cleantok "villains" & the morality of messiness | Internet Analysis 

Welcome back!! I can't stop thinking about cleaning! ... rather than actually doing it, of course. // Try Rocket Money for free: rocketmoney.com/tiffanyferg #RocketMoney #personalfinance

When i was little, i used to watch this show where people with cleaning ocd went and cleaned a persons house with hoarding ocd and basically the moral of the story was that both parties needed a lot of therapy lmaoo

The "Guys's Eyes" thing really bothers me. I hate the "hapless dopey husband" trope

Amanda outright calling her daughter a "bitch" STRUCK me. No matter what a kid does that's sooo beyond a reasonable and healthy adult approach to the situation.

that husband that "doesn't see the mess" reeeeeealy sounds like he just can't be arsed to clean anything

This reminds me of when I was in college , reading articles on domestic and unpaid labor between men and women (for women’s gender and sexualities studies). I remember one of the articles points out that when heterosexual men are expected to do housework, it’s usually jobs that don’t need to happen every single day. Things like mowing the lawn, cleaning the gutters: they are usually jobs that don’t need to be done immediately. Conversely, heterosexual women are expected to do housework that is highly visible when skipped: washing dishes, dusting, vacuuming. It’s the type of housework that is highly noticeable when you skip doing it. I took that class 7 years ago and it’s always interesting how we have new platforms these issues always pop up, usually wearing a different name.

Then your parents come over to your adult house, and Dad goes, "dishes in the sink, huh?". Yeah, Dad. I'm disabled and work - my spouse works. Sometimes dirty dishes stay in the sink.

“why doesn’t my husband help me clean? well he has a case of what i call man’s eyes where he doesn’t see when something is dirty” godspeed to all the stay at home mothers out there genuinely bc patriarchal propaganda is crazy like… that is a grown man who also lives in that house with yall. how are we any closer to “de-stigmatizing messiness” when we can’t even take the blinders off to acknowledge the root causes of why mothers/individuals are the one left w/ the burden of all this + more in the first place :/

There’s an author and social media creator named KC Davis who wrote a book called “How to Keep House While Drowning” she talks about changing the language you use about cleaning, the one that helped me the most was swapping out the word cleaning with resetting because resetting has the expectation of messiness. It helped me realize that everything is going to get messy and cleaning is just how we reset the cycle and that whatever point I’m at in that cycle is morally neutral. I grew up in a hyper clean home. My siblings and I all suffer from mental illness and my mom has had to learn that the state of our homes is (often) due to our mental illnesses, she’s working on learning not to comment on it

Midwest Magic Cleaning (stills from the channel were featured a few times) may not have been the best example for this video: they specifically help people deal with hoarding disorder and are up front about how they don't expect the state they leave the house to be how it will stay. They are clear as well about how hoarding is a manifestation of a mental state and isn't so simple to deal with; they are respectful about how they clean and what they throw away, as they don't want to break people's trust when someone else comes in to help. If it isn't rotting, gone bad, or just trash, they keep all of it. What they can't fit back in the cabinets, they put in clearly labeled tubs. They do this because the guy who runs the channel likes cleaning, particularly extreme cleaning, and because most people with hoarding disorder couldn't possibly pay for this kind of service. It's a lovely empathetic thing to do for someone, and thankfully the youtube channel pays for their sometimes considerable expenses.

special shoutout to everyone who was raised by parents (moms) who cleaned eveything, never learned how to clean, and then one day your parents were mad at you for not knowing how to do basic stuff. like huh, almost like someone should’ve taught me how to do that 10 years ago 🤔

as someone with very severe adhd, I appreciate the normalization of executive dysfunction. but I also grew up with a mom with executive dysfunction so I'm very sensitive to the idea of subjecting poor living conditions to someone else (especially kids but also pets). I deeply relate to being traumatized by growing up in dirty conditions, and I can't imagine having those conditions posted online. It's important to have empathy for people who have trouble cleaning, and to not take the ability to clean for granted. I also relate to the idea of cleaning baggage, where I was so used to being berated for cleaning things "the wrong way" that I freeze up when I try to clean something myself. It's not a failure to admit you need help, but it is a failure to those dependent on you to maintain those conditions in perpetuity. If there's a moldy dish in my sink, that's self harm, that's my adhd impacting myself. If I had a child, that moldy dish would be harming them too, and there needs to be a solution to minimize that harm (division of labor with a partner, hiring a cleaner, etc). Overworked moms definitely need more empathy and grace granted to them, but so do children

Does “unfuck your habitat” still float around on the internet? It was originally a tumblr blog so maybe not, but I know the blog owner did publish a book version. It centered around cleaning routines for people with disabilities and mental illness, and combatting the notion that everything has to be perfectly clean all the time, or that cleaning meant spending hours doing every chore one after another versus just spending 5 minutes picking up one corner to improve it. The struggle is definitely real and it’s taken me years of living on my own to develop (most of) a routine that doesn’t make me spiral or feel like I’m a robot who does nothing but work.

On the flip side, I was raised in a spotless home and I love a clean environment and have adapted those same habits of my mom but it has long term made me subconsciously uncomfortable in any environment that does not meet those cleaning standards and even as an adult, I am very much a homebody for that reason. Most homes, hotels and public locations don't feel 'clean enough' and I struggle to feel comfortable anywhere but my home. (I also have mild contamination ocd which doesn't help the situation)

I'm married in a small house with pets and no kids. Both me and my husband (both men) work full time. He grew up in a disgusting house with too many kids, and I grew up in a clean house with only me and my sister, who were never messy kids. He gets that paralyzing executive dysfunction that's mentioned in those videos and I do not, I just don't like a messy house, so I clean it. Because of this, I end up doing pretty much all of the housework (yes even the mowing lol.) He will help if I ask him to, but he almost never cleans of his own volition. It can be exhausting, and I even call it my second shift sometimes. I can not imagine actually having children to feed and clean up after. He always tries his best to help and to give me lots of praise, acknowledgement l, and rewards for doing the heavy lifting, and I am appalled at the men in relationships who can't even do that much, or recognize how much effort goes into housekeeping.

Im sorry but homes soaked in cat pee and other mysterious liquids should not be normalized. Unorganized and messy at times is fine but that is just a disgusting biohazard and shouldn’t be excused

I feel like rage bait content has sky rocketed in these past couple of years. From "Nikacado" to this cleaning "villain," I think people are willingly placing others around them in harmful situations in trade for money. At what point does that trade no longer "work" (risk assessment)? I'd like to say that the answer is "never," it's never okay to put people at risk but I'm also very,very aware how people can start making these choices under the mindset of "this is only temporary. Until we can afford the rent," and that eventually moves on to ,"until we can pay off the car," "put money aside for the kids' college fund," and it just spirals into really bad territory.

A lot of people don’t realise that there’s a big difference between messy and dirty

I cleaned out my entire closet while listening to this. I’ve been putting it off for years. I have like 7 trash bags full of clothes that I haven’t worn in years, many of which don’t even fit.

I was always told to clean, but never taught how. When I didn't clean correctly or on the schedule that was expected yet never explained I dealt with being berated, yelling, banging dishes etc. Even to this day if I hear someone messing with dishes in the sink it sends me into high anxiety mode where I will hide away in my safe space

Not me getting this notification rigth as I am valiantly cleaning my kitchen on a Saturday night after internet content making me want to be a 'FLY' woman

This gave me such a fresh perspective. I didn’t grow up in the cleanest household. In fact, it was disgusting. I lived in the hood and well, roaches live there. It was early childhood but one time I woke up with roach guts in my mouth. Their guts looked like Pepto Bismol actually. I unknowingly chewed them in my sleep. I am permanently scarred. But my biggest influences on cleanliness who I believe are genuinely neurodivergent are my mother and my aunt. One has almost no executive functioning skills when it came to cleaning and the other one has legitimate cleanliness OCD. My mom got better after a short stint of them living together…you could probably imagine why that didn’t work. Lol. But going from living with roaches, clutter and mess and visiting my aunt and being yelled at for dropping the remote despite being a little kid with limited mobility skills was actually insane. And unlike my other aunts, there’s been times of us living with each other so I was truly being raised with conflicting mindsets. But once my mom moved me and our family away, she just would be angry that we weren’t as clean as my OCD aunt. Which made no sense because she was filthy? But I didn’t start truly seeing mess until I was pushing 30. Between my roommates in college in my mid twenties once I finally moved out to working for bougier hippie types who would surprisingly deep clean the trash can if it smelled like it had rotting citrus fruit in it (which it me actually smells like extra strong citrus fruit which I think is nice, ngl so I had no idea) like…it’s been a wild journey on my perception of cleanliness…I unfortunately think I might be closer to my Aunt’s point of view with the lack of executive skills as my mom at this point…oops. It’s a nightmare. I don’t think COVID helped with the moralizing of cleanliness. The black community has it’s own issues going on and I think it’s partially due to the history of black Americans cleaning white folk’s spaces, ngl. But I dipped out on extreme cleanliness when I saw a woman wash her Christmas tree in dawn dish soap in the tiktok…like…that’s too much for me…even for rage baiting… But one other thing I want to point out (sorry this is so long) is men also have similar upbringings to messy women on top of it not being valued to teach them how to clean properly, if it all, period. If I didn’t see the mess before I was shown, how can I expect a man too? Sure there’s weaponized incompetence, but a lot of them are simply not seeing the mess. Some of them have their own executive dysfunction issues. It sucks in cases when it falls onto partners to teach them, but dumping them…like other commenters have suggested instead of setting a boundary of a certain standard of cleanliness…like…you might lose a good partner whose only flaw is simply not knowing how to clean and some men are willing to learn and won’t use weaponized incompetence. I’ve seen people breaking up with their partners over stupid tiktoks that promote the idea that the only reason men don’t clean is due to weaponized incompetence, but men have different upbringings…on top of their own individual experience separate from manhood which I think people forget sometimes… Like…ya’ll….some of us just didn’t grow up cleaning like that and that’s it. There’s no deeper meaning. (If you made it through this whole comment, I’m sorry…I genuinely have trauma related to cleanliness while battling my own executive dysfunction and ocd tendency issues that cause me not to be as clean as I would like to be….I have a lot of feelings on this topic LOL)

i grew up in a hoarder home with a mentally ill single mom ( lived similarly to the lady at 11:00 and videos afterward) and i think its important to see how people like us lived, especially for those who never had to live like that. it should not be normalized AT ALL (and yes, i would be embarrassed if my friends found out. don't put your kids online) but it does help kids like me feel like we were/are not alone in our struggle, and it can help other people be more mindful of what they say and how they act around others' living situations; i can't tell you how many times i had friends asking me why they couldn't come over to my house and i couldn't bear the embarrassment of telling them the real reason, so i just had to hope they stopped asking. also, the amount of people i see online responding hatefully to the parents (most often moms) who live like this does make me feel sad, most likely because grew up with that mom and i saw her struggle. people just don't understand the amount of mental health decline that has to happen for that level of dirtiness to occur, its not a choice and its traumatizing for everyone involved.

How to Keep House While Drowning has been really helpful for me.

Its very weird the line we are walking between physical and mental health being unable to clean or obtain this perfect clean home and then the obsession of over cleaning our spaces. I'm disabled and have a difficult time doing basic chores so my house is clean but cluttered. But I get hyper focused on cleaning when family or friends come visit. Like I will injure myself making sure my house is spotless for guests. And neither side of that should be glamorized. Let us live in our homes without shame.

I’ll be honest, as someone with adhd who lived in a house with no set chores, I absolutely suck at and hate cleaning. It didn’t help that cleaning my room was basically framed as a punishment and getting help from my dad lead to him just shaming me for all the things i had and pressuring me to get rid of them (I always stood firm in keeping a lot of stuff because my default mindset was have it and not need it than need it and not have it). I also cannot retain verbal instructions if it isn’t reinforced and the way cleaning was done I would go months without doing a certain task so the next time I had to do it I was starting from scratch basically. I think society needs to be more forgiving to people and not judge cleanliness as morality. Not everyone has had the same upbringing so what’s simple for you is not for everyone.

I was grown without structure and was still berated for not cleaning when the people responsible for instilling a sense of pride in cleanliness did not do that. Instead of that verbal abuse making me hyperfocused on the shame of being messy I went in the opposite direction and didn't take care of my room and personal hygiene. I hoarded liters of soda and dirty lunch tupperware under my bed, covered the floor with laundry and brushes would break from how frizzed and matted my hair became. Funny enough the cartoons and comics I was berated for being "lazy" and binge watching are what showed me the joys and sense of accomplishment you can get in mundane tasks when being the Wunderkind™ isn't achievable.

The whole ‘he works’ thing makes no sense! As a mom of a 13 month old, I can tell you there’s no question that raising a child while managing a household is absolutely more work than my actual job. I just went back to work after being on leave for 11 months and my husband is now at home (I live in Iceland, every parent has a right to 6 months of paid maternity/paternity leave and I lengthened mine a bit) and honestly leaving the house and sitting in a quiet office for 8 hours feels like going on vacation. The pace, the noise and the constant mess of having an adorable little demon tearing everything apart and constantly demanding attention is just alot 😅

My ex's father hasn't had a real steady job for 30 years. His mother has been the breadwinner his entire life. For some reason his father still believes that the mother is responsible for cleaning. You best believe when my ex started pulling that shit I said no way in hell am I going to end up like you're bitter ass mom, so we got a divorce 😂

The comments section is already making me sad. Can we please consider how many of these messy living situations might be due to people with disabilities who do not have the support to help them function whether that be through medication, therapies or support workers and how shaming them only makes things worse? Like with hoarding situations there’s often times a serious underlying psychological issue or things build up with depression or adhd. Or their house might not be accessible like they may have mobility issues that make taking out trash hard. I don’t think people would let things get so bad if something is not seriously wrong. It’s not okay to live in such a state where there’s hoarding and biohazard. But they need help not to be ostracised and humiliated and jeered at.

So yeah, as someone who's audhd/disabled and who genuinely struggles with consistently maintaining a clean environment and consistent good hygiene even. The messy content creators make me really uncomfortable, and i'm talking specifically about the ones who seemingly glorify their chaotic lifestyles. Same with the like (typically) white celebrities who pronounce with their whole chest that they don't bathe by choice. I desperately want a clean environment and want keep my person clean. It's not a choice for me to live in mess. And the small part of me that maybe wanted to have a kid someday will always be a bit sad because I know I cannot in good conscience have one. When my executive functioning fails I can barely get myself to work in one piece or even feed myself. I could never subject a child to that. And it sucks because in other areas I think I would be a great mom but keeping a clean and safe home is imperative for the best interest of a child. But honestly the biggest thing that irks me about people who are proudly messy is that I fear it just fuels others to be more judgemental towards people like me. More than anything, I just want people to have empathy for those who genuinely struggle and these tiktoks/videos aren't helping.

If you don't have time to pick up a dirty diaper from the floor, you don't have time to film, edit and rant.

As a stay at home mom for almost 2 years with some executive function issues, I recently found a way to help me stay clean and organized and that is a physical, paper planner. It’s super basic, just has weekly priorities and a habit tracker on the top half and the bottom is just for each day of the week and I can write out my plan for the week. One day is mopping, one day I clean one bathroom and polish the furniture, etc. having a paper planner and not just using my phone has been so so helpful for keeping myself focused

My gf and i both have levels of trauma attached to cleaning, and after living together for almost a decade we've made the compromise of mess vs filth cleaning. There's literally always clutter and mess in the house, there's no way around it. Items never stay put away, clean dishes will sit on the counter until we use them or need space and put them away, the bathroom counter is never visible, etc..... But the filth is always priority. Dirty dishes are at the very least rinsed before they go in the sink so they don't mold. The shower is cleaned regularly. Litter boxes need cleaning every other day at minimum. Floors need to be swept every other day or so. Finding this kind of compromise was a must for us, because we never have the energy to clean the whole house in a day, and we can't expect each other to have that energy. Coming to terms with messes while still keeping the house "clean" has been a process, and I'd encourage anyone who struggles with cleaning to give it a try.

as a girl raised with a Clean Dad ™ (who also worked from home my entire childhood) - your husband is going to be such a great model for your daughter. he may not have given me any of his neatness genes, but he gave me such a good blueprint for what a man can and should aspire to be. happy pre-first father's day, mr tiffanyferg💜

I have complex PTSD, ADHD and im a single mom with a spicy 2 year old. We also have 6 people living in a 3 bedroom house plus a 100 piund pit that my ex left behind and a german sheppard that i bought for my son who has psychosis. We mop every day. If i don't, it looks like the floor hasnt been cleaned in 6 months. Im not over exaggerating. Most days just living takes all my energy. I am fighting to not slip into an anxiety freeze mode or a depressive flashback. Sometimes i just cant clean. I will want to clean but my executive functioning is so messed up. It's really horrible. I have learned to have compassion for myself and not tie my worthiness to cleanliness.

To me we should normalize houses looking lived in. We SHOULD NOT normalize dirty dishes with mold/4 day old food residue on them, leaving trash/dirty dishes all over the house, Theres a difference between a messy/disorganized house vs. Dirty, biohazard living conditions 😵‍💫

My mom is somewhat of a hoarder. Growing up, “clean the kitchen” meant “move mom’s piles of paper to the far end of the counter and clean everything else.” Now, living with roommates, I have a really hard time cleaning the common spaces because I don’t know where to put their stuff. I know I shouldn’t leave it on the counter, nor do I want to, but if I don’t know where else it’s supposed to go (and my roommates aren’t available to ask/take care of it themselves), I just pile it up as neatly as I can on the far end of the counter like I’m used to, but it never feels like I’ve actually done enough. On the other end, though, I was always taught to rinse off my dishes before the food residue had a chance to dry and get stuck to the plate, and my roommates weren’t, so I always end up having to rewash half the stuff in the dishwasher every time I empty it

Lots of stuff to talk about. When being around people who talk about cleaning all the time, I realized that there is a certain level of dirt that I'm comfortable living with for the sake of not constantly cleaning and focusing on hobbies instead. I'm in my 20s and still living with my parents. We have way too much stuff for our place so things are frequently messy because people just keep moving them around if they have no set place. But it's mostly clean enough, except for some spots that seem beyond saving. Which is frustrating to me because my parents let it get to that point before I was old enough to care and now that I do care, I feel kinda powerless because I'm the only one who cares but it's not technically my apartment. A week ago I spent like 2 hours scrubbing the window frames in my room and they're still disgusting on the inside. It's probably the same in all the other rooms but I don't have the energy to dedicate to this when the other people living here don't even seem bothered by it. And I do wish my parents didn't let me off the hook with chores when I was younger because I also don't know how to do a lot of stuff or it takes me forever

I started doing cleaning chores when I was in 1st or 2nd grade and was beaten whenever I did something slightly wrong while cleaning (putting a glass in the dishwasher wrong, forgetting to pretreat my father's dress shirt cuffs, etc). Our entire house had to be perfectly clean. As an adult and a parent, cleaning gives me an intense amount of anxiety, and I always have to get a lot of emotional support around cleaning tasks. And if I see someone with a super clean home, my mind automatically wonders if their children are safe or being harmed in some way. I shouldn't make those kinds of assumptions, but my PTSD can be intense sometimes.

As someone with ADHD and who has had severe clinical depression I can completely understand how houses get like this. it does just seem to come out of no where and food does go moldy so quickly... and I don't have kids so it was all just my mess In recent years my house has only been as messy as the "relatable" messy ones not the disgusting messy ones, and yet I am putting in less effort now than I was back then, the difference is really how much energy I need to do things. when it was that bad I had to really force myself to make food to eat, and then I'd be too exhausted to clean up right away, and the more it gets out of hand the harder it is... without depression it's much easier to get up and do things so I don't have to force myself to do everything little thing, I just do them. This makes me have great sympathy for people who have let their houses get to that kind of state. as for having kids in that situation I do think it's horrendous. If they made a decision to have kids when they knew they couldn't keep on top of cleaning, etc. then I think that's really awful - it's a conscious decision to bring kids into that! However if the kids were either unplanned, or if they were on top of things before the kids and it's something like postpartum depression that caused the messiness then I have much more sympathy. But also I think the other parent in these situations should be taking much more accountability. If I had a wife/husband who was like I was a few years ago and unable to keep the place tidy, especially with kids, I would make sure I took on all that extra work to get it clean until my husband/wife were capable of doing their fair share again. And hopefully I wouldn't be in a situation where were were both struggling badly.

The leaf blowing the car thing made genuinely LOL. My husband does the same thing and its actually pretty effective honestly. He does follow it up with vacuuming but still

FINALLY some good food on my subscriptions page!!!!!

Midwest magic cleaning mentioned!! :D

I didn’t have a friend over to my house until I was 16 and even then the first time she spent the night I was so uncomfortable of her seeing the inside of my home we camped out in the backyard. she was also the first person to tell me she wanted to come over to MY house. she even moved in with my family when she was having problems with her it really did make me feel better about my living situation. Even tho our house was a mess she was more comfortable with my family then her own. it made me realize they’re people out there that do not care about the surface level things and will still care about you even if you do have a messy house or room. And that people will even help you clean up the mess. my friends and I tend to help each other with chores when we go over to each others houses now.

I grew up in a messy and kind of dirty house. I do my best to keep my own house tidy and clean. I am lucky and privileged that I’m able to afford help from a professional cleaner twice a month. I’d give up so many other expenses before I’d give up her help.

I saw a study about how differently men and women see cleaning/taking care of the home. Basically, men only "see" the mess when it's no longer bearable. They ignore it before, but when it becomes impossible to live in (and ignore), they enter into crisis management mode. But women have more of a preventative mode, they don't let the mess become unbearable. So while men "prefer" cleaning for hours on end, women will do little things everyday to take care of the home (open the windows to ventilate so the house doesn't build mold and humidity, tidy as they move, do the dishes before you run out, etc). Therefore, when you ask the man to contribute, you're hit by "I don't think it's that bad", "tell me what to do", etc. What this means is, even with well-meaning men, the mental load still falls on the women. However, this is not to say it's an innate quality. Women and men are not born with their brains wired that way. Women can be just as messy/dirty as men. My mother, for example, is a total slob - which drives me insane because I really like things to be neat and organized (the irony is how she harped on me for years because I supposedly didn't clean well, and now that it's up to her standards, she does her damn best to undo everything I've done in the following hour...)

I truly hate the extreme judgment of cleanliness online. It’s always the woman expected to be clean. When we all live different lives and I think we should have more empathy surrounding this topic.

This is such an interesting topic. I was raised in a house that was always very clean and tidy because my mom loved to keep it that way, and she actually taught me how to view doing chores as a fun, relaxing activity. After moving out and sharing an apartment with other roommates, I was shocked to see that many of the things that were second nature to me didn't even cross the minds of other people. I really struggled with having to be the only one to clean, and even now that I have a roommate who cleans more than the others, I still catch myself being critical of them and not understanding how they can let things reach a certain point before they decide to clean. It does help to understand that not everybody was raised the way I was and that something that looks fun to me might be really difficult for others.

I work 50 hours a week in a physically exhausting job and my husband doesnt (hes working on his degree) and we still both clean as much as we can. We dont measure it exactly, we both just do as much as we can to make life easier for the other, but I would say its about 50/50. Guys who use "work" as an excuse to not do many chores are just lazy.

That bit about that guy’s wife who might clean before she films because she knows she’ll be judged differently…FACTS. For the husbands who don’t really do much around the house, people need to stop asking why doesn’t he HELP, and start asking why doesn’t he CONTRIBUTE. They both f-ing live there. If she was sick or injured (or pregnant 😉) that’s different. But you contribute to the household you live in. That verbiage perpetuates the idea that the woman should be doing all the household chores and if her husband helps in any way he is a hero for doing regular sh#t. Helping comes from outside. Like visitors who might help with something but aren’t expected to contribute because they’re not part of the household. Ok, rant over. Congratulations on your little daughter!

yeah I was abused into cleaning as a kid and my girlfriend was basically raised in a hoarder house and it has caused some massive points of contention between us but it's a process. I constantly have to remind her what/how to do stuff and that she didn't learn as a kid so she has to learn now. I understand what she's going through but man, as somebody who was abused into cleaning as a kid/teen now being the only one that cleans... *sigh* it's a process

The performance of untidiness on socal media is wild to me. I have the ADHD and so does my mum. She brought me up with the idea of cleaning for other people - especially family who lived outside our city. We always did hours of cleaning before they visited - and we didn’t live in a dirty house! Just one that had people in it. But that means the idea of showing other people a messy, dirty house horrifies me, even if thats only through posting on social media. As for me as an adult... I actually really appreciate how Mum raised me. I don't feel guilty for not having a pristine environment on the day-to-day, but if someone is coming over, I spend a lot of time cleaning, which means my place never gets too filthy.

i grew up and still live in a hoarder home and it kills me as i’ve developed the cleanly habits my parents haven’t. my parents would always harp on how embarrassingly messy my room was when theirs was borderline unlivable. i like to take extra precautions now but seeing them live in such a horrible situation is disheartening. a couple months ago they found black mold growing all over their walls behind furniture and they couldn’t be bothered to immediately clean it. the room had always been a little musty for lack of a better term and very humid so i wasn’t that surprised but it was worse than i thought. being told to maintain cleanliness by people who don’t even practice half of what they tell you makes you question what is actually normal.

I really feel bad for Amanda Rose. My family has been close to being there for most of my life. My mom and I have clinical depression, my dad and I both have ADHD and autism and just... If any one of us was lower functioning than we are, we *would* be there. She's doing all of that on her own and is probably dealing with executive function issues on top of that, yet from what I've seen she's still trying. It's so hard to make a dent in a mess that big, even harder when you're the only one doing it. What she deserves above all is help.

Great video Tiffany! The "husband eyes" think sounds quite like weaponized incompetence to me...

I have a major depression home, especially since the cleaning never stops and when it gets really bad it’s a lot of work. You have to get it all done in one go or else you still feel overwhelmed but there’s never a day where the mess isn’t added unless no one is at home. I wish people were more understanding of mental illness and cleanliness cause as much as others are upset about it we are also upset about it but usually ruminating about it to no end

Tiffany I know you will probably not see this but I have to tell you how much I love your channel and format. It itches the scratch in my brain that wants to know about niche topics, all being told to me by a kind host.

oh, my house will go from clean to dirty in less than an hour. I mean, just the process of getting kids up and to school means dishes, spills, bathroom mess, clothing mess. I can wake up to a clean house and come home from dropping off the kids to more than an hours worth of cleaning. And that's if my son doesn't have a meltdown.

Won’t lie y’all… out of desperation after months of trying to stay on top of cleaning the couches of pet fur, I too vacuumed my couch cushions… and it worked too well. I’m in too deep. I’ve been vacuuming my couch for months now. (If you do this, I suggest also cleaning/disinfecting your vacuum regularly or investing in upholstery cleaners too. Idk, I still can’t get over the idea of floor meeting couch and it makes me feel better.)

I was raised with absolutely no cleaning chores, with parents that refused to clean up after themselves and didn't teach me a single thing about cleaning. I've been having to teach myself how to clean for the entirity of my adult life while fighting against undiagnosed depression and ADHD and frankly, it's exhausting. Thankfully I have a partner now that was raised on the opposite side of the chore spectrum and he's taught me so much about how to clean stuff and how to tell if it needs cleaning and is the most patient person on the planet when it comes to my forgetting to vacuum.

Amanda Rose's home has improved so much! Now a days it's just normal messy, not moldy or whatever. Sure had terrible depression and is now on meds.

I was raised in an insanely dirty house. Like “glad protective services weren’t called” dirty. Food on the floor, you spill something and don’t clean it up, overflowing trash can means you put trash on the counters dirty. My boyfriend lived in a generally clean house. His mom kept things tidy all the time and things didn’t get dirty. He cleans NOTHING around the house now. He has the weekends off, I ask him to just please do the dishes, maybe wipe the counters down. Almost everyday when I get home from work the house is in the same state or worse than when I left that morning. When I’m home I wash dishes, wipe counters, clean appliances, wash and fold laundry, sweep and vacuum the whole house, scrub the bathroom walls, shower and toilet, put things in their place and make sure there’s no trash or clutter. It drives me insane. His main excuse is “I mow the yard” he mows the yard maybe once every week or 2 while I clean 3 days a week and also trim the weeds and stay trees outside. Men “doing the outside work” is not in any way equivalent to cleaning an entire home with multiple people that gets messy every single day.

As someone that is very picky with tidiness and cleanness, these videos make me anxious. I hope they get the proper help to have a cleaner house.

Imagine not having toilet paper and what you had to use to wipe...paper towels and napkins weren't a thing in my household either. Our laundry room was in the kitchen, and the dirty clothes pile was high and spilled into the kitchen. We walked on a mound of clothes. It was horrible. My mom didn't work either. We kids are better than how we grew up, we're clean. It was traumatizing. I never brought friends over, I can't believe my sisters did.

I grew up in a “chores first on the weekend before fun” house and had friends who didn’t and would literally go to hang out and would clean their bedrooms before we could ride bikes or go to the mall. It would embarrass me that they didn’t care about sleeping in mess or having friends over. They never asked me to clean I just felt compelled to. I wanted them to have a clean/safe space. As an adult I realized they were living in chaotic environment and this was their way of coping. It actually makes me sad, I hope they felt like I loved them and wasn’t shaming/blaming them. Sidenote: Both of my parents cleaned our house and me and my brothers were taught to clean. My dad at one point was a Merry Maid and I went with him a few times to clean mini mansions. Seeing everyone participate in cleaning made me understand that the ability for both woman and men to keep a clean space is possible if they are taught. I taught my own son how to clean and cook at an early age and though as a young adult he chooses to do neither he grew up doing both.

At certain points of my life I always got the weekly cleaning done and did my yearly spring cleaning to a satisfactory level for me, but after 2016, my mental health did a nose dive, I developed chronic pain, then finally when my chronic pain was fixed with surgery, I got pregnant with twins, and now I’m 4 months postpartum. I feel like I’ve been out of my cleaning groove for years and I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get back to work. My partner has ADHD, is generally more messy than me but not horrible and plans to be the stay at home parent when I go back to work. As a teacher, I’m off for the summer but my job os super demanding and I just wait for our house to turn to shit as I get more entrenched in the school demands. So glad you have a helpful partner who can take on the bulk of the work hopefully!

Tiffany, you seem to always know exactky what rabbit hole I've recently fallen down. Always appreciate your takes!

Hello Tiffany! Hope you doig well. I really enjoy your content, it's so meaningfull and fresh. Thanks for your dedication!

I just discovered other people didn't vacuum their couches... IDK why I do it? My mother did it? It vacuums the stuff that might be on the couch??? How else would you clean a couch?

I watch Amanduuhhh and I LOVE her. She's the first cleaning account that I felt was real. She made me feel seen as someone with depression and ADHD who's space doesn't always look the best. And watching her come out of that and create habits that you can see the progress of in her videos have been so inspiring to me

your videos are so incredible, I always reflect on myself, my environment, and things that had not been brought to my attention until you mention them in your videos, they are carefully crafted and I really value it a lot, I study social sciences so I find them even more interesting, I consider them a stimulus for debate and I would love to be able to share them but language becomes a barrier (my native language is spanish and understanding english is really a privilege where I live), I hope to have translated subtitles in your videos sometime if possible, so that later I have the problem of not knowing which one to share so we can start debating, hahaha, thank you very much for your great work

This was my cleaning the kitchen video for the night. Thank you, Tiffany

I find it interesting how cleaning trauma is passed down. like my grandparents were extremely clean and my mom was messy as a result because cleaning was such a task and had to be done perfectly. I grew up in a messy household and I was messy as a child but now I am very clean because of how much I hated growing up in a mess. if I ever have kids ill have to try to find a balance so that they dont grow up hating cleaning and become messy because I was too clean hahaha.

Leaving comment because I don't know if I'll be able to finish watching this one (baggage with cleaning)

Haven’t watched one of your videos in a while and was shook hearing that you have a baby on the way! Congratulations

My relationship to cleaning is just bizarre, tbh. Like, for one thing, I have ADHD. Severe, disabling ADHD, absolutely cannot function without the highest dose of meds on the market (some people do get prescribed more but it's sort of off-label). So firstly I have thirty years of shame around not being literally able to clean when I want a clean environment because my brain cannot figure out how to initiate the process. Secondly, my mom is lowkey a hoarder and my dad was an alcoholic, so no one ever taught me to clean things if it wasn't a specific chore I was supposed to do, so I made it to college only knowing how to clean dishes and laundry. The bathroom? I kind of hadn't even realized there was cleaning to do in there other than throwing out empty shampoo bottles. I could use a plunger and was approximately aware toilet brushes existed but I think I thought they were for like, big specific messes. Thank god for my college roommates who chose to believe that I simply had no idea what they were talking about and generously walked me through the process, instead of rolling their eyes and saying "stop lying" as most people around me had. They also broke the process down into chunks for me when they saw me struggling, like one time someone sprayed all the surfaces for me and I just had to wipe them all down. This left me with the actual harder/more work-intensive part of the task, but took all the mental load off me when they knew I couldn't handle it. Forever grateful to those girls, and sorry I didn't realize what a gift they were at the time.

Not me on my hands and knees scrubbing the grout in my bathroom when this pops up

Tiffany, they got you in the vlogging dungeon! LOL!

20:10 “internalized it that way?” The government gives a private entity, CPS, permission to arrest your children indefinitely if the home is dirty. These concerns are not soft, internalized expectations: they are about the harshest level of negative consequence our society has to offer.

I have contamination OCD and so I have a hard time deep cleaning because it's so many germs and I have to clean so specifically also I have a lot of anxiety about what is clean enough and what isn't. There have been times where my room has been like a hazard which I am working very hard to stop happening. So I understand the stress of cleaning. But I work very hard to make sure the spaces I share with other people are cleaned when other people are home because as a child I was taught that thats what's respectful and respect was a very important part of my upbringing so I hold it in high regard. I feel like normal level of mess like toys everywhere and a bit of dust in shared spaces is perfectly fine no one is gonna have a perfectly cleaned house 24/7 that is impossible. But if you find yourself constantly with hazards such as mold in public spaces then you need to sit down and come up with a system. For example, my roommate and I noticed our trash kept piling up on the floor and we couldn't figure out what to do. So we realized an easy solve was just more trash cans. We now have 8 trash cans of different sizes in different places our room and its less of a problem now with no extra effort exerted from us. Especially if you have children you need to figure it out. Do you need diaper genies everywhere? Would that help? Mop or vacuum easily available in every room? Do you just need therapy or a cleaning lady? There's no rules its just what works for you

tiffanyferg, not even emily, and casey aonso uploading on the same day thank you god

I've been watching amanda's videos from when she started cleaning and i assure you: it's gotten a lot better. back then, she had severe post partum depression and it was very, very obvious, and her partner just wouldn't help bc "he was working", so she probably just never got the help she needed. thankfully, it seems she's been getting better and a lot has come out (she got her partner to finally help her with house chores after she threw him out) and it just helps to see that getting better isn't linear or always good. i get that she rage baits, but i honestly feel for her bc from her videos, she seems like a person who needed help and couldn't get it, and now it's been getting back at her (ie, her daughter not knowing how to clean), which is something i wish i never have to go through, so yeah, amanda deserves the world

yeah living in a messy house prevented me from inviting friends, but i didnt know it was crazy until my mom scold me for not hiding the mess when someone came home

I was raised in a house where my parents did just about everything, we as kids weren’t expected to do much but put our dishes in the dishwasher and make our beds. So I totally get having to learn later in life how to properly clean. Now as a mom of three myself I prefer cleaning most things but have learned to let go of my crazy standards and teach my three daughters how to properly pick up after themselves and organize. It’s actually one of the things im most proud of!! I know my girls have a healthy relationship with cleaning and know how good it feels to have a clean and organized space.

I'm fine with a bit of mess, as daily living creates messes anyway. But I draw the line when certain smells seem to be "stained" in clothes or items or when it affects children or innocent animals (ie. mold). Whether that's in person or online, I just can't. With friends, I'll just visit for a short while and I don't watch creators who do this stuff.

I love this shade of green with this shade of blonde hair!!

also grew up without designated chores in a cluttered house. credit going off to a residential high school for developing all the cleaning habits I have now. We had designated chores for the common area that rotated each week and had to have our room inspected prior to going home for any long weekend. It wasn't so rigorous as say a military situation, but they wanted up to have things put away, carpet vacuumed and bathroom clean prior to leaving for break. Fast forward 15 years and I still can't go out of town without making sure the house has minimal visible mess.

Yooooooo the hype I feel when I see tiffany in my subbie box is indesCRIBABLE

i think one reason why we get hooked on super dirty houses is because it makes us feel better about our own homes. i might not be able to see my table but at least i can vacuum my floors without too much upfront effort. as you said, there is a certain level of messyness that is normal because we are all living in our homes but we only see the extremes on social media. the average home probably looks like mine. cluttered kitchen, cluttered surfaces but nothing you couldn‘t resolve and turn into a workable area with 20 minutes and some focus. i‘ve really been coming to terms that a kitchen will never be clean for more than the 2 minutes you spend admiring your work before you decide you need to make dinner now and i‘ve become better at cleaning as i go. i just made a tray of muffins and you could already get started on cooking a new thing if you wanted and i‘m very proud of that.

My favorite videos are ones where they make chemical weapons in their toilet and reading the comments

Thank you for this 🙏 Cleaning is so difficult for me. I feel stupid and have always felt stupid for having such a hard time doing something "easy" like cleaning my house. Even after studying how to clean correctly and cleaning with ADHD, there is SO much shame from still being a "beginner" at cleaning.

didnt know you were expecting, congratulations!!!

i have a lot of guilt of my own house. bc i would clean it and then it seems like i just blinked once and everything is in utter chaos-- then that makes me avoid everything before deep cleaning again. the cycle continues. i was raised in a messy/dirty house that put all of the expectations of the women clean while my brothers and dad never or VERY RARELY did work around the house... definitely why i still hate cleaning to this day.

As a mentally disabled person I understand sometimes it just hurts too badly to move. I can't stand spotless clean because I need the clutter lived in feel. I'm not that bad, but I need pain medication just to clean. Less a minute washing dishes would make me in so much pain all I can do is lay down and take pain pills, muscles relaxant. My life is depressing and after a few repeated attempts of suicide. I think unless you think it is a health or safety problem keep it to yourself you don't know what our situation is like

Thanks for this neat video TFerg!

i LOVE the you’re wrong about podcast!!! so so good. the flight 571 episode is one of my favorites

my house is very clean but very lived in. with a one year old sometimes i put a lot of tidying on the backburner. clean laundry will sit for a week and such and for some reason that makes my husband go crazy. he is tidy he will pick up our kid's toys and put dishes away but he doesnt do any actual cleaning and is regularly minimizing the work i do do. clutter means our house is unlivable in his eyes. amanda rose would make his brain explode i think.

I love Amanda. she's doing so well right now and her partner is also helping more, plus she's actually doing the decluttering that's gonna help keep stuff easier to keep clean. her home looks really good now. plus she's doing free cleans for people in hoarding situations or with other health issues

Wow I just found your channel and this video is great! Subscribed 👍🏻