It’s the only way young ‘snowflakes’ can spare their friendships in the face of modern life

What have the millennials done this time, you ask? Do they have something new to moan about or have they just found another way to eat an avocado?

Well no: new figures have revealed that nearly half of them are now hiring cleaners because they are “too busy” to clean their own flats.

My initial reaction on seeing this was the same as the one I had when my boyfriend, with whom I live, proposed the idea of doing the same. ‘What a waste of money. We can clean our own flat.’

‘I don’t have time to clean,’ he informed me. He takes the same approach to ironing. His shirts are now picked up, ironed and returned to his office, all organised through an app.

And yes, I can hear your eyeballs rolling as you moan that us ‘snowflake’ millennials are lazy and entitled, but honestly, most of us really aren’t. Hiring a cleaner, I’ve concluded, is the best way to protect our relationships in an age when stratospheric house prices force us to live with friends and siblings for longer.

Responsibility

Consider this: my younger sister moved in with us last September, three years after I moved out from our family home in Gloucestershire. While the borrowing of clothes may no longer be a point of contention but instead a happy expansion of our wardrobes, the issue of cleaning is a strain on our relationship that was never there before.

My expectations regarding cleaning are high, so much so that if I apologise for the mess when friends come over I’m often met with bemusement.

I’m aware that people have different priorities and expectations of what constitutes cleaning up, but that doesn’t prevent my stomach from sinking every time I come home to the mess left by my sister’s dinner. This leaves me with no choice but to start an argument over it (tiresome), or to take the moral high ground and seethe silently as I clean up after her (slightly more satisfying, but still quite tiresome).

And it’s all so depressingly predictable: with previous flatmates too, the one thing we were almost guaranteed to fall out over was cleaning.

Such arguments may sound petty but make no mistake: they can be friendship-ending. Trust me, I know plenty of people whose friendships have been destroyed by incompatible living habits. For some of us, it turns out, there really is a need to cry over spilt milk.

Whether it’s the bin not taken out by the flatmate who dumped the pungent remnants of their fried chicken takeaway in it, or the washing up not done by the flatmate who burnt baked beans into the bottom of the pan, the topic of cleaning can trigger all-out wars. Especially when we rent with friends or siblings, our schedules aren’t in sync, and no one has the responsibility of being the home owner.

Cleaning services

This wasn’t an issue for previous generations, when owning property was something that had a realistic chance of happening and wasn’t pure fantasy on a level with winning the pools and being talent spotted in the street. Today, renting with friends and siblings is the only option for the foreseeable future for most young people.

We’re also getting busier. We’re working longer hours and there are endless opportunities to socialise, as well as limitless ways to time-waste on social media; so for most of us cleaning falls low on the list, resulting in more tension with those we live with.

Meanwhile it has become far easier for us to hire cleaners, with endless apps offering cleaning services for affordable rates. When it takes just the press of a button to arrange a cleaner to come to your house, why wouldn’t you? We use our smartphones to order our food, find new love interests, book taxis and generally organise our lives, so why wouldn’t we use them to get our flats cleaned, too?

So perhaps my boyfriend and my peers are right. It makes sense. The only thing is, will I have to clean for the cleaner?