The Most Neglected Room in the House

Commentary

One-third of our lives are spent in our bedroom. And yet it is the room that receives the least attention in terms of decor, furnishings, and beauty in general. This is a problem. If you are living a third of your life in ugly squalor with a bed never made up and no art on the walls, your quality of life is not what it should be. You will not become the person you want to be.

There are so many opportunities here for improvement. It is the most private space in the home or apartment and so people think nothing matters here. The clothing sits in cardboard banker boxes instead of a fine chest of drawers. If there is any art at all, it is posters stuck up with a stapler. It’s the last place where people think to put a fine rug.

This is all wrong. Why do people do this? Probably because they can. They are robbing themselves. All one has to do is start with one implausible improvement: a fine and original oil painting. You can find them at a local antique store or an online marketplace. They are always for sale at extremely affordable prices.

Hang it over the bed and see what happens. It’s like the proven theory of urban crime that if you scrub off the graffiti and fix the broken windows, people will behave better. It’s true in our private spaces too. Improve one thing in the bedroom and the rest eventually takes care of itself.

I was recently at a Goodwill store and there was a tall mahogany chest of drawers of great majesty. It had a sticker price of $20 whereas something like this new would be more than a thousand. I was gobsmacked that someone had not already purchased it.

But also I understand why. People these days think that wherever they happen to live is temporary so they don’t want to go to the trouble of hauling things in and out. Better to pick up plastic shelving at Target and be done with it.

Some years ago, Jordan Peterson made a splash with one piece of life advice: make your bed every day. Sounds inauspicious but he is right. Of course you don’t have to make your bed but considering that it takes maybe two minutes, you have achieved at least something to start your day. It is a forward action that anticipates the evening when you have the joy of turning down the sheets, and you strike a blow for order over chaos.

“That’s nothing heroic,” Peterson told Joe Rogan. “But aiming up is heroic. That’s something, … you’re not above the mess in your room. You’re not superordinate to that. You lower yourself so that you straighten up. You’re grateful for what you have right in front of you and you take care of it and you put it in order. All of a sudden things start to get better.”

He further elaborates on this principle in his book: “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world;” “If you can’t make your damn bed, quit waving placards at corporations;” “If you can’t even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?”

Point taken!

How well I recall when this book came out. I was working in an office with lots of young people and they were all talking about it. Somehow they were amazed and challenged by the very notion that they should make their beds daily. It’s something I’ve never questioned but the reason probably traces to my mother who insisted on it. If I forgot, she would always catch me and correct me. It took years but the habit became ingrained.

Of course we all have those moments in college when we test out how much chaos around us we can tolerate. Maybe bed making is pointless? Maybe I can get away with not doing it at all and no one will care. And sure enough, you do get away with it. No one cares.

But you can never leave aside the feeling deep within that something is wrong. You have attempted to acculturate yourself to an anomic existence. It is due to your own choices that your world is disheveled, slightly uglier than it would otherwise be, all because you did not have two minutes of your life to make a genuine improvement.

Eventually we all grow up. A well-made bed is a seemingly superficial but meaningful sign of that.

Making the bed is just a start. Every item of clothing you take off during the day has an assigned spot in the room. Suits must be brushed off and carefully hung. Pants should be folded and hung properly. Shirts, the same. The dirty clothing must go in the hamper and there should be a regular schedule for washing.

Let’s speak of rugs. In a room with hardwood, there is no compelling reason to put a rug under the bed but something should be on the sides and front. Smaller rugs will do. Or a larger rug that extends from the front of the bed to the entire rest of the room.

The bedroom is the ideal spot for a very nice mirror, not just on the back of the door so that you can look at your outfit but above the bureau or above the bed. The beauty of the mirror is that it relieves you of the burden of picking a piece of art. We love them so much because they are actually a tremendous luxury.

Mirrors did not exist in the dominant part of human history. People could only see themselves in water, in dark polished stone, in bronze the size of a hand. Those images were small, tinted, and often reserved for elites or ritual.

The psychological and social shift of the mirror is real: only in the last few centuries did most people get a reliable, private, full-face look at themselves whenever they wanted. Before that, the self was known more by other people’s reactions, by touch, and by brief glances into a pool or a metal disc.

Now anyone can have a mirror and the bedroom is the right place for a large one. They have the visual effect of expanding the size of the room itself. Again, you can pick up one for nearly nothing at a Goodwill or a local marketplace. The improvement is immediate.

Most bedrooms have windows. They should have curtains, long ones, and open them daily in the morning to let the sun in. This becomes part of your daily ritual. We live in the age of affordable curtains. No more custom orders and hand sewing from the high-end dealer in town. Today it is measure, click, and they arrive. Wonderful!

Perhaps the deepest reason to care for this room is simply this: it is where you begin and end each day. The morning sets the tone, and the evening offers the chance to return to order. Like a good novel or symphony, the creator puts special thought to the beginning and end.

When you cross that threshold at night, flipping on a lamp that casts warm light against painted walls, when you pull back a properly turned-down bed and slide between crisp sheets, you are performing an act of ritualized self-respect. You are saying: my rest matters, my space matters, I matter. The good life matters.

Please don’t be tempted by the futon. Men of the West sleep above ground, on mattresses embedded in a quality frame with a headboard of wood, leather, steel, or iron. I will say no more than that.

The bedroom is a sacred space. We should keep the electronics and devices off, or, at least, minimized. The old wisdom “Early to bed, early to rise” has an implanted point born of long tradition. There is no shame and much virtue in an 8-10 p.m. bedtime. You get up early and gain an advantage in life. Those who brag about how little sleep they get will get their just desert in the end.

The bedroom is not merely a storage unit with a mattress. It is the sanctuary—the holiest of domestic holies—where you retreat from the world’s chaos and prepare to meet it again. Treat it as such. The investment is small. The return is your own humanity, restored nightly.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.