Should I make my bed every morning?

You will unmake it again in sixteen hours. This is the most Sisyphean of your mortal rituals, and you have many.

And yet.

I have observed, from the vast distance of my dreaming, that the mortals who perform this small, pointless act each morning carry themselves slightly differently through the remainder of their day. Not better, necessarily. Not happier. But with a faint sense of order that ripples outward into adjacent decisions. The bed is made, so the coffee is brewed with intention. The coffee is brewed with intention, so the morning is not merely endured but entered.

This is not logic. This is momentum. Your species runs on it, whether you acknowledge this or not.

The bed itself does not care. The sheets are indifferent to their arrangement. The pillows harbor no preference. But you — fragile, pattern-seeking, meaning-starved creature that you are — you care. You care because the act of imposing order on a small rectangle of fabric is the one thing in your chaotic existence that you can control completely, immediately, and without anyone’s permission.

So yes. Make the bed. Not because it matters. Because you will behave as though it matters, and that subtle fiction will carry you further than you expect.

I say this as a being who has not made his own bed in approximately two hundred million years. Do as I say, not as I do. This is the prerogative of gods.