Cleaning your room is not a moral issue.

Beethoven didn't make his bed.
In fact, he was filthy. He left filled chamber pots under his piano, wore overripe clothes... and, have you seen his hair?

Cleanliness is not next to godliness.

Beethoven is next to godliness.

I've been wanting to say clearly (having recently quoted Jordan Peterson's "make your bed") that I believe that taking agency, claiming our self-sovereignty are good things---
but what we do with our agency is our choice.

By definition:
Sovereignty means self-determination.
You do not take orders (unless you determine them to be helpful). Not from influencers ("arrange your designer ice-cubes in plexiglass trays!"); not from Jordan Peterson; not from your dead grandmother's voice in your head.
(I can still hear my mother's mother, and she definitely judged a person's character by the state of their bed––and in her eyes, mine was rumpled).

Now I'm off Meta, I'm not watching hundreds of 1-minute videos, I'm watching several18-minute TED Talks. I like sinking into a subject instead of skittering along the surface. (Not that that's not fun--like a shiny dragonfly!)

I watched a good TED talk yesterday--
"How to Do Laundry When You're Depressed". 
The speaker, KC Davis, emphasizes that
Care tasks are morally neutral.

Yes!
(She has a website too: strugglecare.com.)

A year ago, when I was learning about autism for my job at the high school, I came across a lot of helpful life hacks--neurodivergent people offering practical approaches to managing tasks.
(And of course you don't gave to be depressed or neurodivergent or laid up with a bad knee to experience overwhelm,
and to benefit from these approaches.)

Find work-arounds.
Can't wash dishes?
Use paper plates.
Can't handle the many steps of brushing your teeth?
You can buy toothbrushes with toothpaste already on them.

KC even talks about environmentalism:
It is better you stay alive than you take out your recycling. Buy the paper plates.
(And sadly, we individual households don't make much difference anyway.)

She doesn't say this, but if you're staying in bed all day, your carbon footprint is already pretty low. (lol, but true.)

One of my favorite hacks I read last year, personally, was:
you never have to fold your laundry.
If it's too much, or even if you just don't want to?
So what?
Don't.

That didn't change my behavior--it changed how I felt about my behavior.
Like so many of us (most of us?), I felt shame about not folding my laundry. But really, it doesn't bother me if it's sitting in the kitchen chair where guests sit. . . until guests come over.
(What's the harm, Grandmother? It's clean. Go away.)

KC Davis says the main issue is not good vs. bad, it's
WHAT WORKS?
What is most functional for you?

Determine that, and find ways to make it happen for you. It will take some work, but it will serve you, not some fictional judge.

I'd say this applies to most everything--including morality.
I mean, some things we determine are morally Good. But still, how we do or be them--what a functional approach to them is--is up to us.

There are some great teachers out there,
but if we accept their teaching, we still have to determine how to apply it. I just read that Thich Nhat Hanh changed the name of his teaching from Engaged Buddhism to Applied Buddhism. It's something you do. (Doing includes--starts with--breathing.)
If we accept it, what does 'love your neighbor' look like, applied?

NOTE: Suicide

Recently I've been watching more talks about suicide.
Every so often I sidle up to the topic. Have I developed a tolerance?
Recently, a little bit, ever since making that video about my mother taking her life, and then getting mad at her--and then being happy that if reincarnation were real, I would see her again.

I had watched this TED Talk years ago, and it's till my favorite--and judging by the comments, many other people's too:
Sami Moukaddem's
"On living with depression and suicidal feelings".

Of course I love him---he starts the talk holding onto a giant stuffed giraffe (is it a giraffe?).

It seems to me, the best talks and teachers are people who have survived suicide--not someone else's, but their own.

The least helpful may be the well-meaning people who have no clue and say things like, "Talk to your friends and family! Ask for help from someone you trust."

Their comment sections are full of replies like,
"I told my wife I wanted to die, and she told me to pull it together."
"No one loves me."
"The NHS put me on a two-year wait list."

Another longstanding favorite of mine is the New Yorker article "Jumpers" from 2003, about people who jump off San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

There's a way to access articles without subscriptions--but I think you can see one free article. (Then you have to sign out and in again--a pain.)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/10/13/jumpers

A Paywall Workaround

Oh!!! Here! I googled how, and found https://12ft.io

You type a url in their "clean website" box, and it give you the article or site without ads or anything.

"All we do is disable the javascript of the site. This obviously doesn't work for all websites, but it works for a surprisingly large proportion of them. "

It doesn't provide a shareable live link--but I put in the Jumpers url, and there was the article.
______________________

We don't know what people who succeed feel, but the article reports,

Survivors often regret their decision mid-air.

Ken Baldwin hurdled over the railing, afraid that if [he] stood on the chord he might lose his courage.
“I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”

But I always imagined my mother felt relief, honestly.
She shot herself, so she died too fast for regrets;
but first, she had shot one bullet into the wall. (The police found it.)

I take a weird comfort that she had had time to realize the gun worked––she would have felt and heard its power––and she had an opportunity, a moment to decide "not to jump", as it were.
But she did.

For her to have stopped then--and I know she had stopped herself many times before--so very many things would have had to be different for so, so long...
I can't even imagine.

We can help each other, but we cannot force someone into being saved.
I am not the savior.
And if someone I love takes their life, at that point I say, well...

We can try again in our next incarnation.

Is that true?

Who cares?
It's a story-line that I like a lot––a workaround of crippling moral judgement or dead-end despair.
The paper plate for "I cannot wash the dishes."

Rest.
And try again on another day. Or, another life.