I hate sterile environments.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to be swimming in a vat of aids whenever I go to the hospital, and the surgeon certainly should not lather up with a good rinse of raccoon guts just before cutting me open. I’m not talking about those places where sterility is necessary. I’m talking about places where it’s not, which is basically everywhere but hospitals and those factories where a tiny dust particle can ruin a microprocessor. Keep your hazmat suits on, people, this isn’t about you. I’m talking about normal, everyday places where sterility has crept in. And it’s caused by the endless pursuit of clean.
Carpet is hard to clean, so replace it with vinyl flooring. Brick looks dirty, so paint it white. Bright colors fade, so embrace the beige inevitability you sad baby, you. I’ve written before about the cost of convenience, and in many ways this is the same criticism. A gas fireplace can be turned on with a switch. How convenient! And you don’t have to mess with logs or ashes. How clean! How wrong!
People pay through the nose to vacation in cabins made with wood and stone. They gather before the fireplace, enthralled by the burning logs chopped by the bewildered redneck who owns the place, and whose upcharging eighty-five dollars for the fire, which the guests happily pay. These cabins can and will never be fully cleaned. A permanent smell of those base materials permeates every square inch of it. That fireplace smells of smoke, and its sparks must be kept at bay with a black iron grate.
And people love it.
Why? Because it feels real. It feels natural. It’s the absolute opposite of sterile.
You know that feeling you get in a hospital? And set aside the emotions of loss or pain, just the vibe of the place. Take the loss out of the equation, and if you’ve ever been to a hospital that doesn’t handle emergencies, like a dermatologist’s office or even a dentist’s office. These places should and must be sterile. But they’re not comfortable. There’s… something about them. You want to leave. And you should. Get your work done and go stand in the grass. Much better.
So why are we turning our homes, our restaurants, everywhere into hospitals? Not only does it feel uncomfortable, it’s literally killing us. A certain amount of bacteria is healthy, and our too-clean world is creating super-bugs that antibiotics struggle to treat. Not to mention that the ‘clean’ look often uses plastic. That plastic floor doesn’t look so clean when you realize walking on it barefoot is basically scraping microplastics into your heels!
Again, don’t go painting your walls with roadkill de jour, and I understand many people can’t afford to brick over their homes. But if it’s already there, leave it alone! Brick, wood, metal, stone. These are unsterile but beautiful things that replacing them with sterile, clean-looking plastic will just build up a credit card in your system like we’re walking cash registers. And if things are a little messy, that’s fine. Consider it your daily vaccine against the pursuit of sterility. And if our lived-in environments look like those unsterile cabins, we never have to pay Cleatus for the pleasure of risking getting shot on his property when he gets drunk and thinks we work for the census.