Rick's b.log - entry 2026/02/08

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Why washing the dishes is so much harder than examining......random stuff.

I did not do this because I wanted a clean kitchen, and certainly not because I had suddenly developed a fondness for domestic order, but simply because I had reached the point where I could no longer eat without doing so.
Every plate, bowl, fork, spoon, and mug had been used. The choice was stark and just a touch dramatic for something so mundane: wash the dishes, or don't eat. Despite the temptation to just shrug and go to bed, clearly one of those options was unsustainable and unhealthy...so I and my "assembled by the Sunday graveyard shift" brain were extorted by my stomach and so I stood at the sink and did the thing.

From an external point of view, that is you reading this, this story is barely worth telling. The task took perhaps twenty minutes. Boil the kettle for hot water (I don't run the immersion heater unless I have to as it takes forever to heat way more water than I need), cover the dishes in the hot water to let the grot soak for a few minutes, heat another kettle a little and then do the wash/rinse/rack a bunch of times, then job done. Twenty minutes, tops.

And this is exactly why it is so often misunderstood. Twenty minutes is the only part that anyone ever sees, and so twenty minutes becomes the entire narrative. But twenty minutes is merely the visible part of the cost, not the cost itself. The real effort had already been expended elsewhere, invisibly, in a place that most people never think about.

What makes this all so jarring and a touch annoying is that I can, without any hesitation or complaint, spend an entire afternoon absorbed in something that looks far more demanding. I can lose myself in the workings of a heated blanket controller or a mechanical washing machine controller. Not using it, but simply understanding it. Why this component, why that method, how the cogs work, what assumptions the designer made about failure and safety and, of course, cost. And, of course, there're the days that become weeks writing some software to do something that only takes me a few minutes to do otherwise. ☺
Time evaporates. Mental energy appears from nowhere. There is no internal argument, no bargaining, no need to threaten myself with hunger to get going (though when I'm absorbed I do frequently neglect mealtimes).

This is usually where people reach for explanations involving motivation or priorities, and this is where things quietly start going wrong. It is tempting, especially in a culture that prizes visible productivity, to assume that what is easy reflects those things we value, and what is hard reflects some sort of moral failing. It is also very tempting, especially after years of being told so, directly or otherwise, to conclude that the problem must be one of motivation, discipline, or character. That if only one tried harder, or cared more, or paid attention, the sink would not acquire its own lifeforms.

That I can understand complex things for pleasure, and not work, means I have a decent analytical mind. But that I struggle with housework chores means I'm lazy, feckless, badly brought up, and basically failing at adulting.
We all know that the negatives are remembered far more than the positives.

The thing is, not only is this interpretation damaging, it won't stand up to even casual scrutiny. The same brain that resists washing a plate is capable of sustained, intricate reasoning, hyperfocusing for hours on technical minutiæ (and that's because I'm a nerd; others may do craftwork or whatever, but the sustained focus and intricacies are there).
The difference is not the willingness to do something, it is the conditions under which the doing becomes possible.

People with ADHD are often intensely motivated, just not by the things society labels as important. The issue isn't in wanting to do things, it's activating the neural systems required to begin tasks that don't provide immediate feedback. Action does not flow smoothly from intention. The systems that initiate tasks, particularly those that are repetitive, low-reward, and endlessly recurring, are far more fragile. This is not because such tasks are "disliked" in some manner, but because they fail to generate the internal signals that say that now would be a good time to do this thing. Dopamine, so often mislabelled as "the pleasure molecule", is better thought of as relevance. Washing the dishes simply does not feel relevant to the brain until it becomes urgent, and by then it has already accumulated plenty of additional, unnecessary, emotional weight (from "oh my god, I'm so useless this has all piled up" to "do this or don't eat, it's that simple").

Autism complicates this picture further, and where ADHD and autism overlap, the friction increases again. Washing dishes is not merely boring; it is sensorily hostile: hot water and steam, unpleasant smells (old food and whatever washing liquid is supposed to smell of) the feel of grease (especially on your fingers that just won't wash off), the sharply unpredictable clatter of crockery, standing still leaning slightly forwards, repeating the same movements again and again... None of this is neutral, for a sensory-sensitive nervous system it is actively draining.
In addition, there is no reward other than a piece of crockery upon which to dump a pile of linguine and a fork in which to eat it with. At which point the plate, and fork, and saucepan, will now become dirty once again. There's no advancing, there is no end goal, just once in a while keeping entropy and mycelium at bay for a little while. Dishes don't have an arc, there is nothing to understand, no flash of inspiration. It's just a rote repetition of the last time I had to do this. It is deeply unsatisfying to a brain that wants meaning, structure, and progression. Doing the dishes is a lighter load than Sisyphus endured, but otherwise not so different to his plight.

By contrast, technical exploration is often sensorily clean. The environment is controllable. Screwdrivers and screws are, usually, controllable (even if we must accept that at least one screw will wander away never to be seen again). Inputs, outputs, and feedback are all clear, even if they may begin as mysteries to be solved. The only chaos is in the initial regard, the "how the hell does that even work?" moment, but by being precise and methodical, each little part will reveal its secrets, a series of micro-rewards, until the whole can be understood. You learn something. You understand something. It is intellectually satisfying.
For a brain that struggles with sensory overload and relevance, this matters enormously. One task regulates while the other dysregulates. One task pays with interest, the other actively loses value.
Again, and I want to make this very clear, this has nothing to do with virtue, and everything to do with nervous systems interacting with environments that were not designed with them in mind. And, just to throw it in because "you're just lazy" has turned up enough times to be actively depressing, people with ADHD do have differences in their brains. This is how we are, not how we're choosing to be.

What is rarely acknowledged is how much actual invisible cognition is required just to begin a task like washing dishes. Before the tap is even turned on, the brain must notice the task, decide that it matters now rather than some wishy-washy vague "later", disengage from whatever it was doing, sequence a series of steps, tolerate the sensory environment, and commit to seeing it through. Each of these steps draws on executive function, and executive function is not infinitely available. For people with ADHD, the margin is thinner. It does not take much for the system to stall, to grind to a halt.

When this stalling happens, it is often misread as procrastination or avoidance. From the outside, it looks like simply choosing not to act. From the inside, it feels more like waiting for a signal that never quite arrives. Yes, I was quite aware of the growing pile of dishes, it did not sneak up on me, but it never really felt "urgent". I'll do it, I know I'll do it, just not right now. This continues until, eventually, something external intervenes and gives the necessary push. Hunger is an effective motivator. Urgency cuts through where abstraction cannot. Faced with immediate consequences, the brain can finally get about to doing something. The dishes finally get washed.
The story, from the outside, becomes one of far too much unnecessary drama over a really simple task.

What gets lost in this way of telling the story is the cost of living like this. When urgency is the only reliable trigger for action for all of those mundane tasks, life becomes a series of low-grade crises. Things get done at the last possible moment, not because of poor planning, but because that is when the brain finally receives permission to act. Without the urgency, the dopamine gets expended elsewhere and other things get done. Things that may not be necessary, but are rewarding. The pressure of the urgency is a workaround, a hack, that provides the missing signal to push a task into a "this is relevant right now" status.
This is, however, exhausting, the need to wait for an urgency in order to do the unsatisfying tasks. It also feeds a quiet sense of shame, because the narrative offered by society is that such struggles are self-inflicted, that we choose to live like this. This isn't a design flaw, it's a specialisation that is out of step with the way the world works.

This is where the misunderstanding becomes systemic. Traits associated with ADHD would have been assets in other contexts, such as curiosity, improvisation, exploration, pattern recognition, and the ability to intensely focus on interesting problems. What gets rewarded today is routine, consistency, and invisible labour; the kind of work that must be done repeatedly, produces no lasting improvement, and is noticed only when it fails. We then moralise the struggle to provide this. The result is shame layered on top of neurological reality. It is even worse when we know how well our brains can work when they are correctly motivated, only for them to be floored by a domestic chore. Or maybe I should be more accurate and say a series of unsatisfying micro-decisions and unpleasant sensations masquerading as a chore.

For neurodivergent people, this creates a particularly cruel situation. The things they find easy are often dismissed as indulgent, irrelevant, or straight up pointless while the things they find hard are treated as basic requirements of adulthood. The effort expended on simply staying functional goes unrecognised, because it leaves no obvious trace. Clean dishes are not praised, nor do they even have the grace to stay clean. Only dirty dishes get noticed.

Understanding this does not magically solve the kitchen problem. The dishes will need washing again. And again. And again. And again, entropy will continue to do what it does best. But reframing this struggle matters because it shifts the question away from personal failure and toward environmental mismatch. It acknowledges that difficulty is not evenly distributed, and that time is a hugely misleading proxy for effort.

Perhaps the most damaging misunderstanding is the belief that if something looks simple, it must be simple for everyone. This belief allows society to ignore sensory differences, executive function differences, and the very real cognitive load involved in tasks that produce no lasting results, and to view boredom or avoidance as a moral failure rather than a genuine psychological state. It allows us to judge rather than accommodate.

So yes, I washed the dishes. I ate. The world continued much as before. And then I spent many times longer than that took writing a blog article about it. ☺
But this story was never about twenty minutes at the sink. It is about how much of life is structured around assumptions that simply do not hold for everybody. It is about how often those who struggle under those assumptions are told, explicitly or implicitly, that the problem is them.

A brain that can happily unravel the logic of a gizmos and controllers is not broken. It is just living in a world that mistakes effort for morality, and invisibility for ease.
Or, to put it in nerdy terms: People with ADHD are running a specialist operating system in a general purpose world.

And, finally, as another self-demonstrating article, this entry was written in a room that still needs tidying and there is exactly one plate beside the sink.
I'll tell you what, I'll pop the kettle on to heat water to wash the plate and with the leftover water I'll make myself a cuppa...just thinking that I can almost feel the Dopamine and Serotonin bubbling up from someplace deep inside. Now it's time to turn the thought into executive function and, to be blunt, get shit done.

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