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I'm pretty sure my washing machine is the thing that saves me most time. Washing by hand is fucking hard work and very time consuming. I would neither have the time nor the physical endurance to keep all my clothes and household items in a state acceptable to society.
Then again, if washing machines did not exist, society would have to adjust it's expectations. It's also kind of wasteful to wash clothes too often.
Wouldn't it simple revert to the class based system of cleanliness we had before?
The problems you mention here comes from wealth inequality. We still have those problems when wealth inequality exists - people just find other things to differentiate themselves from the poor. I.e. instead of cleanliness, it is wearing the right (read: expensive) brand of clothing. Or owning an expensive car, or an expensive phone or an expensive anything.
Cleanliness used to be an expensive thing so the wealthy used that to show off their wealth. Nowadays, it is other things.
The solution to this problem is not to make things cheaper (again, there will just be other ways to show off status/wealth), but to reduce wealth inequality.
Basically the only point that needs to be made at the moment.
I think that counts as a kind of societal expectation adjustment
Makes me a bit glum to think about how this concept applies to other areas
Yeah, every time a new timesaving invention becomes mainstream the “meta” of society adjusts and everything gets faster. And more chaotic and insane and crazy. Modern life is weird
Yeah, 'living within your means' works in both directions.
That’s an interesting idea.. can you explain more?
My dryer was down for a bit so I had to hang clothes to dry. Slight inconvenience that really made me appreciate having a washing machine that still worked.
Massive respect to people (most often women) around the world who have washed clothes by hand. The cleaning of the clothes is bad enough but there's also the fetching of (or travelling to) a lot of water.
mechanized laundry is second only to modern medicine, imo
followed closely by indoor plumbing and dishwashers
Indoor plumbing wins all of them for me, for one my washing machine wouldn't be worth it without, and for another it'd be hard to access clean water to rinse wounds and drink medicine.
Having just returned from a long carry-on trip, I concur.
I spent half April washing my socks and underwear in the shower. Even without washing my outer layers, it got really irksome. Thankfully, we had an apartment (with a washer) for the second half. That first load of laundry was magical.