The experts are here to throw cold water on your pursuit of cleanliness and pleasure.
At the risk of playing to type, I’m nonetheless obliged to bring to your attention an item in the Washington Post admonishing all of us for failing to “embrace using cold water, almost all the time.”
That’s right. If you’re using hot water to liberate grease from plateware, stains from clothing, or sweat and grime from yourself, you’re part of the problem. You have succumbed to the cult of efficiency, whose members expect their appliances to perform as advertised with as few demands on your time and resources as possible. You have forgotten the more important things — things like climate change.
“By washing four out of five loads of laundry in cold water, you could cut 864 pounds of CO₂ emissions in a year, an amount equivalent to planting 0.37 acres of U.S. forest,” the Post relates, citing something called the “American Cleaning Institute.” That may be true. If, however, your goal when washing your clothes isn’t to remove oil and dirt from fabric and kill microorganisms in the process but to feel better about your individual carbon footprint, you’re probably not representative of the median washing-machine user.
Perhaps some of you are luxuriating in hot water for your own personal enjoyment — an experience you should regret insofar as it allows you to escape the world’s ills for a few happy minutes. “Your steamy showers also consume energy: Nearly half of a home’s hot water is used for bathing,” the Post continues. “You should also rethink washing your hands with hot or warm water for the same reason, she added.” In addition, “those who have drier skin or skin conditions” may benefit from decreasing their exposure to hot water. The same might be said for high-pH soap, which requires significant resources to produce and can also “dehydrate your skin.” But let’s not give them any ideas.
And what about your dishes? The experts agree that you need not pre-rinse your dishes in hot water to get them clean if they’re just going into the dishwasher anyway. “That’s just a waste,” one of those experts said. “While dishwashers use hot water, energy-efficient models need very little,” the Post insisted. Actual consumers appear to disagree — among them, the Post’s own reporters, who put the expert’s advice to the test and found that pre-rinsing is no mere frivolity. After all, “expert advice can go sideways in the real world,” the Post confessed at the time.
But then, you could “be less resource intensive” by “washing a few dishes by hand.” Indeed, you could. You also could reduce your contributions to heat-trapping emissions by purchasing produce sown in fertile fields by hand, washing yourself and your laundry in the nearby stream, and enjoying the entertainment provided by crank-operated victrolas. Most reject that sage advice because it is an avoidable drain on your time — time that could be devoted to more profitable pursuits. For a particular sort of reformer, however, there is no more profitable pursuit than privation.
The enlightened understand that seeking enlightenment requires us to marinate in the unhappy features of existence wherever they occur. In that way, we might share in that suffering and, thus, dedicate ourselves to their extirpation. In the abstract, it is a noble philosophy. In practice, it mimics a wildly impractical Luddism that marks its practitioners as fanatics. It would be one thing if those who believe in the virtue of a simpler existence took requisite satisfaction in their self-deprivation, but they don’t. As they say, misery loves company.