The Difference Between Men and Women #613: Light as decorative accent

My wife and I play a game that neither of us has ever acknowledged playing: She walks around the house turning the lights on, I follow her, turning them off.   While this game is played in households all across America, I don't know that anyone has stopped to look into the origins of the game.  Here they are:

As little boys, all men spent hours of their childhood watching the little wheel on the electric meter on the side of the house spin around in circles; sometimes it spun slowly, taking a couple of minutes for the little black line to make one revolution.   Other times it whirred around like a deli slicer, lethal enough to cut off that arm and a leg it was going to take to pay the bill.  

As curious boys, we wondered what made it spin.  What we found was an underground pit, a portal to hell, where ogres and beasts  are whipped while demons play "The Rowing of the Galley Slaves" on kettle drums made from human skulls.  Medusas cackle with glee at their pain while deformed and grotesque souls revel in their damnation.  The ogres and beasts, covered in the grime and soot and grease of hell, labor to push a giant turnstile, like Conan the Barbarian bellowing to Crom!  The whip cracks, the beast master roars, the turnstile grinds ever so slowly while fire and brimstone scorch the backs of the damned.
That's how electricity is made.

Meanwhile, my wife skips through the house from room to room, sprinkling potpourri and straightening throw pillows, always turning the light on as she leaves the room, as though it were a treat plucked from her little basket of sunshine.  
"Why are you turning the lights on?" I dared ask on one occasion.
"It makes the room so much brighter and cheerier" was the answer I already knew. She obviously had no concern for the ogres and beasts of hell, suffering to bring us every drop of artificial sunlight.

I've learned to pick my battles and deal with the lights, but sometimes I've got to stand strong.  One of those times was when we were recently leaving the house to start several hours of errand-running. As I reached for the door, my wife turned on all of the lights in the kitchen.
"Why are you turning the lights on? We're leaving."
"I know, but it makes the kitchen so much cheerier."
"For whom? No one will be here."
"I know, but when we come back into the house, it'll be cheery."
"Tell you what, when we get home, you wait in the car and I'll run inside and turn the lights on."
"It's just a few lights."
"If you multiplied 'just a few lights' times every household in the world that was leaving them on, that's billions of lights."
"C'mon, I want to get home so we can take a nap."

Fine, we leave the lights on so the house will be cheery when we get home.  
But they'll be no naps for the ogres and beasts and rest of us slaving away to make the little wheel spin.  Crom!