The Math of Not Caring
Turns out, your 7th grade math teacher was right. Eric can prove it—with boxers
Eric wasn’t trying to spark a revolution.
He was just putting his laundry away one Wednesday evening, watching the same socks-and-sweats routine unfold for the 500th time. Fold. Stack. Drawer. Repeat. Then came the boxers. Then the undershirts. Somewhere between a crumpled Hanes and a half-folded Fruit of the Loom, something unexpected happened.
“Why am I folding things no one will ever see? Who cares if they’re wrinkled? It doesn’t matter. I’ve been wasting so much time. What is life?”
He paused. Looked down at the cotton chaos in his hands. And that’s when the math brain kicked in.
Eric, being the kind of guy who once calculated how many more chips came in a “family-size” bag compared to a standard bag, decided to time himself. Just the folding part. Only the stuff that didn’t matter visually—underwear, undershirts, beat-up sleep shorts.
12 minutes. That’s how long it took.
Then he ran the numbers:
He did laundry roughly 4 times per month
That’s 48 loads a year
Multiply that by 12 minutes per load just for folding “invisible” clothes…
576 minutes, or 9.6 hours a year, spent folding stuff literally no one would notice
Nearly 10 hours of his life. Folding boxers.
So Eric stopped. Cold turkey. He now flings his “invisible” clothes into a drawer like he’s pitching laundry into the void of societal expectations. No shame. No wrinkles where it counts. No wasted time.
And here’s the best part:
And the next time someone rolls their eyes in math class and asks, “When am I ever gonna use this?”—Eric has an answer:
“When you’re folding laundry, my friend. Or better yet, when you decide not to.”