Is it normal to think raking leaves is stupid!!

It's a ridiculous thing to do (for reasons I'll come to) but, despite that, I do enjoy it. It's nice to be out and about in the garden at the time of year when you need to clear leaves. I love Autumn and Winter.

Why it's ridiculous, though, is that all of gardening is a battle with nature that only has one winner. Gardening itself is almost anti-nature. I'm criticising it despite having a personal interest in it, by the way. But then, just because I like something doesn't make it right.

I only rake leaves to make a pile and then jump in it.

Feel the power of mindless labor!

Oh, but those leaves make a great mulch for the garden. Personaly I find your lawn a bit pointless. But you know what's worse? Leaf blowers. I hate those.

The Rake is listening. Don't go to sleep.

Well it depends, we raked the leaves because we didn't want it to wash down a drain thus blocking it. So there is a logical reason behind it sometimes.

We rarely never did this when I was a kid, the trees in our front garden lost leaves, but my grandmother never really seemed to care. The back garden never lost leaves, just branches. I can see why some people would want to get rid of leaves. Personally, if I had to walk through them, I'd be freaked out by the possibility of spiders or something.

There's this couple that live near where I work, I walk past them daily. They are both out before 7am, raking and sweeping (with a broom, and a dustpan and brush) every single leaf or twig for the whole block surrounding their house. Gutters (which I could understand), footpath (also understandable) and any other area they can. That's insane! I spent the first 6mths I walked past trying to work out if it was maybe their job or something, but I think they're just mental. They've killed the grass! Stupid bastards.

They even sweep out the garden beds and under shrubs.

U r right it's dumb as shit! Just another thing control freaks gotta do! Mowing yard is dumb too u can eat the weeds!

It's not that ridiculous. If you don't rake the leaves and there are a lot of 'em, they could really mess up your lawns green appearance. Left some on mine before and it left part of the grass brown.

I always notice when someone rakes the leaves in their yard. Then again I do a lot of landscaping so I notice such things.

I am no wiseman, I am frankly pretty f---ing stupid, and if I come off as didactic and holier-than-thou, I am sorry. I just wrote this in one long binge, did a cursory spell-/grammar-check and then posted. You can read my asinine ramblings or just, please, heed the TL:DR's advice. Both, I can only shakily recommend.

TL:DR - Read all of this: 'http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in-his-own-words' and then contemplate it. Also, OP in specific, it's there house, there rules, and they don't have to be fair, learn to survive raking by making the most of it, possibly by thinking of good reasons you shouldn't have to.

You make the assumption raking leaves is for its a/effect on other people, when that is a mere possibility backed against the arrays of others. Maybe the person that tasked you with raking leaves dislikes the aesthetic effect of leaves creating a mottled and patchwork and unkempt feel, maybe they think this aesthetic reveals something about their psychology, and their vanity prevents them from not caring. Maybe the person lives on a development where raking leaves is punishable by fine by the development owners, and the development owners are vigilant in their polity's enforcement. Maybe the person tasking you with raking the leaves served a higher purpose that you may realize in your fits of ranting and self-pity, not saying you are but I sure-as-hell did, that life is filled with pointless BS and sometimes you have to take it, straight up you-know-where, and feel the reaming. Maybe your the person, presumably your father, is just having a bad day or has a f*cked up psychology that he cannot help be mean or whatever. Here's the thing, this is your parent's house. The primary teleology, the point, of your parents's situation is to raise you and aid your development so that you may be an informed citizen and an asset to humanity and a lovely individual, but not to be fair or anything like that; your parents can order you any way they d*mn please and their isn't jacksh*t you can do about it. Dude, I know how you feel and I had to take it for the first thirteen years of my life, but I learned something. They can kick you out of the house and spirit you away to a godawful foster home with a child-predatory father, dominatrix mother, perversion of the Judeo-Christian God's teaching in justification. Parents qua parents don't have to be fair if their subscription's to such things is nonexistent, like I have said over and over. They have to raise you, and sometimes they need you to help. Do you realize the stress of the adult day-in and day-out? Wake up, go to shower. Shower's filled with scary creepy-crawling stuff. Get gloves, insecticide, spray, go downstairs, take shower. Eat breakfest, go to work, get yelled at by boss, do monotonous BS that perpetuates a wage-slave system, go home, listen to kids b*tch, listen to wife, try to watch television, go to bed, practice the ol' onanism, sleep. Repeat. It isn't fun, it is stressful, life sucks. Your probably a middle-class child, so your dad probably is applicable here.

You want to get out of doing crap like raking leaves? Maybe try doing something intellectual so they can see that raising you comes before their own physical pains and stuff. Read contemporary classics, philosophical tomes, and all those good bores of stuff, and riddle the pages with semi-coherent summaries and thoughts on them, and talk about some of the concepts with your parents, I don't know. Write something. Paint. Sculpt. Play an instrument like a b0ss. These are boring to most though, and is about all I can think of in the way of escaping such mundanity, so you probably have to take it. But taking it is dependent upon you and how you yourself use the time raking the leaves; this is general advice, not specific. Think about something, day-dream, appreciate the brittle delicacy of the leaves, you know, all that stupid stuff about appreciating the small things in life. Let me be honest with you, those little tadbits about small things. They are a part of a grander scheme of things, surviving life without devolving into those factory-default settings of consciousness. You know how when you rake the lawn and absolutely hate it? Like I said, its life, it should be changed, and we should do our best to change it, but change on such a short notice, possibly within our lifetime, is dubious; people don't much like change, which is both reasonable in some ways and others not so much. Learning to survive it as you try to change it is key. Hating something gets boring, hating gets nothing done, hating is mostly a waste of time. Learn to think about life through another lense instead of the default hatred. Think about your father and his possible condition(s), think about the nice alternatives to it being punishment, if anything, try to think of a reason why you shouldn't have to do it, or create a reason. Blind hatred only leads to someone's suffering, and most often that'll be you.

Point is, there are many ways to interpret the act and point of raking leaves, and assuming it is only for punishment or for, IMO, stupid adherence to an aesthetic discounts the smorgasboard of possibilities and, by thinking of things in such a manner, you only bore yourself in the process and waste your own time, OP.

It is pretty ridiculous. I was taught from a young age that it was something you HAD to do. Turns out, it was because they were worried about what others would think about them. Why deny the beauty of nature by raking up the trees leaves? It's best to leave them be. There's only one upside I can see from raking, leaf piles. You can make a huge colourful heap and jump into it:) It's so much fun! But afterwards, the leaves are bagged up and I guess thrown out which is a pointless waste.

You must not have neighbours like mine. They comment and complain about everything they think I'm not doing well enough with my yard. Most home owners do care about what their neighbour's yard looks like because it affects the value of their home.

Think of it as contributing to the maintenance of the home you live in. If you are able, you should help out.

Settle down! I love raking. I'll do it for you ya big baby! Don't think you're jumping in the pile when I done either!