The Power of Doing Less (and Being Happier)
The Dishwasher That Changed My Life I once read a short story about a therapist that I still think about regularly. A woman was venting in a session about how much she hated washing dishes. The chore filled her with resentment. It felt endless. And to make matters worse, her dishwasher never seemed to get the dishes clean. The therapist listened and then said something so obvious it felt revolutionary: “Run the dishwasher twice.” That was it. No deep childhood excavation. No reframing her relationship with domestic labor. Just permission to do the thing in a way that actually worked. Something clicked in my brain. Because the problem wasn’t the dishes. It was the anger she felt every single day while doing them. That tiny shift, the idea that we’re allowed to remove unnecessary friction from our lives, quietly changed mine. Because maybe sometimes there is a hidden cost to doing things the "right" way. For years, I did chores the “correct” way. The socially approved ...