The Adult in the Room Is You

As the coronavirus spreads and those of us without essential jobs remain indoors, it becomes more and more apparent how our reliance on the service and gig economies have made some of us terrible at accomplishing mundane yet necessary household tasks.

We’ve outsourced these basic homemaking skills, and now we’re left to fend for ourselves for a while. Our dependence on their services has compounding consequences: Some people have found themselves out of work and not getting paid by the people who usually employ them; undocumented workers who occupy these jobs have little aid to get by. Without their help, our reliance on their skills is laid bare, giving people a new appreciation for these people and their services.

When Hulu recommended Basic Skills Challenge to me, a fairly proficient home cook, I was mildly offended. For as long as I can remember, I’ve relished home cooking. My parents divorced when I was young, and I’d often help my mom with dinner when I’d get home from school, while she was still at work, browning ground beef for tacos or putting together a salad. I learned to do laundry and scrub the shower because if we didn’t do it ourselves, it wouldn’t get done.

In New York, you can get anything — dinner, laundry, someone to clean your apartment — delivered to you instantaneously. When I first moved here and started reporting on these companies in 2014 as a broke intern, I scoffed. I couldn’t imagine the luxury of outsourcing these kinds of menial tasks, and I silently judged able-bodied friends and co-workers who seemed to rely on others to do them.

But I’ve admittedly gotten lazier in my homemaking skills as I’ve gotten older and moved to a city that enables all of the worst tendencies of adults who don’t want to — or don’t know how to — do anything themselves. Eventually, I got a job, and without any knowledge of the importance of a work-life balance, that job overtook my life. Silicon Valley startups’ seemingly endless ability to subsidize their services with venture capital emboldened me; I might not have tried Postmates otherwise, but a $10 discount code for new users tempted me.

Of course, I was an entry-level journalist, so I was limited by my finances, and as I began reporting on the exploitative labor practices these companies relied on to keep their overhead costs low, I limited my usage and tipped extravagantly, in cash when I could. In a time before the coronavirus, I’d cook most nights during the week, clean the apartment myself, and only allowed myself one luxury: the wash-and-fold, drop-off service at my laundromat across the street. Most of my friends are like me: We regularly cook for each other and aren’t overly reliant on the kinds of services that adults seem to seek out as replacements for their mothers.

But a quick glance around social media made me think that among my urban-dwelling peers, maybe it was me and my friends who were the anomaly. A video of Real Housewife of New York Ramona Singer shared on Instagram by her daughter Avery showed Singer, who is self-isolating with her daughter and ex-husband in Florida, cleaning her toilet. But much to my horror, instead of using the brush to scrub the inside of the bowl, she rubbed the brush — which, I cannot stress enough, is intended for use inside the toilet bowl itself — all over the seat, the toilet lid, and the outside of the bowl. “You’re like a professional!” Avery marveled. “Brings me back to my childhood. How many years was that? A long time ago!” Singer replied. (She has also recently been documenting her journey using a mop on Instagram.)

Well, okay, you may be saying, of course, a real housewife cannot be expected to take care of basic adult tasks. That’s why they typically outsource these chores to people they pay. Dear reader, this inability for people to complete standard home care tasks on their own extends beyond Bravolebrities. Now, we are all Ramona Singer. Our friends, colleagues, and neighbors have started to do the kinds of domestic work they normally outsource themselves.

For Manny Ocbazghi, a producer at Insider, this has meant cooking for himself for the first time and doing it cheaply — and in the process, eating an astounding number of eggs. “Before the virus, I rarely cooked, maybe a couple times a month, would always order out or go somewhere to eat,” he told me. But when he learned how cheap a carton of eggs was compared to his usual takeout orders, everything changed. At first, Ocbazghi cooked up omelets or scrambles, which was all he knew how to make. But he quickly grew tired of those and has since expanded into new horizons, making sunny-side up, boiled, and poached eggs. Now, he says, “at least two of my three meals are eggs or involve eggs.”

As happy as I may be for people learning to cook for themselves right now — and I’m very happy for them — I couldn’t hide my distress about Ocbazghi’s egg-forward diet. It reminded me of a subway horror story my friend Julia told me. A few years ago she saw a guy waiting for the L train during morning rush hour, eating scrambled eggs out of a plastic, Ziplock-style bag with his bare hands. It sends a chill down my spine to this day.

Moshe Isaacian, a 26-year-old social media strategist in Portland, is used to relying on his local laundromat, a maid, and occasionally his parents for help cleaning and cooking. But post-Covid, when it no longer feels safe or ethical to rely on external services, he’s taken matters into his own hands: cooking, doing his own laundry, and cleaning the bathroom himself. “I had to learn which products to buy, how often to maintain the stuff myself, and do all the cleaning,” he told me.

“It can be overwhelming and time-consuming, but I’m getting the hang of it slowly.” Isaacian has found it more difficult than he anticipated. “I didn’t realize how much effort goes into shopping and doing the physical cleaning,” he said. “Just cleaning my bathroom and shower was a half-day ordeal.” As my childhood home’s onetime bathroom cleaner, I could relate to how draining it could be to clean a bathroom but… I cannot imagine the whole thing taking more than an hour or two, tops. Perhaps he is scrubbing the grout in the bathroom tiles, too?

The beauty industry has taken a hit as shops close across the country and people shelter in place to ride out the pandemic. Meanwhile in quarantine, some, in the absence of nail techs and hairstylists to help, have taken to cutting their own bangs and doing their own waxing. Pinterest saw a spike in search for people looking to remove their acrylic nails, up 173%, according to Teen Vogue.

For Mary, who lives in upper Manhattan, no longer having access to the beauty technicians she’s come to rely on meant learning how to do her own nails and removing her eyelash extensions — and paying her aestheticians anyway. “Normally, I’d go to my lash technician every three weeks. I sent her the tip I would normally send on Venmo anyway last week,” she told me. “And I’d get a manicure maybe once every two or three weeks, depending on how the last one held up. I had gel on before the closures, mostly because I wasn’t thinking when I got it.” She’s since picked off the gel manicure, and as for the lashes: “I tried to take care of them, but once they got too straggly, I used olive oil to coax them off — it didn’t go as great as it could have.”

The beauty industry, Mary told me, has commodified the idea of well-being, and coronavirus has made her reconsider why she thinks about getting her nails done regularly to be such an integral part of her appearance. I used to relish my twice-monthly manicures that I gave up necessarily last month, so I get where she’s coming from. “In a lot of ways, I have no business complaining, and I really am not trying to do that,” Mary told me. “At the same time, I think it’s also fair to worry about the livelihoods of the people whose businesses are now stalled and to also mourn the life you had literally weeks ago. For a lot of people, and especially people with disposable incomes and no kids, those can seem to be vapid or frivolous, and I think that gets compounded by the fact that I am a woman and the things I spent money on are often considered nonessential. I don’t know what the right answer is, but I do know that the least I can do is go without for a few weeks or months.”

I’m trying hard not to judge people who are just now learning how to fend for themselves — it’s not always easy or particularly fun. I found myself resenting having to make a breakfast burrito this weekend instead of enjoying the task like I normally would. We’re in a pandemic, and everyone’s trying their best. And maybe for the first time, they’re being honest about what tasks they can’t do — and that’s not easy.

As we adjust to our chaotic, indoor-only new normal, we’re still stumbling around in the dark, learning to pick up the skills we’re so used to paying others to do for us. In the Before Times, Ocbazghi’s days often consisted of lunches in Manhattan’s Financial District near his office. For dinner, he’d order in using UberEats or Seamless. “I got an Instant Pot for Christmas and was using that for a bit but that fizzled out,” he said. “I think what will likely happen is that I won’t go full cook mode but I will try to hit an order-out and cook equilibrium.” However, all of his egg-cooking comes with one downside. “I have been recently notified that [a high-egg diet] could be destroying my cholesterol,” he told me. “So I think I’m gonna try and curb a bit.”

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