Rounded Apathy
Longing to return to stardust
- Aug 8, 2022
- 772
TL;DR it may actually be better for you and I've got a guy to back it up.
Given that not much was able to happen in my corner of the world two years ago, I decided to try an experiment I'd hear of over a decade beforehand: washing one's hair with just water to allow it to achieve a kind of natural state of self-cleaning. It had already been a few years that I was just using a basic bar of glycerine soap for everything to great effect, so I figured "what the hell, no one sees and judges me anyway, might as well see what happens". And to my surprise, it was fine. There was hardly any difference, other people didn't notice when I saw them, so I kept doing it. Up to and including today, in fact.
Earlier this year, in the winter, as a result of a combination of misery and just being too blooming tired to deal with all the extra work that now comes with showering due to health reasons etc., I stopped showering as often as I had been, which was usually every other day. I started doing so every three, then four. Eventually I just decided to see how long I could go without doing so at all because of how much damn effort it was and the time it took for the now extra shit and how I no longer enjoyed doing it. Days went by, then weeks. I didn't notice much change. I explained my experiment and asked a coworker how long she thought it'd been since I had given my appearance and odour, and she guessed a few days - when it had been half a month. I was liking where this was going.
I forget how I came upon it; I think it was actually well before I did this. But there was a book written by a former Yale physician as well as several subsequent articles talking about it (and I'm just linking to the good ones), and others interviewing him for further info about his experience of basically not showering for a full five years. Across them, he explains how the organ of the skin, like the gut, has its own microbiome and letting it thrive and work in its own balance can usually be much better for our well being than indiscriminately killing off everything on it with excessive oversanitation.
Essentially, the hygiene industry sprang up pretty quick after soap became a ready-made commodity around the 1920's and was a way for the wealthy to differentiate themselves from people living in more impoverished, close-contact environments where diseases were more likely to spread. Cue typical classist/racist/predatory shit from now-megacorps like Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, and so on. Of course over time, this stuff trickled down the social stratum; it became possible for the "lower" echelons of society to afford these products, they began to buy them, the corporations diversified, invented new shit no one needed, and so on. There went from being a single bar of soap for pretty much everything, to pretty much a different personal hygiene item for every theoretical application. Billions of dollars later, here we are.
He talks a bit too about the stigmatization of natural human aroma and other neat stuff, as well as how what he experienced may not be exactly replicable for every single other person. But I really liked it all given how much I hate a lot of the ogres he goes after, and figured since there's a good chance many here besides me might struggle to keep up with this "expected" behaviour, you might be better off not only giving yourself a pass, but celebrating your choice!
Given that not much was able to happen in my corner of the world two years ago, I decided to try an experiment I'd hear of over a decade beforehand: washing one's hair with just water to allow it to achieve a kind of natural state of self-cleaning. It had already been a few years that I was just using a basic bar of glycerine soap for everything to great effect, so I figured "what the hell, no one sees and judges me anyway, might as well see what happens". And to my surprise, it was fine. There was hardly any difference, other people didn't notice when I saw them, so I kept doing it. Up to and including today, in fact.
Earlier this year, in the winter, as a result of a combination of misery and just being too blooming tired to deal with all the extra work that now comes with showering due to health reasons etc., I stopped showering as often as I had been, which was usually every other day. I started doing so every three, then four. Eventually I just decided to see how long I could go without doing so at all because of how much damn effort it was and the time it took for the now extra shit and how I no longer enjoyed doing it. Days went by, then weeks. I didn't notice much change. I explained my experiment and asked a coworker how long she thought it'd been since I had given my appearance and odour, and she guessed a few days - when it had been half a month. I was liking where this was going.
I forget how I came upon it; I think it was actually well before I did this. But there was a book written by a former Yale physician as well as several subsequent articles talking about it (and I'm just linking to the good ones), and others interviewing him for further info about his experience of basically not showering for a full five years. Across them, he explains how the organ of the skin, like the gut, has its own microbiome and letting it thrive and work in its own balance can usually be much better for our well being than indiscriminately killing off everything on it with excessive oversanitation.
Essentially, the hygiene industry sprang up pretty quick after soap became a ready-made commodity around the 1920's and was a way for the wealthy to differentiate themselves from people living in more impoverished, close-contact environments where diseases were more likely to spread. Cue typical classist/racist/predatory shit from now-megacorps like Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, and so on. Of course over time, this stuff trickled down the social stratum; it became possible for the "lower" echelons of society to afford these products, they began to buy them, the corporations diversified, invented new shit no one needed, and so on. There went from being a single bar of soap for pretty much everything, to pretty much a different personal hygiene item for every theoretical application. Billions of dollars later, here we are.
He talks a bit too about the stigmatization of natural human aroma and other neat stuff, as well as how what he experienced may not be exactly replicable for every single other person. But I really liked it all given how much I hate a lot of the ogres he goes after, and figured since there's a good chance many here besides me might struggle to keep up with this "expected" behaviour, you might be better off not only giving yourself a pass, but celebrating your choice!
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