him feel that his brothers got more than he did. I explained to him that our other sons actually did their chores for all 5 days, so they were rewarded accordingly,” the mother wrote. “And assured him that if he had decided to start giving the boys an allowance, then he can run allowance however he wanted, but this was ultimately the system I had come up with.”

She added that her husband said she is being “insensitive” and “humiliating” their son.

The mom asked Reddit’s AITA subforum if she was in the wrong, and the commenters unanimously agreed that she was right. Other commenters noted that she made a smart decision leaving her ex-husband because he took the side of his child, who refused to do work for sexist reasons.

The only problem the commenters had was that the mom was being a little too generous by giving them $50 a week. That’s $600 a month for 3 kids.

"It’s the real world, you don’t do your job, you don’t get paid, and I actually think $10 a day is pretty generous for allowance," Longjumping-Gur-6581 wrote. "$10/day is insane for that age,” fIumpf added.

“You’re not taking money out of your son’s allowance, you’re not paying him for services not rendered,” Excitedorca wrote. “The sexist, misogynistic reasons behind not completing the chores need to be corrected and that won’t happen by rewarding it.”


This article originally appeared on 9.22.23

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Health

Therapist breaks down how to do household chores when you're depressed. It's a game changer.

'Replace "I'm failing," with "I'm having a hard time."'

Conttonbro via Canva

KC Davis breaks down how to do household chores when depressed.

Mental health struggles impact people from all ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. It doesn't matter if you're making millions of dollars or minimum wage, depression can still strike. Knowing how to care for yourself while depressed can make a huge difference in your ability to operate.

KC Davis, author of "How to Keep House While Drowning," breaks down household care tasks to make them more manageable for people struggling with depression. In her TEDx talk, the therapist gives multiple examples of tasks that can be broken down into smaller pieces to make your home functional. The first step in the process is being gentle with yourself and changing your mindset from "I'm failing" to "I'm having a hard time."

In 2020, around 21 million adults ages 18 and up experienced at least one major depressive episode. Depression can be debilitating for some individuals, causing them to have difficulty caring for their own needs or even getting out of bed. In Davis' TEDx talk she explains how to care for yourself even on the days you can't manage to get out of bed. Her advice involves a zip-close bag.

Yup, a plastic baggie. If there are days when you feel you can't get up, Davis' advice is to keep a gallon size zip-close bag on your night stand to put your dirty dishes in. It's a simple fix that seals in any odor the food may produce and won't attract bugs. The dirty dish will stay secured until you have the energy to take it to the kitchen, put it in the sink or wash it.

Small depression hacks like this can help a person feel less shame around the tasks not being done to the standards of society. Davis reiterates that, "care tasks are morally neutral" and "anything worth doing is worth doing half-assed." Check out her TEDx talk below.

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