The Mental Load No ’10-Minute Delivery’ Can Lighten

Equality has entered the workplace, while inequality still rules at home. Women have stepped out to work, but the weight of running a household hasn’t grown any lighter. We operate like systems that never shut down, scanning, calculating, reminding, planning, predicting, often all at once, while pretending to focus on just one thing, a system that is not even allowed to hang.

The rise of work from home has only made this background processing louder. When your office is ten feet away from the kitchen, the boundaries blur. 

You draft a strategy while your child cries in the background. You refine a presentation while the pressure cooker whistles. Working from home has only reduced the commute, not the burden of this mental load.

How Media Normalises The Load

This isn’t new. The overlap between a woman’s work and her responsibilities has always existed. It is something we have seen for years in the way women were portrayed at work.

In the 2001 Hindi sitcom Office Office, Usha Ji, played by Asawari Joshi, the only woman in the workplace, is rarely shown doing her actual office work. Instead, she is seen knitting for her children or chopping vegetables atop files that demand urgent attention, her desk constantly collapsing the boundary between office and home.

She is never allowed to be just an employee. Even in fiction, women at work are rarely allowed to be unidimensional or taken seriously. When the media normalises this, reality does not question it; it repeats it.

In many homes, mornings begin differently. One person wakes up to the world, reading the news and thinking about global crises. The other wakes up wondering if there’s milk in the fridge and if there are enough vegetables for the day’s meals.

And yet, the solution arrives wrapped in simplicity, a clean interface, bright icons, and a smooth scroll. On the screen, everything looks effortless, problems solved in minutes.

Off-screen, the kitchen still runs on memory. Quick commerce platforms solve these problems in minutes, but they do not remove the responsibility of who should remember them. If anything, they accelerate the cycle.

Quick commerce reduces friction. The milk arrives before the argument begins. The help arrives before responsibility can be negotiated. But the question remains untouched.

The logic does not stop at groceries. On-demand home service platforms now bring labour to your doorstep for cleaning, laundry, dishwashing, and even the smallest tasks. 

But something deeper is shifting. We are moving from relationships to algorithms. The didiji who knew the rhythm of the house is being replaced by a booked expert, efficient, precise, and temporary.

A person becomes a task, and a relationship becomes a time slot. For many women, these platforms offer mobility without exposure, no late-night trips, no negotiations, no explanations. But this safety is unevenly distributed.

While one woman stays inside her home, another steps into unfamiliar spaces to work. These apps promise safety features like tracking and verification, but the contrast is stark.

One woman avoids exposure while another navigates it professionally, repeatedly, and invisibly. Quick commerce is no longer just reactive; it is becoming predictive.

These platforms anticipate needs before they are expressed, guessing the dal before dinner, groceries before the shelves are empty.

The Pain Technology Cannot Relieve

Technology has begun to think for you. But it cannot replace what it does not understand, who should do the work and why it is still expected of the same person.

In Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, where ghoonghat and purdah still limit mobility, the smartphone becomes an unfiltered window to the world, bringing the market quite literally into the palm of her hand.

But even here, the structure holds. This relief is not universal. It is built on layers of inequality, class, access, and risk. One woman’s convenience is another woman’s labour, even if it brings her employment. One woman’s safety is another woman’s exposure.

The burden has not disappeared; it has simply moved. Convenience feels like progress, but progress without redistribution is not liberation.

The mental load has not gone away; it has just been optimised. Until remembering is shared, we optimise exhaustion, not escape it.

Aastha Jadon is a PhD scholar whose work examines the invisible structures shaping women’s lives. She is also the author of Sunflower on My Shoulders, which explores similar themes of gender and lived experience. Views expressed by the author are their own.