Our faucet and sprayer have been broken for about three years—far longer than they worked. (My parents have an earlier revision of our faucet that is going on a decade; the new one barely worked for more than a year.)

Now, it’s not broken broken; it’s just sort-of broken. The sprayer works, but the button that actuates it gets stuck, so it might take a minute or two to turn off while the button very slowly unsticks. The faucet works fine, but it drips unless you close it at a slight angle, just right. And our sink is stainless steel, so you really hear every drop.

My wife and I know exactly how to close the faucet. It’s kind of rewarding. It’s also pretty silly. It occurred to me, the other day, that we’d gotten really good at doing things the wrong way.

We do this all the time, in different kinds of ways. This might or might not be your fault. If you’re trying to walk along a six-lane road, for example, or biking with aggressive traffic—I have to find a land-use tie in here!—the design works against what you’re doing, and if you manage to make it pleasant, it’s no thanks to the environment you’re being put in.

But sometimes it is your fault. My wife and I could have replaced the faucet at any moment, and instead we got really good at dealing with it. So good that I’d almost miss the little ritual of turning it off just right. But of course I wouldn’t; I’d say wow, I forgot how nice it feels to be able to turn the faucet off and it actually turns off!

I wonder how much of what we consider “work” is actually just laboring needlessly under suboptimal conditions. I raised something like that in yesterday’s piece, which, if you missed it, read it here:

I remember a lunch conversation with some folks back at my old magazine job, and one of my old colleagues declared, “I think it’s a good thing that health insurance is so hard to figure out, because it means you have to take responsibility for your family.”

What a dismal, misanthropic, self-loathing sentiment—and even more so because there are undoubtedly people holding elected office who think this way and act on it. In this view, making people’s lives easier is not only an unnecessary pursuit, but an illegitimate one.

After awhile, that suboptimal situation becomes so natural that doing things right, which would also be easier, comes to feel like cheating. But it’s not.

This is one of those things that strikes me as an important insight. I think it might explain a lot about our national life and our problems. What do you think? I’ll probably be coming back to this idea. In the meantime, leave a comment!

Related Reading:

Simple Dishwashers

A Hard Day’s Wash, Part 2

The Spider Skeleton

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