Cleaning makes the house dirtier. Takes the dirt out of hidden cracks and spreads it around where you can see. All you can notice is spots you missed. The more money you make the poorer you feel. Going to the doctor makes you sick or afraid. Working out makes you too stiff to move. All human effort is appointments in Samarra. What you wanted to was to feel like the house was clean. To feel like you did something. But doing something only opens up more to do.
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Heidegger has a name for the first half of this. When you live in a house, you don’t really perceive it. The moment you clean it, it stops being something you inhabit and becomes an object you're inspecting, with infinite properties that were ignored before. That's the shift from Zuhandenheit (ready-to-hand) to Vorhandenheit (present-at-hand). The dirt did not increase but you notice more of it.
Suffering (dukkha) arises from the desire and craving to resist this experience of the infinite regress of noticing more opening up and the terror of groundlessness (Heidegger’s Abgrund or Buddhist sunyata, emptiness of inherent existenxe and essence)
You have to pull back and remember the Worumwillen, the for-the-sake-of-which, of the action undertaken: the resoluteness of Entschlossenheit.
Sep 10, 2026 · 9:31 AM UTC
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