While we’re on the subject, I’m surprised that people still use dishwashers. They seem so unnecessary to me. Just wash and scrub your dish when you’re done using it and put it on the drying rack. Does there need to be an extra machine that cleans it further? Why put in the extra effort?
That’s true. Perhaps I mean that for myself I find it to be minimally time-saving to own one. I have yet to run the numbers but I can’t see how it would justify a purchase, at least while living alone.
It takes less effort to rinse a dish before putting it in a diswasher than it does to clean it by hand (in fact often you don’t need to rinse it), and the machine beeps once your dishes are dry. These factors, plus the batch processing, make dishwashers less effortful per dish for me.
For example, when you have kids, you often get a situation where dozens of things get dirty at the same time, and instead of washing them immediately you need to do something else, such as taking them to a kindergarten.
But without kids, I agree with you, washing everything right after you used it is quick and simple. It just requires a bit of conscientiousness.
I am pretty low on conscientiousness, but I know people even lower than me.
For me, an important lesson was living alone in my own place, for a few years. That allowed me to try different things, and see what happens. After a few iterations, I guess my System 1 learned that actually washing the dishes immediately is the option that requires least work, which made it my preferred option.
Seems to me that people who never lived alone are missing an important learning opportunity. (Not just about dishes but also other household topics: vacuuming the room, buying toilet paper, etc. You see the entire “metabolism” of the household, not just selected parts.) When you live with other people, the options are not only “do the dishes immediately, when you mostly just rinse them”, “do the dishes later, when you have to scrub the dry parts of the food”, or even “do the dishes much later, when you also have to remove the disgusting mold”, but there is also an option “if I wait long enough, someone else will do the dishes”. The presence of the last option, especially when one is in denial about how much they benefit from it, is one of the things that make bad roommates.
tl;dr—I believe it’s usually more about incentives than about conscientiousness; or rather that going against your incentives requires even more conscientiousness than usual.
Just wash and scrub your dish when you’re done using it and put it on the drying rack. Does there need to be an extra machine that cleans it further?
Why do you say “further”? Do you wash things before putting them in the dishwasher? We generally scrape off things that won’t dissolve, and then put the dishes in as-is.
(In a house where we regularly have seven people at dinner being able to just put everything right into the dishwasher saves us loads of time over hand washing)
I would generally do a minimal rinse before putting dishes in the dishwasher, yes. I can see given the above comments that people disagree with me. I would guess the main sources of disagreement are:
I am considering a case where people do their dishes alone and don’t share (you noted that this is different with seven people).
Rinsing/scraping, putting the dish in the dishwasher, and then taking it out takes a very small amount of time compared to hand-washing (I assumed that this was false, but maybe people other people are right).
While we’re on the subject, I’m surprised that people still use dishwashers. They seem so unnecessary to me. Just wash and scrub your dish when you’re done using it and put it on the drying rack. Does there need to be an extra machine that cleans it further? Why put in the extra effort?
They are faster when you have a lot of dishes, and often much more energy and water efficient than hand washing.
That’s true. Perhaps I mean that for myself I find it to be minimally time-saving to own one. I have yet to run the numbers but I can’t see how it would justify a purchase, at least while living alone.
It takes less effort to rinse a dish before putting it in a diswasher than it does to clean it by hand (in fact often you don’t need to rinse it), and the machine beeps once your dishes are dry. These factors, plus the batch processing, make dishwashers less effortful per dish for me.
For example, when you have kids, you often get a situation where dozens of things get dirty at the same time, and instead of washing them immediately you need to do something else, such as taking them to a kindergarten.
But without kids, I agree with you, washing everything right after you used it is quick and simple. It just requires a bit of conscientiousness.
I think there’s some typical minding going on here of how hard conscientiousness is.
I am pretty low on conscientiousness, but I know people even lower than me.
For me, an important lesson was living alone in my own place, for a few years. That allowed me to try different things, and see what happens. After a few iterations, I guess my System 1 learned that actually washing the dishes immediately is the option that requires least work, which made it my preferred option.
Seems to me that people who never lived alone are missing an important learning opportunity. (Not just about dishes but also other household topics: vacuuming the room, buying toilet paper, etc. You see the entire “metabolism” of the household, not just selected parts.) When you live with other people, the options are not only “do the dishes immediately, when you mostly just rinse them”, “do the dishes later, when you have to scrub the dry parts of the food”, or even “do the dishes much later, when you also have to remove the disgusting mold”, but there is also an option “if I wait long enough, someone else will do the dishes”. The presence of the last option, especially when one is in denial about how much they benefit from it, is one of the things that make bad roommates.
tl;dr—I believe it’s usually more about incentives than about conscientiousness; or rather that going against your incentives requires even more conscientiousness than usual.
Why do you say “further”? Do you wash things before putting them in the dishwasher? We generally scrape off things that won’t dissolve, and then put the dishes in as-is.
(In a house where we regularly have seven people at dinner being able to just put everything right into the dishwasher saves us loads of time over hand washing)
I would generally do a minimal rinse before putting dishes in the dishwasher, yes. I can see given the above comments that people disagree with me. I would guess the main sources of disagreement are:
I am considering a case where people do their dishes alone and don’t share (you noted that this is different with seven people).
Rinsing/scraping, putting the dish in the dishwasher, and then taking it out takes a very small amount of time compared to hand-washing (I assumed that this was false, but maybe people other people are right).