The Worst Chore on the Planet

Or, the eternal karmic cycle of doing laundry...

“About 10 minutes ago, we all woke up because of this strange roaring sound. We all raced toward the sound, which turned out to be the washing machine going back on.
Who knew the rinse cycle could be so scary?”
― Susan Beth Pfeffer, Life As We Knew It

While chores are inherently grotesque, nothing is as needlessly elaborate and painful as doing laundry. Even dumping garbage has a quick finality that’s comforting.

Clothes don’t wash themselves. N reminds me of this fact of life every few days or so.

Before you judge me for being a typical chore-averse y-chromosome troglodyte, I want you all to know that I’m a proactive partaker of household drudgery in general. And yet, the idea that laundry needs doing requires a Memento-esque web of notes, alarms and perhaps even a forearm tattoo as a reminder.

When the fateful moment arrives, you collect a bunch of clothes at various levels of marination and offer them to the great cleansing whirlpool while adding a bunch of chemicals like a bored alchemist. You then contemplate the NASA mission control of brutalist dials and buttons on the surface.

If you reflect too much, questions arise.

Why does fabric care need the same number of combinations as a Cold War missile launch? Does the universe implode if a sock is washed at 30 degrees instead of 40? Is the Eco-Friendly wash option meant to kill the planet at only half the speed?

My sop is simple: Turn a big, round knob 90 degrees to the right, press start, and immediately erase any memory this happened. Even this I consider a reckless overinvestment of my mental bandwidth to an activity I will look the least fondly on my deathbed.

Aside 1: My dad loves doing laundry. Unsatisfied by the centralized authoritarianism of modern washing machines, he runs his own laundry anarchy, personally pausing the machine at various stages, soaking, scrubbing manually and restarting cycles in an elaborate hours-long ritual. It’s laundry theatre.

For most chores, doing them would be the end of it. On the other hand, laundry is a test match of a chore. On one side, Sam Altman apparates into my phone, promising an AGI takeover, while on the other side, my washing machine convulses and gurgles like a medieval contraption in Winterfell.

I now wait.

Technically 45 minutes but life distracts you and sometimes two hours have gone by before you remember that your clothes are marinating inside, inventing new smells.

The descent into tedium hell

“I am the washing machine of love. And if you have no idea what I mean, maybe it’s time to let some laundry into your life.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale

Laundry descends into worse and worse tedium as it progresses.

Cursing the inventor of leggings, you untangle the damp clump of wet garment spaghetti. The limp, ghostly carcass is then hung using a system of rods, rails, ropes nailed to the wall, or, like when I lived in Banglore, an elaborate pulley system, all very reminiscent of a fatal hanging in a western.

Aside 2: This performance by Danish National Symphony Orchestra of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly movie theme is 🔥

You’re still not done.

Hours pass. Days? It really depends on whether the sun was shining or if an unseasonal tropical storm emerged, but after some interminable time, you remember again. The movie plays reverse, where you pull out the clips like bad teeth and dump your washed clothes somewhere. Where you dump, these shows how badly you want to cosplay as an adult.

You’re still not done.

A few days later, when you realise you are out of underwear, you dive into this cloth dump. At some point, these clothes may get folded up into your wardrobe. This is usually when you realize that the cycle needs to start all over again.

This is civilization? Just endlessly repeating wash cycles?

I refuse to accept the arrival of singularity unless someone promises me that laundry has been abolished forever.

The damn chore used to be worse (if you can believe it)

“Where does someone go when he dies?', 'When does fear end?', 'Where are all the single socks that disappeared in the washing machine?”
― Antonia Michaelis, The Storyteller

It’s already the Donald Trump of chores, but laundry used to be much worse.

Urine was like Tide in the Roman times, the literal golden era of laundry. In a move that gave India’s finance minister a run for her money, Emperor Vespasian introduced the urine tax. Citizens would go to designated urine tax stations to make their warm contributions, all for the greater good.

The kind of stalls where Roman launderers stomped on urine-soaked clothes.

Professional launderers collected all this golden detergent to soak the dirty clothes in vats. They’d even stomp on it. Something, something about ammonia helping clean the clothes, but during the peak urine-laundry era (words I never imagined I’d write in my life), the romans had industrial-sized laundromats where teams of launderers would be stomping on clothes soaked in ankle-deep urine pools, you know, like a sweat shop making Apple phones, except with urine.

While laundry thankfully evolved from a urine-soaked mess to a soap-soaked drudgery, it still wasn’t so much better.

"Are they trying to break those stones with clothes?" asked Mark Twain after visiting India and seeing the dhobys laundering clothes near the river.

And then, of course, unless money was involved, laundry was usually dumped on women historically. Housewives worldwide spent their lives scrubbing, boiling (only the Victorian weirdos, I think), and generally abusing fabric until they got out their day’s worth of trauma of patriarchy.

Since the 1950s detergent companies started selling the idea that laundry wasn’t just a chore, but a moral achievement. Smiling housewives, high on bleach fumes and societal expectations, proudly displayed their ‘whiter whites’, while husbands marvelled at the magic of a washing machine they refused to touch.

They even got a little girl in there for good measure.

Can’t we solve all this with one of those Boston Dynamics robots by now? I do not need a bloody AI agent to press buttons for me, give me one that takes care of my laundry.

But apparently, laundry is too soul-crushing even for a robot.

Ever eager to replace humans with robots, Japan gave it a shot with Laundroid, a $16,000 laundry-folding AI cabinet. It was supposed to relieve humans of just one small part of the laundry process - the folding. A refrigerator-sized machine overengineered with AI-based image recognition, laboured over clothes, folding one t-shirt in….ten minutes.

Naturally, the company went bankrupt.

So here we are. The robots are busy making art and writing poetry while we continue sorting, washing, drying, and folding like medieval peasants.

The complete lose-lose, no redemption arc of a chore

“It's better to have loved and lost than do forty pounds of laundry a week.”
― Salvador Dalí

Most boring chores offer some redemption. Even if you hate cooking, you have to accept that there’s some dark magic in the sizzling of tadka. It’s a transformation of ingredients into the most Pavlovian of conclusions - food. You may even likely receive a compliment on the meal. Washing dishes is a miserable but redemptive act. You start the session with greasy, grimy dishes and end with sparking smooth ones. Ironing isn’t a chore at all for me, but a steamy meditation of de-creasing.

Laundry has zero redeeming aspects.

You can only lose with laundry. Has anyone ever complimented you on well-laundered clothes? The best you can hope for is that no one notices. The worst is people judging you for wearing dirty, stinky or creased clothes.

There’s an old joke about lousy bureaucracy. One man is digging a hole. Another one is filling it in right behind him. When questioned, they say that the guy who is supposed to be laying a pipe is off sick that day.

This is the spirit of laundry. Futile doing.

You’re a glorified courier service that relocates clothes in various stages of grime, dampness and dryness from one place to another. Even if you’ve done nearly all the tasks but fail to fold the washed laundry, it stares at you like a big crinkling pile of disdain, a soft mountain of failures.

No joy. No redemption. Just shame.

Could be Worse,

Tyag