You have always hated dust bunnies.
Pretend, reader, that you have always hated dust bunnies.
You could give any number of reasons for this. Dust bunnies are uninvited guests. They are not like cabinets or paintings, which are there because they're beautiful and unique-- instead, they are meaningless and unwanted. You don't like the cutesy name "dust bunny", either. Really, you think disposable things shouldn't have fun names at all, especially not ones that imply they're alive. What's more, they are practically identical, and something about that gives you the ick. Any two dust bunnies are always fundamentally the same despite being made of different dust, like stamps or Marvel movies, and you feel that's a violation somehow.
This makes them addictive, to you. Whenever you clean a dust bunny, your brain becomes poisoned with one thought: "Is there another dust bunny I can clean?" You hate that dust bunnies make you think things like that-- you have big ambitions, after all, and you can't waste your time in an endless loop of wanting to clean.
And of course, you hate dust bunnies for the obvious reason. Dust bunnies are composed of undesirable things that you brought into your house. Dirt, dead skin, hair, lint, pollen, tiny shreds of paper-- things like that, all bundled up into your problem.
You like to think you have a healthy relationship with living in a body. You eat mindfully and take long walks, and if a genie offered to upload your consciousness to a computer or whatever, you'd probably pass. You like being an animal with a body. Still, you are the sort of animal with aspirations, complicated language, and big dreams. You'd prefer it if your brain and body acted accordingly, and let you focus on achieving those big dreams without much fuss. But you still walk, sneeze, and shower. You still maintain a body that needs things like water and multiple types of rest. And dust bunnies, the second-order consequences of maintaining your body, are the salt in that wound. You waste time eating, and later you waste time handling the dust bunny born of the crumbs.
You dream perhaps there will be a time where dust bunnies will be gone forever, that living in a society will eventually reward you with some sort of ultimate Roomba or self-cleaning carpet. Maybe they'll go even further, and they'll find cures for dead skin and shed hair and even dust. Maybe as humanity progresses there will only be strange, bespoke trash left to clean-- old receipts, empty soy sauce bottles. You would prefer that, somehow. An empty soy sauce bottle feels, in some small way, like it has more of a coherent story to tell about your life than a dust bunny. For whatever reason, you feel like that would be more respectful to your brain. You figure you might grow to hate picking up that kind of trash, too, but at least it wouldn't be the sort of addictive hate you feel toward dust bunnies. At least you wouldn't be stuck in a loop of hating the same intruder, over and over again.
To comfort yourself, you used to imagine the dust bunny materia as coming from a separate animal entirely, specifically a mindless ghost whose body movements mirror yours. When you're having a nice dinner, the ghost is also sitting in your favorite chair, moving its arms, but out of idleness and force of habit. When you're walking to your favorite class, the ghost is in your shoes, nonchalantly plucking a hair from your scalp every so often. It never knows where it's going, completely reliant on you to pick it up and move it from habit to habit or room to room. And so you imagine yourself as obligated to care for this poor animal, to give it enrichment, to drag it to the movie theater and let it sit picking off bits of dead skin while you see something life-changing. Cleaning dust bunnies, then, would be like cleaning a litterbox or feeding a dog, just another necessary chore. This felt better, somehow, like you were doing something more noble than moving one of many identical clumps to a different location.
This was a comforting thought for a long while. One day, though, you realized a problem. If you and the ghost are always in the same place at the same time, what makes you the caretaker of the ghost, and not vice versa? Imagine the ghost, carefully molding a dust bunny out of body-ephemera and static. Then it places three of them artfully along the wall, so that the poor novelty-obsessed rabid animal it cares for would take the time out of its day to do rote work. Would that benefit you, you wondered. If you had a ghostly caretaker, would you benefit from being made to do something, then being made to desire to do it again in the same way? Would that be something to transcend, or would that be so fundamental to the animal you are that a responsible caretaker would make you do it, like eating your veggies?
You weren't going to think further about that, you decided. It was fine, you decided, to just hate dust bunnies, and to leave it at that.