You Can’t Lifehack Your Way Through Living

On embracing simple pleasures

I can usually get through about half a record while folding my laundry. It’s a great time to catch up with what’s new, or to listen to something before a show, like I am right now with Ratboys excellent Singin’ To An Empty Chair.

For quite a while now, I haven’t done that because I have not been doing my laundry. Given that I live in an ancient San Francisco apartment, let’s just say in-unit laundry is a luxury that I do not have. And when they started the seismic retrofit ages and ages ago, they actually had to remove our shared laundry since it was in the ground floor garage they were refitting. I got a nice cool $50 in my pocket every month (well, just a credit on my rent) and had to figure out other options.

Since San Francisco still has a lot of places without laundry in-unit or even in-building, we still have a lot of laundromats, and I decided to take a flyer on wash-and-fold. Which I do have to say is life-changingly good. I do not love doing laundry, and I do not particularly like folding it. It’s not my favorite task in the world, and at the end of the day, it’s not all that much more expensive (accounting for the fact that I’m paying for my time as well). So it’s a task that is worth it to me, and for the past 7 years since that construction started, I’ve largely offloaded it. We have a new laundry room and the machines suck, so that helps. I still do the linens because I ain’t got that kinda money and they are simple.

However, since I quit my job a bit ago, the math is a little more in the favor of schlepping a block to the laundromat and doing it myself instead of paying for wash-and-fold. I feel like I have more time, and that it’s more worth it to keep a little cash in my pocket for something I can do, even if it’s not my favorite chore (though far from my least favorite). My situation has changed, and so the economics of it have shifted. My time is still valuable, but with much more of it my own, I can make the time versus money exchange in favor of setting aside a couple hours of mostly passive time to deal with my clothes each week.

Perhaps it’s just embracing the simple pleasures, the simple tasks, the repetition, hell, the structure of an activity right now. I get a few steps in walking back and forth to the laundromat, and they solve one of my major frustrations with folding it on my own in that they have dedicated space to do that. So I can queue up something good and zone out for 15-20 minutes to whatever has been catching my ears.

Paying someone else to deal with my laundry is no doubt more efficient, and not out of place in a city laden with people seeking the next lifehack, with incessant concerns about efficiency. There have been many apps for that (though in my experience most of them have sucked compared to my local laundromat). And I’m sure when the equation shifts again, when I have a job again that is more demanding of my time, when I can make that tradeoff more simply, I will again. But for now, I’m learning to embrace the simple pleasures as I search for the right balance of wending hours away while still getting shit done. You can’t lifehack your way through living, sometimes you just gotta do it.