Schadenfreude isn’t listed among Airbnb’s amenities — but this week, it’s practically complimentary.

Some Airbnb hosts are threatening to quit the platform, raise their housekeeping fees or pare their rental properties down to the bare essentials rather than accept new restrictions on checkout chores. A segment of travelers, meanwhile, has greeted the uproar with the particular delight of people who have spent years paying cleaning charges while being handed lists of chores. “I’m just here with popcorn to watch,” wrote one Reddit commenter. 

Under new rules announced last week, Airbnb will generally prohibit hosts from requiring guests to wash and put away dishes, strip beds or haul garbage off-site for reservations booked on or after November 20. The changes address a long-simmering grievance among travelers, some of whom have encountered checkout instructions that read less like the end of a vacation and more like the beginning of a Saturday spent doing housework.

There are, of course, always more extreme stories, particularly if one goes looking online. “Our current host is asking us to load trash in our vehicle and drive 20 minutes to a drop-off facility,” wrote one traveler. “Our vehicle is fully packed so we’d have to make an extra trip to do this.” Another, who claimed to have already paid a $300 cleaning fee, described receiving a request for an additional $600 after checkout for allegedly failing to scrub the toilets, stove and hot tub, along with leaving “ONE ‘dirty’ pot (it was just water stains).” The guest said Airbnb ultimately sided with them.

These are individual, unverified accounts, not necessarily representative experiences. Still, one can understand why a guest might object to having a 20-minute pilgrimage to the local garbage facility added to the vacation itinerary, or why a $600 dispute over a water-stained pot might leave a lasting impression.

Some hosts maintain that basic housekeeping is simply part of staying in someone else’s home. Their critics counter that they could spend their holidays doing chores at home for free. 

Eventually, somebody delivers what is meant to be the conversation-ending argument: Then book a hotel.

Except it never quite ends the conversation. A host will point out, with some satisfaction, that a hotel room probably won’t have a full kitchen. The traveler, who was just moments ago swearing off vacation rentals forever, admits that’s exactly the problem: They need a kitchen! And there they are, host and guest, still standing in the same imaginary room, arguing about the dishes.

It’s a lot of emotional freight for four burners and a refrigerator. Which raises the obvious question: Why has the kitchen become both the most persuasive argument for renting someone’s home and the place where the whole arrangement gets so contentious?

For families, people with dietary restrictions or anyone hoping to avoid three restaurant bills a day, a kitchen can be essential. But cooking occupies a peculiar position in domestic life: necessary chore to some, passionate hobby to others, and sometimes both to the same person. I have friends who explore unfamiliar places by running through neighborhoods at sunrise or sketching what they see. I prefer wandering a local market, imagining what I might make for dinner.

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One Thanksgiving, my mom and I debated attempting a traditional holiday meal at a rental on Hilton Head Island. At home, we’re spreadsheet cooks — planning weeks, if not months, in advance — and an unfamiliar kitchen seemed a risky place to make stuffing. Then we opened the cupboards: good knives, cookware in every shape and size, multiple colanders, and a generously stocked spice cabinet guests were welcome to use. Whoever owned the house, we realized, loved to cook.

Soon, I was bicycling to Harris Teeter for cornbread ingredients, where Harry the Happy Dragon — a coin-operated green kiddie ride — stood sentry outside the entrance. Later, I padded barefoot into the yard to snip rosemary for the stuffing. I felt like Ina Garten, albeit one whose charming village market featured a mechanical reptile. We cooked leisurely. If Thanksgiving went sideways, we could always order pizza.

We’ve returned several times since. Mary, the owner, understood that a well-equipped kitchen could be part of the vacation itself.

Not every rental kitchen inspires such confidence. At a North Carolina cabin, I once envisioned mornings of cinnamon rolls, bacon and porch-side coffee, only to discover approximately three plates and no coffee maker. Salvation arrived in the form of a traveling companion who, inexplicably, had packed a French press. (I now appreciate hosts who even roughly inventory their kitchen equipment.)

That’s the peculiar promise of a vacation rental kitchen: You can experience someone else’s domestic life as your own. Their spice cabinet becomes yours; their stove, your stove; their neighborhood grocery store, your little errand. But there’s a contradiction tucked inside that promise. We want the intimacy of a home without necessarily inheriting all the obligations of maintaining one. The pleasures of playing house and the responsibilities of keeping house aren’t quite the same thing, even when they happen in the same room.

I don’t remember cleaning up after our Thanksgiving dinner, though I’m sure there was plenty of it. I remember the rosemary, the bicycle ride, the pleasure of discovering another cook’s cupboards. The rest was simply part of making dinner.

Which is perhaps why, reading through the celebrations of Airbnb’s new rules, I keep imagining the other side of that sink full of dishes. The blender caked with a week’s worth of old food. The plates slowly accumulating a geological record of every meal cooked since check-in. I wouldn’t want someone to do that to my kitchen, or to the kitchen of someone I loved.

I can already hear the response from a thousand comment sections: THEN YOU SHOULDN’T HOST!

Fair enough. I don’t! The possibility of strangers allowing marinara to fossilize on my favorite saucepan is among the many reasons I’ve never considered entering the vacation rental business.

But I do think we occasionally forget that hospitality is a two-way street. Being a good host is a genuine responsibility, as is being a good guest. And we tend to understand both roles more intuitively in situations where nobody is exchanging money. If I were watching a friend’s house while they were out of town, I wouldn’t dream of welcoming them back with a pile of bolognese-crusted pots. If that same friend handed me a list of toilets to scrub before returning the keys, however, I might reconsider the friendship.

Of course, the exchange of money changes things. When I pay a cleaning fee, I expect someone to handle the work of preparing a property for its next occupants: washing linens, scrubbing bathrooms, cleaning floors. I’m not volunteering to become somebody’s housekeeper. But I also don’t think loading the dishwasher after making dinner is an especially onerous price to pay for enjoying somebody else’s kitchen.

Now, Airbnb has attempted to draw the boundary more formally. Under its new rules, hosts may ask guests to place dirty dishes in the sink, but generally cannot require them to wash and put those dishes away.

Apparently, somewhere between setting down a dirty plate and turning on the faucet, a vacationer risks becoming a housekeeper.

And perhaps that’s the difficulty with Airbnb’s entire proposition. I loved cooking Thanksgiving in Mary’s kitchen partly because, for a few days, it felt like our own. I could wander into her garden, borrow her spices and imagine that this was simply what my life looked like on a Thursday afternoon. But the pleasure depended on a temporary arrangement, one in which somebody else’s home had been made available for my enjoyment, and in which I understood that eventually I’d have to hand it back.

What does it mean to make yourself at home somewhere when that home is also somebody else’s business? Airbnb has been asking travelers and hosts to negotiate that question for years. Judging by the delight and indignation greeting its new housekeeping rules, we still haven’t agreed on an answer.

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Few things are more difficult to get down in immutable ink than the history of professional wrestling.

Born on the carnival circuit, the pseudo-sport maintained a here today-gone tomorrow feeling until relatively recently. Promoters scraped out regional fiefdoms where transient performers would fight for a spell before jumping ship in search of better deals. Sometimes they took their name with them; other times they molded themselves to whatever gimmick their new promoter needed on the roster. It makes a mess of any timeline, and that’s before you get to the kayfabe — the illusion — of it all, the fact that all these real men and women are deadly serious about keeping up their fake characters. 

Grasping for concrete facts can leave you with two immutable bits of data: when a wrestler was born and when they died, with everything in between being a show on some level. Get enough of those dates together, and it’s hard not to notice a pattern: These sideshow athletes don’t live very long. 

Gorgeous George, one of the most famous faces of wrestling’s Golden Age, didn’t make it to his 50th birthday. “Macho Man” Randy Savage and his ex-wife/manager Miss Elizabeth both died before reaching Social Security eligibility. High-flying technical wrestler Eddie Guerrero died at 38. Windham Rotunda, who freaked out the WWE for years as a swamp-dwelling cultist named Bray Wyatt, passed away at the age of 36. And earlier this week, All Elite Wrestling star Pac died in the parking lot of an Illinois chain restaurant, just a day after his most recent match. HIs cause of death is still unknown. 

Born Benjamin Satterley in a blue-collar community in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, he first came to national attention stateside in the WWE, where he wrestled under the decidedly English name Neville. He took the cruiserweight title twice before jumping for AEW in 2018. His star rose exponentially as a regular heel for the young promotion. At the time of his passing, he was only 40 years old.

Playing a fake brute who’s willing to take a folding chair to the face to settle a disagreement is hell on a body. Learning how to fall and pretending you have superpowers can’t cancel out physics. If a 240-pound man turns you upside down and drives your head into a padded floor, you’re going to feel it the next day (and probably several days after). The wear and tear is cumulative, adding up over time like it does for all contact sports. Just take a boxer’s blown-out ears and a running back’s trick knee and expand it to account for the fact that, in wrestling, shots to the back of the skull are frequently necessary to move the story along. Recruiting almost exclusively among the huge and jacked — it’s easier to appear larger-than-life on camera if you’re real-world large — makes the list of heart conditions start to pile up. It’s all a recipe for a brief career, and a correspondingly short life.

The situation is exacerbated by wrestling’s employer-employee relationship. Staying true to its seasonal carny roots, almost all professional wrestlers are gig workers. The average star of WWE or AEW signs on as an independent contractor, meaning they are responsible for their own health insurance and are subject to being fired for nearly any cause. The situation has been even worse for wrestling’s women, who spent decades subject to the whims of Mary Lillian Ellison, better known as The Fabulous Moolah, a wrestler-promoter-extortionist who controlled virtually all of women’s wrestling, loaning out talent to regional promotions and taking cuts of stars’ pay.

Unlike the four major professional sports in the U.S., wrestlers have no pension and no retiree health benefits. If you wrestle for a living, you’re faced with significant pressure to perform for as long as you can, through as many injuries as you can. Unsurprisingly, the list of premature wrestler deaths is heavy on accidental painkiller overdoses and acute toxicity from mixing medications with alcohol. 

The central role of the promoter — and the lack of genuine athletic competition in matches — puts wrestlers and management on remarkably unequal footing. It’s hard to cause trouble for a boss who can simply write rabble-rousers out of the scripted action. Attempts to unionize the talent were mounted in the 1980s, first by hoo-rah heel Sgt. Slaughter, and then by wrestler-turned-governor Jesse “The Body” Ventura. The latter seemingly bought into some of the era’s storylines and ringside magic, believing that a rousing speech to the wrestlers in the locker room would convince them to strike. But he was ratted on by company star Hulk Hogan, and promoter Vince McMahon quickly summoned Ventura to let him know that any future outbursts of class consciousness would come with walking papers. 

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“Vince . . .  basically threatened to fire me if I ever brought it up again and read me the riot act,” Ventura explained on The Steve Austin Show. ”I then did WrestleMania 2 and immediately left and did ‘Predator’ and was a member of the Screen Actors Guild now, my union that I get retirement from now, healthcare from, all of that from.”

The situation only got worse as WWE muscled out nearly all regional promotions. McMahon’s anti-union behemoth spent decades as the only game in town for professional wrestlers who wanted the reach of a televised promotion. In recent years, AEW has pitched itself as an antidote to the WWE, but its roster is also almost entirely composed of independent contractors. Stars like CM Punk and Ray Fenix have complained loudly about the way the promotion handles wrestler health.

Pac is the second wrestler who performed in an AEW ring to have died just this month. Andy Williams, the former guitarist for metal-core act Every Time I Die who wrestled under the name “The Butcher,” died after collapsing during a match with an independent, regional promotion on Sept. 5 at 48. (His contact with AEW expired in April, after which he became a free agent.) Williams’ official cause of death is pending, awaiting final autopsy results.

Wrestling’s treatment of its employees is a bit too abstract to be listed on either man’s autopsy report. Coroners are in the business of endings, putting a neat period on decades of damage with phrases like “cardiac arrest.” Still, anyone who has followed wrestling for years can see the way it hobbles its heels and heroes alike. In a sport that heavily encourages everyone watching to follow the narrative, it’s hard not to notice a pattern.

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