A minimalist approach to washing the dishes
farbeyondthestars.wordpress.com
farbeyondthestars.wordpress.com
A monk came to Joshu, asking, "Master, I just entered the monastery:
may I have my first lesson?"
Joshu asked, "Have you eaten your rice?"
He replied, "Yes, I've eaten."
"Then you had better wash your bowl."
In that moment the monk was enlightened.
In my last apartment, this was very clear. I was generally the only person who washed dishes, so I always ended up washing a sink-full of my housemates' dishes when I did my own. It was a good lesson in patience, since it is easy to claim unfairness in such a situation: but the real core of the matter is that you want a clean kitchen and it's not going to happen unless you clean it, no matter who is "to blame." (In this sense I learned that blame is not very practical and will probably need to be replaced in my life with something better.) The whole house was like that, caked with years of grime built up. Slowly but surely, one room at a time, it could all be cleaned. The stove was the worst. "I thought our stove was yellow?" said my roommate. "Was yellow, past tense," I said -- there was a beautiful white stove underneath yearning to be set free.
The blog post comments that it's a problem with appreciating honest toil, when you let the dishes pile up rather than just doing them. This might be true. It might also be a problem with deferring gratification, as I noticed that the dishes were neglected for the sake of watching television or YouTube. It might also be that they simply treat these things as an abstraction layer; like someone who does not sharpen their chef's knife, it implements the interface `knife.cut(x)` in some functionally pure and undecaying sense; the idea of `sharpen(knife)` is too real-world and stateful.
a) the running water barely touched the item before going down the drain
b) does it need to be as hot as the tap is able to produce?
On the other hand, I usually pre-wash stuff in warm water with heavy washing-up fluid, to get rid of grease and large pieces of food, then a hotter, more detailed wash to get rid of small stuck on particles and residue. Then maybe a cold rinse to get rid of the soapy water. Then I leave things to air-dry.
A solution to things getting dried-on is to put dirty dishes in water to 'soak', then it should get easier to clean them over time, instead of harder (although it does mean your dirtier dishes will dirty you cleaner one, but maybe this is just more incentive to clean them properly?).
I try to 'batch' things when I can, rather than doing dishes as needed, but the sink might need to be used in the meanwhile, and some people have a chip on their shoulder about having dirty dishes in a sink.
Maybe this is wasteful too, but it annoys me when people dry things with dirty residue on them - if you "clean" something with yellow, greasy water, it isn't clean!
The idea is that you let a thin stream of hot water come out of the tap; glasses and other aesthetic things get rinsed first, aiming the dirty water that runs off of them down the drain. This is why the wash-bowl does not fill up the whole sink. Once those are done the extra water is still clean and clear in the wash-bowl, so you can add some soap and do the plates and other greasy dishes: just let the dirty water fall out into the drain. This solves the "cleaning with dirty water" problem; you never soak the dishes in the water, so they never have to contaminate it.
Another water-saving measure I've seen is simply not to rinse soapy-water dishes but to let them briefly drip-dry and then dry them with a dishcloth: this gets the soap off without using extra water. I mean, it's a first-world country and they've got lots of water to spare but I'm glad to see that the Dutch "no inefficiencies" demeanor means that they make an effort anyway.
A running hot water tap is probably the most enery intensive thing you can turn on in your home. 20+ kilowatts. If it's heated with electricity, 50+ kilowatts of fossil fuels are probably being burned to run it.
Almost every article is instantly bombarded with "holy crap this is terrible" style comments.
The article is based on his observation that people who do the dishes being happier/more organised/more productive people. Anecdotally, I've also noticed this.
You don't have to listen to his advice but you also don't have to insult people who are giving advice based on their life.
Or I could just.. not, considering it harms nobody and then I don't have to do chores immediately after eating my dinner. I get the impression the writer has a case of OCD here.
- sometimes it's easier to wash things after you've left them to soak overnight or for a few hours
- it doesn't make sense to do the washing up for one teaspoon, it's better to wait until it all accumulates and then do it all in one go (that's my excuse, anyway)
- I highly doubt that doing other people's washing up will make them do their washing up
That was facetious and ostensibly hypocritical but in all seriousness I judge people constantly and they rarely measure up. This should be true for most people. We can only judge what we're aware of and what we're aware of we're usually good at. I realize (everyone's different | ymmv | to each his own | etc). I still think I know whats best for people in a few domains. Sometimes I'm wrong but that hasn't stopped me. I've encountered enough people like you to know that if I try to help them, even if it's completely earnest, they'll think I'm being condescending. Now I bite my tongue and worry about the person who could be helping me but is instead silently judging.