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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   2085 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for April 5, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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What does TheMotte think about hiring a home cleaning service? There are a few wrinkles I consider when hiring a monthly or bimonthly cleaning service:

  1. I am very cheap and hate spending any discretionary income on anything, let alone a cleaning service.

  2. I have it in my head that I will buck up and actually clean the bathroom, but I've been living in my apartment a year and hardly ever do. (I've had cleaning services come by so it's not like my bathroom is completely disgusting).

Number 2 conflicts heavily with number 1 and causes me guilt. I feel like cleaning my house (really the bathroom) is something I should do without paying for a service, but I find it to be something I never get around to doing. So I'm pretty much at the point where I'm going to throw in the towel and schedule a monthly cleaning service. It's not cheap, $160 for a one bedroom apartment, but clearly I can't handle this chore myself.

I'm laughing as I write this post because it's so ridiculous, but here I am.

If it helps on point 1., you might be able to get it for cheaper? I don't know about the US, but here in London I'd expect to pay less than half that to clean a one-bed apartment. (Maybe we're all just Europoors?)

Ya in my neck of the woods you can get a non-corporate cleaner to come in for like $30 an hour -- 2-3 hours seems like it would be plenty for a pro to clean a one bedroom?

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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