In another life, I think I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you

Back in college you would pick up free condoms from laundry rooms. You’d pay eight dollars to wash and dry your clothes in moldy Speed Queen machines in dorm basements. It costs about the same to wash your clothes in a NYC laundromat. You’d wait around the laundromat, watch your clothes, stare at the ceiling, put your dried clothes in a metal cart, and carry it home. In all the marriages I’ve seen growing up, the woman has yelled at the man about something laundry-related. I thought that was the fault of the relationship, until I started having arguments with college girlfriends over doing laundry, in the laundry rooms where we were supposed to be picking up condoms.

Other than that meme likening doing laundry to Sisyphus pushing his boulder, there is nothing in the history of Western consciousness that really helps us deal with laundry. The doing or non-doing of laundry can ruin someone’s weekend, make parents yell at the kids they love, or slowly make a perfectly loving couple resent each other. We prefer to not talk about laundry because we’d prefer not to think about laundry at all. It is as boring as it is ritualistic, as unresolvable as it is meaningless. Every religious and philosophical theory of being in community with others seems to fall apart when applied to how we think about chores: neither “do to others what you would have them do to you” nor the ethics of care really help us understand the outsized emotional and moral weight chores take up in our lives. Chores are something you have to deal with, but they’re not quite overwhelming like the inevitability of death and the problems of ennui and solitude. Chores are ubiquitous, but we’d hesitate to count it as some fundamental part of the human condition. Constantly doing chores for other people, even the people you love, could breed resentment and distaste; on the other hand, you may take for granted the chores that are done for you, or feel guilty about outsourcing your chores to others. Chores are uncomfortable necessities, and doing them is always more inconvenient and less fulfilling than we imagine. Nobody likes doing chores–that’s why they are called chores. We do our laundry and dishes only because they need to be done.

Oftentimes, our very first responsibilities to other people are the family chores we did as children. Most Americans prefer to do their own chores–recall the viral video clip of Anthony Bourdain speaking passionately about the beauty of doing one’s own laundry, chastising a group of young people in Singapore who had foreign maids doing their laundry. Like America, Singapore is a highly stratified, capitalist society: but unlike America, there is no cult of individualism there. Young professionals and families outsource their chores to their elderly parents or underpaid migrant workers to free up space for their own 14-hour workdays. In East Asian societies, chores are usually shared unequally among household members alongside those usual lines of gender, age, and class.

But in America, having other people do your chores for you somehow feels more evocative of the history of slavery and serfdom than familial duty. It took feminist theory and the tradition of radical organizing to reframe and reclaim chores as possible acts of care and radical kinship, but that’s still somewhat of a minority view here. Chores, especially in the cosmopolitan-educated-liberal-feminist-American collective subconscious, have always been more about subjugation than care. Americans feel more comfortable hiring invisible serfs–DoorDash drivers, Taskrabbits, Instacarts, dropoff-and-pickup laundry service–that show up, do their job as a fulfillment of a predetermined fair-value contract, and disappear. In reality those workers are more like shared servants between white-collar workers of the same zip code.

And so it makes sense that when the Asian American™ couple in Everything Everywhere All at Once said, “in another life I’d do laundry and taxes with you blah blah blah,” it really resonated with everybody in America. On the screen, two glamorous people who never needed to do their own laundry craving and fantasizing this life of misery they might have shared together–or, in other words, pure cinematic cope that says the Really Losing Loser was actually living a dream the whole time. We have seen the same trope in a literal Rick and Morty episode, where more successful versions of Beth and Jerry in an alternate universe find each other and was like “i’d rather be unhappily married to you” or something.

I brought up Everything Everywhere All at Once to show just how psychically titillating the idea of doing laundry can be. Americans especially love the idea of doing laundry. Americans love the sense of self-sufficiency and responsibility that doing laundry affords. Laundry may become more bearable, but it doesn’t stop being laundry because you’re doing it with the person you love. There is no life where doing laundry was preferable to not doing laundry. It’s still a chore and it’s really draining.

It’s much more likely that you start hating the person you love because of laundry. When we do laundry we are getting it over with, getting it out of the way; we would rather be doing something else. We might not know what that something else is, but it sure ain’t laundry. For the moment, we are stuck doing laundry. We cannot hate laundry itself; it just had to be done, so we transfer resentment to the person who were rushing us to do our laundry, or forcing us to do our laundry, even though they may mean well: at the start of life it might have been a parent, usually the mother (hence the figure of the nagging mother in misogynist Chinese public imagination); later in life it might be a partner. Why is this person who loves me, who means well for me, making me do something I hate? If laundry means so much to them, why can’t they simply do the laundry for me?

Thankfully, we have dishwashers and laundry machines to automate some of the pain away. And we’ve had dishwashers and laundry machines for a while. But just as quickly, “did you do the dishes?” became “did you put the dishes in the dishwasher?”, and “did you do the laundry?” went from meaning did you wash the clothes with soap and bare hands to did you put the dirty clothes in the machine did you use the correct setting did you put the detergent and the other stuff and did you put it in the dryer with the dryer sheet and did you take it and fold it–it’s still a fucking pain to do laundry. Even with machines around, doing laundry is still a chore.

The actions we consider as doing laundry today didn’t become a chore until the laundry machine was invented. The reality is that perfectly normal tasks can become chores with the snap of a finger: chores are just tasks that are no longer interesting or rewarding to do, or in other words, tasks that have been disenchanted a la Adorno and Horkheimer. And any tasks that arise as a result of automating or simplifying a previous pain automatically become chores by association.

Human civilization will never be rid of chores: as more tasks gradually become automated, the very task of commanding the automation becomes a chore in its own right. My grandma, who did her laundry by hand for forty years, does not consider using the laundry machine a chore–she thinks it takes basically no time with machines and she frequently wonders why we (meaning my parents and I) are so lazy with our laundry, especially because we have laundry machines.

She doesn’t realize we consider throwing clothes into the machine a chore, and sometimes the act of doing a simple chore like that demands more agency and resolve than more Herculean things like working or studying. If I consider something a chore, then it goes into the mental bucket of “things that I no longer should have to do or think about at all.” A laundry machine could do it. An assembly line could do it. A vibrator could do it. An AI could do it.

We detest the fact that automation isn’t complete. We hate the laundry machine for not magically taking our laundry and spitting it out readily folded and dried, into the dresser, into the closet. We detest the fact that we still have to be a part of the process. We hate human-in-the-loop. We hate laundry. And in the grand scheme of things, it’s really not unreasonable to just want everything about laundry to go away.

Someone once said in an ancient newspaper, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” Most merciful God, AI is here, and its art and writing is almost as bad as the median art-and-writing producer. But the million dollar question is, is AI going to do my laundry for me? (AI is not a minimum wage worker with a foreign accent so if AI did my laundry I wouldn’t feel bad.)

The answer is yes. Because thanks to AI, everything is now laundry. Reading is laundry, writing is laundry, learning is laundry, working is laundry, and AI is doing all the laundry. A point of critique is that some things that shouldn’t be laundry are now treated as laundry, but they all just sound like Anthony Bourdain to me–they are just privileged people who romanticize the idea of laundry. Who are you to decide what should be laundry and what shouldn’t be laundry? Now we have all the time in the world to want things: after that, we can simply tell AI to do the thing that needs to be done. We can just sit back and enjoy the brief moment of rest until we have to fold the laundry.

You might wonder what we might be doing instead of laundry. Well, you know, we are doing what we do best: fantasizing about doing laundry, watching TikToks of people doing laundry, of people talking about laundry, things of the like. Imagining doing laundry is enough and almost like doing the laundry ourselves. Instead of doing laundry, we are saying to each other, every single day, "in another life, I think I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you."