Three years ago, I bought a rundown dump of an old hunting camp and have been fixing it up ever since. This process has involved, among countless other (invariably stinky) tasks, hauling out a musty AstroTurf “area rug” and skim-coating the swirly, 1970s plaster walls, stained a tawny color by decades of cigarette smoke. When I took possession of the property, ridding the thing of its tobacco-juiced floors and plastic-everything bathroom couldn’t happen soon enough. Now though, as the project nears completion, I’m disappointed. I’ve found I crave chores.
I know I’m not alone. When I wrote a piece last summer about how mowing the lawn is underrated, I received many messages in praise of puttering. In writing my forthcoming book, Woke-Proof Your Life, I found plenty of research affirming that the impulse my fellow eager honey-doers and I have in wanting to complete mundane tasks and pursue passion projects is healthy and natural. It’s also my experience that the more our lives have become automated, online, and inundated with woke messaging and “news” manufactured to arouse fear and division, the more we crave chores and hobbies — and the more we need them.
Wokeness, for all the professed confusion surrounding its definition, is nothing new. Nor is it a complicated concept. Wokeness is simply radical, left-wing ideology using updated terminology. It’s just political correctness on steroids, and it seems screen time is the “juice” most responsible for growing the chaotic machine. It appears the reason wokeness has gained such
