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I Will Get Through This by Folding Laundry
Meanwhile, the Second Law of Thermodynamics can go to hell.
Matt Gross
January 13, 2025
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Just as I was about to start writing this essay last night, Jean walked in and suggested we fold laundry. I did not object. In fact, I love folding laundry—it’s one of the household chores I really embrace: transforming a mound of four different people’s different garments, all tangled and twisted and turned inside-out, into neat piles of shirts and pants and rolled-up socks.
I don’t have any really special techniques for this, other than the Japanese T-shirt folding method, which you should really learn right away. And I do know how to fold a fitted sheet properly; I showed Jean the method last night and felt pretty darn proud of myself, and of her. Also, we figured out a solution to the Loose Duvet Problem—you know, the way a duvet will bunch up at one end, always the wrong one, inside its cover?—which is just to safety pin it to the sheet on the inside corners. Duh. We are 50 years old and almost ready to face the world! Can we retire now?
The most important thing to know about folding laundry is that to do it you have to do it. That is, what may appear to be another fucking chore you would do anything to avoid, another insurmountable Sisyphean interruption in the otherwise joyful flow of your life, is actually quite surmountable. You start folding laundry, and sock by sock, undie by undie, you make progress, until eventually all the laundry is folded. Then you put your own clothes away in drawers and closets, and assemble the kids’ clothes in neat piles they will ignore for weeks, and you are done! You have folded the laundry. Was that so hard?
Again: I like doing this. I like turning disorder into order, and folding laundry is one of the easiest ways to do so. In fact, sometimes I will even leave the second load of clean clothes in the dryer not out of laziness (no, never!) but so that I will have more clothes to fold tomorrow; I’m like one of those weird-ass kids who refuse a second marshmallow.
Order: We all appreciate it to one degree or another. Folded laundry, a well-made bed, dishes washed and dried and neatly put back into their shelves and drawers, books slotted among other books, to-do lists checked off: Our lives—especially our very bougie lives—are spent reducing the entropy of various systems, wresting organization out of chaos. This happens, as I understand it, at all levels of our being, starting with our individual cells and our very consciousness, which expend energy to reshape the world into forms we can then integrate into our bodies and minds. It’s a heroic if futile process: The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that the entropy of the universe always increases. Despite our efforts, and the accidental processes that a result of the fundamental laws of physics, we are always heading toward greater disorder. Our ziggurats of rolled socks are transitory; we will all one day turn to biological mush. The heat death of the universe is unavoidable (maybe?), so why do we bother storing irregular shapes inside shapes with flat surfaces when friends come to visit?
More after the jump—but don’t forget to click the ad!
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As rigorous as I can be about folding laundry, I’m no neat freak. My desk is a shitshow I’ve been meaning to deal with for months now. Here’s what’s cluttering the right side of its flat surface right now: therapy putty, in four different stiffnesses, for strengthening your hands; three cassette tapes, including the Beat Street soundtrack; four C batteries inside a plastic container, with a scraggly hair elastic on top of it; a Jules Verne Lego set, assembled; the remote control for the air-conditioner, which I won’t use till May, most likely; two pairs of eyeglasses I don’t wear anymore; two cloths for cleaning eyeglasses; a hexagonal wooden trivet for putting my coffee mug on; my coffee mug, which is not sitting on the trivet; an empty glass I used for water last night; two miniature bottles of Tabasco sauce I don’t think I’ll use; a high-quality Sony digital audio recorder; a podcast microphone; a pair of Expanse challenge coins; a black Alessi watch, its battery dead, that I have no intention of wearing; a sandpaper-wrapped wooden stick for filing down the calluses on my hands; two external hard drives whose obsolete connector cables I long ago lost; a cork coaster filled with coins from various nations, a pin, and one of those things you stick into the tiny hole in your iPhone to get the SIM drawer to pop out; a blue desk lamp off of which I’ve hung a Petzl headlamp, a magnetic dust broom for my computer, and my third-place ribbon from last year’s Trials of Miles one-mile indoor race; and a business card for the #YeahYouWrite reading series.
We will not discuss the left side of my desk.
I would very much like to clean all of this up, but I have a feeling I won’t do it anytime soon. And that’s because although I crave order, I’m also willing to live amid a certain amount of chaos. I think we all are. We all are trying to strike a balance, whether we do this intentionally or not, between ordering our world and letting it just do, like, whatever. The contours and rules, however, about what is acceptable entropy and what absolutely requires immediate reordering are hard to define. How is it that I can leave my desk in this state for so long, yet the sight of shoes scattered thoughtlessly at the door to our apartment sends me into a rage? I mean, obviously, the more we leave shoes lying around, the more someone is likely to trip on them and get hurt in a dumb way, so—again obviously—we want to reduce the disorder of one system so as to reduce the chances of disorder in another system. My desk, meanwhile, is less dangerous, as long as I don’t ever actually touch anything on it.
If we’re lucky, we can surround ourselves with people whose chaos-control mechanisms complement our own. I, for example, cannot stand to see dirty dishes near but not in the sink, so I put them in; Jean, meanwhile, cannot stand to see a sink filled with dirty dishes, so she puts them in the dishwasher; I can’t stand to see how she arranges dishes in the dishwasher, so I rearrange them. This is the recipe for a very happy marriage. Also: We now make the kids do the dishes, and avert our eyes while they do it.
Laziness is a fair explanation for these gaps in our behavior: We can only expend so much energy bringing order to the galaxy. But it’s also a lazy explanation. More satisfying (to me, anyway) is the idea that just as our minds crave order and predictability, so too do they crave risk and novelty. Maybe that’s because, at some base level, we sense the Second Law of Thermodynamics. We know that chaos is coming for us. We don’t know when or how, or what form it will take, but no matter how much effort we expend to fight entropy, along will come something to disrupt it: a stumble, a slip, a wildfire. What will we do when that happens? For this inevitable randomness we must remain prepared, even if at a very low level, so we keep this enemy close by, nestled among the T-shirts and underwear, undealt with but acknowledged, seen, understood—just in case. We are neither solely Chaos Muppets nor Control Muppets but both at once, to differing degrees, and while it may be a kind of torture to watch the show of humanity yo-yoing violently between those extremes, and often starring our very own selves, in small doses it can be quite enjoyable.
And so: Please don’t ask me over to fold laundry for you—I would not want you to deny yourself that pleasure. 🪨🪨🪨
It’s Good and I Like It
From the writer who brought you McMansion Hell (and many other great things), this essay:
The big picture is this, to put it bluntly: the attacks on the press by the capitalist class, usually via the tech industry, either by controlling it or undermining it through platformization have created an existential and paradoxical bind where the media is now in such a state that the need to survive is more important than both the journalism-movie “will to do the right thing” and the desire to produce work that is honest, brave, requires effort and time to make, and will last beyond a single news cycle. We (writers) all know this, and it’s not particularly heroic of me to state the obvious on the stating the obvious app for the ten thousandth time.
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