Why is it easier for humans to make the mess instead of cleaning it up?
In: Biology
This is just my guess, but I think when “making a mess” it’s a result of some other task. For example, I want to make dinner, so I take the pots and pans out, I chop all the vegetables, I accidentally spill a bit, I use plates and now they have food residue on them.
Cleaning up requires the conscious decision to clean stuff up, and small clean ups don’t have the same “reward” as the previous example.
I get 3 outfits from my closet, sprawl them on the bed to choose what I like, and from that I get the satisfaction of choosing a nice outfit, and feeling pretty.
Now if I want to put those outfits neatly back in the closet, all I get is… Neutral? We are back to before the mess, which may be slightly satisfying, but it wasn’t as satisfying as the activity that made the mess was.
That’s my take on it at least.
I think most people view cleaning as less of an enjoyable task, and more a necessary evil, and the only way to make it a normal part of your life is to make it a habit (be it a cleaning rota or a to do list) or else it just won’t get done, because it’s fun to throw confetti, it’s not fun to sweep it up
Entropy. It is always easier to disorder things than to order them, just as a fact of the universe. On some occasions, order is actually the best way to cause things to tend to disorder fastest (see: the fact that life consumes a whole lot of ordered energy and turns it into useless heat and waste), but cleaning your room is not one of them.
Almost any state of things can be characterised as a mess, while only a few states are in the order we refer as ”clean”.
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