Life is Too Short to Wash and Dry
What I stop taking for granted on every vacation.
I’m a non-conformist, but not a reflexive contrarian. My chief goal is to enjoy every day of my life, and my non-conformism is only a means to that end. But what a means it is! By the power of non-conformism, I weasel out of hours of daily drudgery. Not by shoving work onto others in my family, but by beating the system as a family.
When I’m at home, to be honest, I take my streamlined life for granted. It’s when I’m on vacation that I become hyperaware of the inconveniences most of the global rich needlessly endure.
The top two: the washing of dishes, and the drying of clothes.
Washing dishes. Normal people use “real” plates, bowls, cups, and utensils for meals. Which means rinsing, loading and unloading, and restacking multiple times per day. The drudgery easily adds up to hours every week.
What’s the alternative? Go fully disposable. CostCo sells cheap, high-quality disposable plates, bowls, cups, and utensils in bulk. My whole family uses these products for virtually all meals, so instead of washing them when we’re done, we throw them away. Even setting and clearing the table is easier with disposables, because they’re lighter and you don’t have to worry about breaking them. (And for the same reasons, kids can start helping years earlier).
How does vacation renew my appreciation our glorious system?
Even in the U.S., family hotels usually only provide enough plates, bowls, cups, and utensils for one meal. That’s fine if you’re staying for one night, but otherwise you’re stuck washing dishes instead of enjoying your trip.
Outside of the U.S., moreover, even obtaining decent disposables is quite the challenge. In “green” countries like Germany, disposable products are garbage. The utensils are made out of fragile wood; they’re like the paper straws of flatware. When we lived in Palermo for a month, we actually brought a “mobile CostCo” of disposables across the Atlantic so we wouldn’t have to wash dishes in our apartment. If you’re stuck in a non-CostCo country, I urge you to pay for international shipping of these life-altering products.
Drying clothes. Americans take electric dryers for granted, but in most of the OECD, air drying of clothes remains common. Which is a nightmarish ordeal: placing laundry on drying racks, checking laundry on drying racks, adjusting laundry on drying racks, and rewashing clothes that get mildewed despite your best efforts.
What’s the alternative? Bend over backwards to get an electric dryer, of course — the bigger and ungreener the model, the better.
Again, I’m so used to our glorious system that I have to go on vacation to fully appreciate it. When we lived in Palermo without a dryer, I got a small dose of the drudgery to which hundreds of millions of the global rich submit. Keeping four guys in clean clothes in the hot summer burned about 90 minutes daily. Sure, my speed improved with time, but the asymptote was about 60 minutes. Even I found myself thinking, “I can see why Italians don’t want more kids.”
Good economists will remind me that the global poor are wise to spend their time saving money. Fair enough — though even the poor really ought to crunch the numbers and see if the money they save is worth more than the extra time they could have been working.
For the global rich, in contrast, the math is clear. Wake up: Every year, you’re paying thousands of dollars of time to save hundreds of dollars of money.
Yes, I’ve heard the popular stubborn excuses for being normal, starting with: “But I really like eating on real plates” and “Electric dryers damage your clothes — look at the lint catcher!”
But come on. When was the last time you even consciously thought, “It’s such a pleasure to eat from a real plate” or “My air-dried clothes are ever-so-nice”? In contrast, when was the last time you weren’t consciously aware of having an extra hour of fun? My point: Hedonic adaptation to slightly lower product quality is far easier than hedonic adaptation to boring toil. So save yourself.
Sure, you can call me crazy. Plenty of people have! But when it comes to washing and drying, I’m crazy like a fox. If you think conforming to conventional standards of sanity is more important than enjoying an extra hour of life every day, you are lost.
To answer your question, every day I think it’s a pleasure to eat from a ceramic plate. Even if I didn’t care about the environment, I’d prefer the aesthetic of ceramic to the flimsiness and cheap scent of paper or plastic plates.
I was hoping this was a joke. So glad the global rich can look past the waste and pollution created by plastics manufactured at plants and sent to landfills adjacent to the global poor who are lucky enough even own a dishwasher. There is a certain zen in taking care of your own shit, whether it is washing your own dishes, or hanging up your own clothes. I do both even though it would be more convenient to just buy energy and single use flatware. May your brain accumulate enough microplastics to jar into you to some sense of responsibility for your impact on this planet. Global rich indeed…