The Squalor Ogre

The YouTuber Day 9 has a great video about the ‘Squalor Goblin,’ a term that describes the sunken mental and physical pit one often falls into on a 3-day weekend.

The weekend starts off full of possibility, a chance to do positive things for oneself, but quickly devolves into lost potential and sedentary behavior. It’s only the threat of the upcoming workday that causes a Squalor Goblin to reluctantly and anxiously fix his disgusting nest.

Day 9’s Squalor Goblin concept applies to a three day weekend. The Goblin arrives quickly, but, thankfully, is usually gone in just three days. I’d like to discuss a different, larger, kind of rut: the arrival of a Squalor Ogre.

I’ve noticed a pattern in my life where I start off mentally strong, start getting slightly grumpy, and then out of nowhere it’s like I’ve fallen off a cliff. My mind is all over the place. I suddenly hate work. I fall into an existential spiral about things like where I live, what company I work at, what I do in my free time, even what career I’ve chosen.

This usually means a Squalor Ogre is present.

Squalor Ogres want a nice home. They just don’t want to deal with taking care of it. For this reason, they try to quietly move in with you. To make things harder, Squalor Ogres are invisible by default.

The invisibility of an Ogre helps explain why it’s so hard to pinpoint what’s going wrong in my life. Since I can’t see the Ogre, I start wondering whether I’m the problem, on some foundational level. Is it my career? Is it the fact that I’m not as successful as others? I start focusing on all kinds of things about myself on a very high level, and comparing myself to others. It seems like the obvious choice at the time, but what’s really going on is that a Squalor Ogre is stinking up the room, its fumes woozily redirecting me to incorrect conclusions.

A Squalor Ogre will sit quietly in the chair next to me and watch as I start to blame myself for all kinds of unrelated things (i.e. career choice). I don’t think the Ogre is malicious, but it likes living rent-free in my apartment, so it doesn’t correct me.

One of these assholes comes by my apartment every single day to jiggle the door handle. If the apartment is locked, the Ogre leaves, respecting the lock. But if I’ve accidentally left the door unlocked, it invites itself in and starts invisibly fucking up my shit.

This hatred of everything and tornado of self-doubt caused by the presence of an invisible Ogre usually lasts anywhere between two and four weeks. Sometimes I think the weekend will fix it. But if Monday rolls around, and I’m still living with the Squalor Ogre, then it only gets harder to escape.

Thankfully, there is one way to start seeing a Squalor Ogre. When I eventually notice and name the Ogre, then it becomes easily visible, and it’s not as hard to evict.

Evicting an Ogre is typically done by ‘getting back on track’ — overcompensating in a way that is healthy and feels extra good. For me that might look like going on a long bike ride.

Ogres don’t usually put up a huge fight once I name them; they’ll just walk to the door. But there’s one thing I can count on. An Ogre I evict will be back tomorrow to try to get in again.

Locking Out the Ogre

There are actually several locks on my door. Each one has a different color. There’s:

• Green: Space hygiene (clutter, decor)
• White: Digital hygiene (not using the computer, phone, or TV too much)
• Blue: Physical Hygiene (exercise, showering, shaving, brushing my teeth)
• Red: Food Hygiene (buying groceries, cooking consistently, eating moderate and balanced portions)
• Black: Career Hygiene (learning new things, taking steps to put myself in a career that works for me, recognizing that I won’t )
• Purple: Financial Hygiene (actively saving, spending mainly on things that solve real problems for me)
• Teal: Mental Hygiene (therapy, yoga, journaling, meditation)
• Orange: Fun Hygiene (this is a cringey name, but basically just doing things I have fun doing instead of things i think i should do. Biking, writing, playing Nintendo)

By default, all of these locks have to be done up and down manually. It can get exhausting, and I’m often so focused on the rest of life that I’ll forget to manually turn the lock before I leave.

Whenever the Ogre showed up, invisibly, in my home, I could be sure that I’d forgotten to lock one or more of these.

And once the Ogre was there, it would get harder to remember to lock the rest of the locks. The jerk would take my keys and hide them around the apartment in random, difficult places.

Automating the Locks

I’m starting to realize that at least some of these locks might be able to be automated, so that it’s easier for me to lock the Squalor Ogre out.

For instance, a few weeks ago, I set up several different bucketed savings accounts for different purposes, which auto-deposit set amounts each paycheck. This is one way to automate locks: by using external tools to do so such that you can set and forget.

Habits are another way to automate the locking of certain locks. For instance, I’ve built the habit of doing yoga after showering. Habits are more fallible than automations done with external tools, and take some effort to stick, but once solidified, they can be really effective.

[note to self: i want to try to figure out other ways (both strategies and tactics) to keep the Ogre away. One promising strategy is to think more about the identity I want to have (not just the things I want to do)]