As we grow up, life gets more tangled, and happiness can seem harder to catch. In childhood, joy feels easy, like catching sunlight in your hands. But as we become adults, things…
Laundry, dishes, cleaning, cooking can get exhausting, especially if only one person has to do everything. This brings us to a fundamental question in marriages – How to divide household chores fairly with spouse?
In this modern era, men and women are both working adults which share an equal amount of burden of daily household chores. Unlike long ago, women used to be housewives to take care of children at home and be the one in charge of household chores. At the same time, men are the ones that go out to work to bring back income for the family.
However, during these modern days where both husband and wife are working. Thus, we need to share this burden of house errands equally to avoid future misunderstanding and arguments in a relationship.
Many couples do not sit down to have a discussion on this topic before moving in together. According to studies and research, house chores issues are linked to divorce rates among husband and wife. Divorce rates for those couples who do not share house chores are fifty percent higher than those who share.
Discuss House Rules in Advanced Before Marriage
Before staying together as a couple we need to remember that every individual is different. Both parties are brought up from different families upbringing and culture. Thus, what someone thinks is right or normal might not be the same in other people’s mindset.
This is the ultimate reason why conflict happens when a couple has different dictionaries in their heads of what is right and wrong. The root cause of this could be solved when having an advance discussion and agreement on house rules regarding the chores division and person in charge.
For example, men usually do heavier duties which require more strength like washing the floor outside, cleaning the high ceiling fan and throwing the garbage out. While women do chores like laundry, vacuum cleaning and ironing clothes.
Be Flexible But Do Not Take For Granted
Setting house rules of who is in charge at home for the daily chores are good to follow. It gives equal responsibilities to both the working adults. However, at times of uncertainties we also need to be flexible. In a realistic world, there is no plan that goes 100% as planned, as there will always be change and unexpected events happening disturbing our schedule once in a while.
If our spouse is tired that day and had an exceptional late working day, we can also assist them to do the chore on their behalf. This act however should not be taken for granted or over abused. We need to be flexible in certain situations to ensure important chores are done on time for a smooth livelihood together.
Be Accommodative and Understanding
When allocating the household chores with your spouse, be open minded and listen to their concerns and preferences. If your spouse has sensitive skin to dishwashing detergent, be sensible enough to offer to do the washing where the soap would come in contact with skin.
With better understanding and reasons why certain house chores are delayed or not done, we will not be angry with our spouse. Sometimes our partner is shy to tell you the reason for not doing or avoiding, we need to take this chance to sit down and solve the problem.
If we accommodate each other more often, many small conflicts could be avoided while living together as a couple.
Hire a Part Time Maid If Needed
This method is applicable to most couples who do not trust having a full time maid on standby at home. As both husband and wife are working adults, there may have times where both parties are extremely busy and have no time left. For this scenario, hire a part time maid during the weekends to settle certain basic chores which could be delayed till the weekend.
When times are crucial and busy, you need to spend a little more to hire for cleaning services. It will be totally worth it, while you take a good rest at home after a tiring working week. This step could prevent arguments about blaming each other for not doing the chores after a hectic work week.
Voice Tone Matters
The human mouth is the most powerful tool to make a person happy, sad, angry and many other emotions are affected. When speaking rudely or harshly to someone, we do not bring any benefit to both parties. Thus, we need to always remember to use the appropriate tone to our husband or wife.
With a polite voice, the same message could be conveyed to our spouse. If we start raising our tone, our spouse will feel hurt and heated up which eventually leads to havoc and arguments at home. Remember to always be cautious of your voice tone when speaking to your spouse as this is just chores which should not be something to raise our tone on.
Once you get used to it, it will be natural and easy to cultivate. This is also a good influence to kids at home when parents speak politely among each other.
Appreciate and Give Praise Genuinely
The longer you live with a person, the more you naturally take them for granted. Realistically, we as humans tend to forget those who are always present with us. We often chase what we do not have, then forget to appreciate the presence of what we already had.
This fact is true because remember the first time you met your spouse as a stranger and new friend. If they had done something small but annoying during the first few dates, we might tolerate it at first and forget about it.
Try to do a comparison after many years living together, the same small matter might be used as a bullet point for an argument.
Encouraging and giving good praises to your spouse could increase happiness and make each other feel appreciated. Make it a habit to always show gratitude to every small effort your husband or wife has done for your sake.
Bottom Line
At the end of the day, it can be concluded that living together for a long time is a journey together as a team. Both husband and wife should always remember that certain small matters are not worth the fight. Thus, they do not want to argue over small matters.
Animals which are tame in nature had become human’s pets since a century ago. Specifically, dogs are known as a man’s best friend. Since the olden times even during the cave man century, you may come across comics or movies from the television about cavemen that go for hunting with their pet wolf. With social media these days, you can even see celebrities who owned tigers and dangerous snakes as their pets.
Lack of Love From Their Human Companion
No matter wild or tame animals, they chose to have pets in their life. Research and studies had shown that some people would opt to get a pet as their companion usually due to unfulfilled or missing love they cannot get from their human companion. Thus, there are cases where some people get a pet dog after a bad break-up for their recovery process.
People who had traumatic and abusive family members during their childhood may also grow up with missing love and opt for getting pets. There are companion animals who helped many of these victims as researched by the NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information).
Depression and anxiety from a traumatic and bad human relationship cases, many managed to be cured after getting pets especially animals like dogs. Dogs are one of the special species which could feel a human emotion and naturally want to heal their human owners with genuine love and care.
Psychology Research of Human and Pets
According to the research from the National Library of Medicine: “research suggests that humans can form strong attachments to their pets, and at least some pets display attachment behaviors toward their human caretakers. In some cases, these bonds have been found to support or enhance the physical and emotional well-being of both species.”
“Human–animal interaction research suggests that humans often form strong attachments to their pets. In some cases, pet ownership has been associated with greater physical and emotional well-being in both adults and children. A growing number of studies point to possible therapeutic benefits of human–animal interactions. “
Pets That Cured Suicidal Victims
We spoke to a few ex-suicidal victims who used to have suicidal thoughts but was able to get through the dark phase of their life after owning a pet dog.
According to Emily, one of our survey participants who were willing to open up about her past depression experience.
“Many times, when I was driving, I felt like getting into a car accident! I wished I could end my life to run away from all the troubles and bad events that happened in my life. I had reached my limit of all the continuous bad events in my life.
One day, it crossed my mind, to distract my mind, I wanted to get a puppy to renew my life journey. I know having a dog is going to make me busy and also take my mind off from all the negative thoughts I had been dreaming of.
My puppy had saved my life. I might not be standing here talking to you if not for my pet dog.
I had learnt so much life lessons from my dog.
Sometimes, it takes a dog to teach us humans how to genuinely live your life. “
Pets Are Genuinely Empathetic to Their Owners
Do you know that a pet dog would follow entirely how the owner feels. They are naturally made to feel their owners’ emotions, catch them, and heal them if needed. For example, a dog usually knows when their owner is angry or moody and usually, they are smart enough to behave well during that moment.
As for during a downtime of their owner, they somehow know their owner needs some healing and would cuddle on their owner’s lap to provide as much love to their owner.
Many dogs and cat owners had mentioned and agreed how their pets knew it when they were sad. After getting some attention from their pets, they naturally felt better and thankful for having their pets as their chill pill.
There were also known cases, where some dogs were abused by their pet owners but still remained loyal and would never hurt their owner. Their genuine love is undeniable, and nothing to be compared to a human being.
Pets as a Stress Reliever
Having a pet not only shape your life to be mentally healthier as you will be occupied in the pet care journey with them.
Having a pet dog for example encourages you to be physically more active as you need to spend some play time with them, walking them out and it make you more active to move around. Getting some exercise with your dog in the park makes you naturally wanting to exercise which contributes in relieving your stress levels.
Besides, having aquatic pets like fishes at home is also another form of stress reliever. It is very calming and relaxing when you look into a beautifully decorated aquarium with beautiful fishes swimming inside it. The water sound from an aquarium and nature from this aquatic landscape would naturally calm our mind and relieve our stress level.
Archeologist Facts and Research About The Human-Dog Special Relationship
Since centuries ago, dogs are the known animals, described as the most loyal companion owned by the mankind. If you read about the discovery of the Aztec dog burials by the archeologists, it had been believed these dogs would even accompany their human care taker’s souls even in their afterlife.
According to the research, other sources also mentioned that these Aztecs dogs were also known as the most loyal protectors of towns, agriculture, and food since long ago.
In short, if you happen to meet someone who have love for animals, they are usually kindhearted souls who appreciates all living things. If you are someone with high level of stress, you may opt to have some trial session of owning a pet from a relative or friend house on a weekly basis. Before owning once yourself, try spending time with one before committing into one. It is a whole new responsibility to own a pet. No doubt they will be your daily stress-reliever but be sure to love them with all your heart when deciding to get one.
According to the statistics, 80% of working adults are not happy with their job. This unhappiness and dissatisfaction could lead to underperforming at work. In the long term, it could slowly lead to stress and could even grow to depression with many of being unaware.
We need to differentiate between underperforming in a job or staying in the wrong field of job. Before it is too late, as time waits for no man. We should quickly decide on what we would like to do for the rest of our lives. An average person spends about 90 000 hours of their life at work.
Signs of underperforming
1. Lack of focus at work
When you do not enjoy your job, you get easily distracted with external surroundings. It is a way your body language telling you what your priorities are. We always unconsciously do things our heart wants, more than the brain. Like the saying goes, “Put your heart at the work you do, you will definitely succeed!”.
Thus, we will tend to slack at work and find chances to the distractions at work. This stage usually happens not at the initial stage of the new job. It usually happens when we reach a comfortable stage and stable mode at work.
2. No goals or target set in mind of the current job
If you had experienced jumping into a career, you do not have interest in due to the course you took in college. You will realize that you would not want to follow the footsteps of your current manager or superior.
When this idea crosses your mind, you will be just doing the job for the sake of the money with no proper goals set in mind. This will happen when your performance review is around the corner, you will feel lost and there will be nothing in your mind to write about in your career goals page. Discussions with your manager will not be something you look forward as there is not excitement in your current role.
3. Always delaying work and taking short breaks
The day you newly start a new job, everything seems new and interesting to your eyes. You seem like a very highly motivated employee to start a new role. Your performance as a beginner is also reasonable at the first year.
However, as you reach the later years in the job, you slowly loss interest in your current job. Your work efficiency starts to drop, as you start to slow down and delay some work. Then when you start taking some annual leaves to have a get-away to escape work is also another sign you will soon fall into the underperforming category.
4. Struggling to keep up with the pace
When you could not perform the speed of your teammates of the same rank, it means you are clearly struggling to finish work. If you could not keep up with the deadlines set this may be the sign of underperforming. Depending also on how many deadlines you had missed, if just a rare occasion, there might not be an issue.
However, if work is not completed on timely basis for the long term, it indicates a poor work performance which needs to be seriously looked into.
Signs you are in the wrong job
1. You work just for the money, not passion
Working just for money would never give you the job satisfaction in life. If you are someone who hates Mondays and always looking forward for the weekends, it means you do not like the job you are in.
Weekends are just a temporary escape from the job you hate. If you love your job, you will always be excited to contribute and learn something new for your job in hand. Working for money at the initial stage of life when you just graduate is fine, as you need the money to fund the dream job which needs a certain capital.
2. You become depressed and stress when overworked
Do you realize when you do something you like for example, maybe playing a video game, time flies so fast? Half a day could be gone while into something you love and enjoy.
This applies to our work, if you are in a job with your interest, you will definitely put your whole heart and time on it without even thinking of time. If we are stuck in a job we do not enjoy, when given more tasks and needed to work more, we will become stress about it. If the work continues to increase and take so much of our time, it will eat up our energy. Then, we slowly become depressed when overworked after facing too much of stress in life.
3. Poor performance at work
There are some cases of employees who do not perform well not because they did not work hard enough. This can also happen because they are trapped in the wrong field.
Being trapped in the wrong field will cause many issues in coping with work loads and performance expectations in the company. Some people are just not made for a certain role.
Thus, no matter how much effort and support you provide them, they still struggle to perform to average expectations.
4. No self-awareness on what you are good at
If you are in the job where you cannot see results you wanted and you often feel lost about your career direction, this means you might be in the wrong job. When there is no self-awareness on what you are good at, means the current job did not unleash your full potential.
Billionaire “Shark Tank” star Mark Cuban mentioned that “self-awareness is one of the most important skills for any professional.”
Many of us lack self-discovery to know ourselves better. It takes time, age, and many life experiences to truly know and be aware of what we are really made of.
Closing Thoughts
The root cause of the wrong career choice is usually due to wrong courses took during their college or university level. Some students who manage to pass their degree and enter the working world for the sake of personal financial crisis is one of the causes.
According to research, India has the most serious cases of implications of wrong career choices which lead to deaths.
India has one of the highest suicide rates among people aged between 15 to 29 years, the most vulnerable group being the ones studying in class 10 and 12 due to board exams related pressure. Every hour, one student commits suicide in India
-National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).
Before this problem becomes worse, country by country prevention steps like career counselling to young adults are very crucial. Family members, close friends and loved ones also plays an important role for giving moral support to every individual on a more suitable career path.
In life, we need to learn that change is the only constant. We as adults grow and change our interests as we mature. Acceptance and effort to overcome possible challenges to succeed in any career is equally important besides chasing your dream job.
Since schooling days, we are trained and shaped to be a worker of a company, but never an owner of a business or company. Our education system had shaped 95% of the world to be 9-5 workers. Many of us do not realize this until only minority with business mindset realized this, a modern day slavery.
Those who realized this at a younger age usually have an entrepreneur mindset and would dream of owning their own business in the future. With that, entrepreneurs are born but not high in number as compared to typical 9-5 employees.
Reasons Why People Get Stuck in Their Modern-day Slavery Jobs
High Commitments
People who cannot escape their 9-5 jobs have fixed commitments like house installments, car installments, bank loans and many more. Many people are caught in credit card debts and bank loans from high value purchasing.
They got themselves trapped in a never-ending cycle after committing to loans to buy huge essentials like housing and cars.
Mindset
We have 2 types of friends with different working mindsets. Those with business mindset are more open to potential opportunities outside the typical 9-5 jobs. They are risk takers, where else, most of us are risk averse.
Most of us are made to have a worker mindset due to stability and security provided by a big company. Staying in the comfort zone is happening to most of us. Stepping out into high risks and high returns by being a potential business owner is feared by many of us.
Inconsistency
Being consistency and persevere through out the journey as an entrepreneur is a difficult attitude to have. Those who were able to start the first step usually have problems in putting in continuous effort and many tend to give up in between the journey.
It is never easy at the beginning, but it will be much easier after going through the toughest stage. Nothing good comes easy. Those people who start their business and give up in the middle do not have futuristic thinking and often fall into the losing hope mindset. This is where the difference come between the successful entrepreneur and those who failed.
Environment Influence
Choosing your circle of friends could influence your idea of how a successful career would be. For a typical 9-5 job worker, they would think getting a manager position is successful enough. If your circle of friends are all loyal and fixed mindset office workers, you would not be able to think outside the box on the potential opportunities outside.
As for entrepreneurs, getting that manager position is modern day slavery. As long as you are working under a company and not getting any ownership with less flexibility.
Staying for Temporary Happiness
Typical office workers usually look forward to weekends without realizing that the weekends they have are just a temporary escape from reality. It shows how much they despise their work in the office.
It never crosses their mind about the possibility to turn their daily work to a dream job. They get happy for a small increment and promotion from their boss. After a year, they had forgotten about it and the cycle of suffering repeats.
Many of these actions of looking forward for the weekends and getting a small salary increment is just a temporary happiness. It does not solve the root cause of why you hate your 9-5 jobs so much.
Fear of Failure
Many people have no courage to take risks and prefer to stay in their comfort zone. As we age, it becomes more reluctant for us to step outside the comfort zone.
The fear of failure and being unable to imagine handling the consequences of disappointments. This had caused many of us to stop ourselves to take a leap into the unknown possibilities. A change of decision in our career path could determine so much of happiness or failure in the long term in our lives.
Reasons You Should The Cycle
Sense of Ownership
Being an entrepreneur gives you a sense of ownership to what you are working for. You are not working for a boss above you where you got to depend on them. You do not need to care if the boss is in a bad mood or being nasty if you are the boss yourself.
Working hard to shape and grow your own company give you the sense of ownership in work because this business belongs to you. It is like having a baby and taking care of its growth. Eventually you want your creation to be successful. You will feel happier to work for yourself instead of working under other people.
Flexibility
When owning your own business, the most enjoyable perks is the flexibility of time. You do not need to follow a scheduled time to start and end your work. You do not need to stick in the morning traffic jam to follow the fixed office hours. In this way, with enough rest and sleep, you can have more energy and time to focus on your own business.
Next, you can also have the flexibility to take holidays whenever you want. You do not need to apply annual leave from your boss and rely on them. With this, you also have more family time especially when needed during emergency you can attend to your family needs. It is how you manage your time between your work and family, do not need to be dependent on a boss in another company.
In terms of decision making for work, as an entrepreneur you can make decisions easily on your own without too much waste of time approval process. As long as you have a qualified and competent team to work with you, a smaller crowd enables you to focus on what matters most for the benefit of your own business.
Achieve Bigger Goals
What if I told you, everyone had an equal chance to turn their faith from a poor income employee to a successful business owner with just a change of mindset and good self-discipline. In life, we need to always have a goal and a dream to achieve. Most importantly how we put action into the beautiful plan in our mind.
Turning your dreams into reality is an ultimate goal for everyone in life. Being stuck in a 9-5 job you hate will not bring you to achieve your biggest financial goal.
Looking at how flat most of the hierarchy in an organization is, it is impossible for employees in a company to be promoted or having huge salary increment every year. With that said, most employees would be stuck at a lower income range and only a very rare percentage or directors and partners could achieve a high-income earner pay.
Early Financial Freedom
If you are someone who wants to achieve early financial freedom, being an entrepreneur is one path to this goal. With the high costs of living, but not having increments in our salary in our 9-5 jobs, we will always be stuck in a repeated cycle where our costs will slowly exceed our expense.
Owning a business opens up many potential opportunities and possibilities of making more money locally and even nationwide. The power of owning a business expands to many prospects as compared to being stuck in a employee working in a big company.
Our true potential is not revealed if we are under a management. The day we manage to be an independent business owner, as an entrepreneur will be the day, we achieve true financial freedom.
Final Remarks
In the end, it is up to us to decide on how we want our career to be like. We choose our path and decide on our own. Being caught in the modern-day slavery is definitely something many of us fear to be in. However, many of us do not even have this realization of this life trap.
The term “Money Cannot buy Happiness” is not realistic at all. It should be re-phrased to “Money Cannot buy Some Happiness”. As a kid, we might believe in the initial saying. However, as we grow older, we start to realize many things we were taught of were not after all true or even realistic.
As humans we grow to want more and want in life. This is an unavoidable urge, as we are surrounded with beautiful and luxuries which attract us to chase them. This fact of life is inevitable. I truly believe that money can truly buy most of the happiness in life.
Better Health With More Wealth
For example, we do hear of this story of the rich man in the hospital who could not buy his life after falling deeply ill. People would automatically assume that it shows that money cannot buy health. Why did not they think of if that were a poor guy, he might not even afford the hospital bills and would die a long time ago. In this scenario, you do realize that the rich guy got to buy a chance to live or even more time to live. With money, you get to pay your medical bills to buy a chance to live at the least as compared to the poor beggar who had no money to even go to the clinic.
Next, related to health issues too. These days healthy food is expensive as hell. Cheap food on the other hand is freaking unhealthy. By eating healthy, it becomes too costly. For the one with money, eating healthy is no problem at all, and with a healthy body, they are happier with one less worry. As for the poor, they are not only eating cheap and unhealthy food, but they are also stuck in the cycle and could not change this unhappiness.
Higher Quality Lifestyle in Every Stage of Life
No matter what, you cannot compare a life of a kid who is born rich and a kid who is born in a poor family. The happiness attained by a rich kid is a quality lifestyle since young till grown adult. With money, the kid in the rich family could worry less about working early because they do not have the finance problem in their head. With this luxury, if trained well by the parents, he or she could do their passion to chase their dreams without chasing time.
There is a lot of stress that could be avoided by the rich kid as compared to the poor one. The poor kid might need to work early and do a work which is not their passion. At the same time, due to the poor family finance status, they have no choice but to also share out their living expense with their old parents.
Instead of chasing their dream career and instead of using the money to travel the world, the poor young adult had to use that for their poor and old parents. Worst still, also due to their parents not having the retirement savings, the poor kid will be stuck in the poor people cycle forever if there is no drastic change and sacrifice made.
Less Arguments for Family Matters
With more money, a couple’s married life would also be much smoother. There is automatically one less worry and one less stress in their lives. Many poor couples argue due to money matters. With poor financial management and status, stress increases and spoils the mood. Thus, long term married couples with different financial goals who are poor will ruin their marriage.
Where else the rich couple, would not have this risk at all in their marriage due to the strong and stable financial foundation. Money matters could really bring a huge impact when building and maintaining a family. With stronger finance, purchasing all essentials ready for a young couple to start a family will also be easily done. As compared to a poor couple, they would be both struggling and could end up fighting if put in stressful situation.
Money as a Plus Point to Find a Mate
Some people say money cannot buy Love. This is somewhat true as you cannot force someone to fall in love with you. However, you also hear of old men who are married to young girl models. There are people who exists like that who do not mind men older than them for the sake of living the luxury life. This scenario had proven that a rich old man is more attractive than a poor old man for some ladies. It is an obvious fact that the rich old men stand a much higher chance to find a wife compared to the poor old man.
I had stated a lot of points that represents “Money can Buy Most Happiness”. Now I would also share some thoughts on why the statement is “Most” but not “ALL”. There are certain things in life which money could not buy.
Money Cannot Buy Attitude
Those are character. Money could not buy attitude and character of a human. With the correct attitude we can make more money or vice versa. Every human being is unique in their own ways, and no one is the same person. Thus, money certainly cannot buy our character. We shape who we are in the future and the power is in our own hands. With lots of money, we could actually lose it all with the wrong attitude.
Money Cannot Buy Some True Feelings
Money could also not buy certain relationships or feelings. You can be a rich man son but with bad attitude, not all women will be attracted to you. You cannot force someone to love you for you with all the money you have. Not all women or men love a person for their wealth.
Equally, we have people who are not money-minded and could not buy their feelings with all the money you have. We do hear of stories of a rich guy who got rejected by a girl he had a crush on. This is an example of how money cannot buy that happiness, specifically “some happiness”.
With all the opinions in the world, it is an obvious fact that, the rich get richer if they have brains to sustain and grow their wealth. They could also end up being the poorest at the later generation if not handled wisely. Money is no matter what the power of most happiness in this world, it also solves most problem. Just imagine, the reasons of rising crimes. It is because poor people sometimes do not have choice. It is wrong to steal and rob someone, but because they really need money.
The world is made this way. The gap of the rich and poor is so huge. The poor gets poorer, the rich get richer. The meal of the rich could be equivalent to few years work of a poor income worker. This is how crazy rich a person can be as compared to the poor class people.
At the end of this article, don’t you agree with me that “Money can Buy Most of the Happiness” in the world? This is a more realistic expectations in life. We cannot change this culture as our booming world is all about having more money to enjoy travels, good food and luxuries from all over world.