> Like, I'm defining "unpleasant" to mean really horrible, something actively negative, like e.g. cleaning up vomit might be, whereas you just mean "not that interesting / fun"?
I mean something in between. Not necessarily causing revulsion or mental pain, but still less preferable than doing nothing at all.
> I tend to find that my attitude towards these sorts of tasks varies depending on how stressed I am.
That's definitely true for me too.
> It seems to me that you must have a line somewhere - like gardening for example, is that a maintenance task, or is that different because it's not actually necessary? Decorating the interior of a house?
Depends. I'd definitely prefer for the garden to maintain itself by magic instead of having to micromanage it, and having no other option, I'd probably turn gardening into a set of half-baked electronics hobby projects. Decorating the house? That's a one-off task, a means to an end. Still, while I'd happily decorate the thing in CAD software[0], I'd happily pay someone to assemble and put the new stuff according to instructions. I've assembled and moved enough furniture in my life for that to become boring.
(A somewhat related example that's current for me: Kerbal Space Program. Your first couple dozen orbital insertions, your first couple dozen manual orbital intercepts and dockings, are all super fun. But after a while it gets so repetitive that you wish for a way to automate it. When your goals shift from "let's land on the Mun for the first time" to "I want to send 250-ton spaceship to Duna for long-term planetary studies", you start realizing that doing a dozen launches to assemble it in orbit is a chore, and you don't want to spend the hours required to do it.)
Maybe it's the "mastery" thing? There's this well-known "Frustration/Boredom" chart floating around the Internet, see e.g. [1]. Most maintenance tasks don't require too much skill for good enough results, so with near-zero challenge, repetitive nature, and goal being mostly treading water, it's just one big grind. People probably have different thresholds of tolerance for that.
Another issue is whether this is even self-directed. Living with other people means that you may be asked to do maintenance tasks way before you yourself think they're needed. In these cases, I find the work doubly frustrating.
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[0] - which I recently did, to accommodate our newborn.
I mean something in between. Not necessarily causing revulsion or mental pain, but still less preferable than doing nothing at all.
> I tend to find that my attitude towards these sorts of tasks varies depending on how stressed I am.
That's definitely true for me too.
> It seems to me that you must have a line somewhere - like gardening for example, is that a maintenance task, or is that different because it's not actually necessary? Decorating the interior of a house?
Depends. I'd definitely prefer for the garden to maintain itself by magic instead of having to micromanage it, and having no other option, I'd probably turn gardening into a set of half-baked electronics hobby projects. Decorating the house? That's a one-off task, a means to an end. Still, while I'd happily decorate the thing in CAD software[0], I'd happily pay someone to assemble and put the new stuff according to instructions. I've assembled and moved enough furniture in my life for that to become boring.
(A somewhat related example that's current for me: Kerbal Space Program. Your first couple dozen orbital insertions, your first couple dozen manual orbital intercepts and dockings, are all super fun. But after a while it gets so repetitive that you wish for a way to automate it. When your goals shift from "let's land on the Mun for the first time" to "I want to send 250-ton spaceship to Duna for long-term planetary studies", you start realizing that doing a dozen launches to assemble it in orbit is a chore, and you don't want to spend the hours required to do it.)
Maybe it's the "mastery" thing? There's this well-known "Frustration/Boredom" chart floating around the Internet, see e.g. [1]. Most maintenance tasks don't require too much skill for good enough results, so with near-zero challenge, repetitive nature, and goal being mostly treading water, it's just one big grind. People probably have different thresholds of tolerance for that.
Another issue is whether this is even self-directed. Living with other people means that you may be asked to do maintenance tasks way before you yourself think they're needed. In these cases, I find the work doubly frustrating.
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[0] - which I recently did, to accommodate our newborn.
[1] - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Flow-state-frustration-a...