.

-- Ok I'm sorry, maybe this is superficial of me, but I just cannot fathom consciously choosing to wait till offense overcomes decorum to decide when to shower.

This seemed very efficient to me. Why go around guessing when you need to shower when others can more tell you more accurately?

But different strokes for different folks. I'd rather be known, not for my complete lack of odor, but for having an independent intellect.

People are known for their bad odour though; and if they figure out it is because your not washing most people will either a) think your a bit weird or b) avoid you.

Besides, he wasn't "creatively following the dictates of his inspiration". He was wimping out of the consequences of his 'inspiration'; man-up and shower. Unhygienic!

edit: bad speller

What definition of "hygiene" are we using?

As unpleasant as his smell may have been, when does a shower reduce the incidence of disease? (That's the medical definition of hygiene - Wikipedia - "In medicine, hygiene practices are employed as preventative measures to reduce the incidence and spreading of disease.")

Also since when was acne caused by not taking a shower?

Anyway, I'd like to see some statistics, because we can both come up with arguments like that for as long as we like.

I think I'd love to be surrounded by negligent melodiousness, it sounds delightful.

Malodorousness, perhaps?

And you say it's unhygenic... there's nothing dangerous about not showering daily. It's purely an aesthetic thing. I do it for that reason, but I don't kid myself about its necessity.

.

'==' and '!=' are coercive in JavaScript -- as in:

    5 == "5" -> true

    5 != "5" -> false

    5 === "5" -> false

    5 !== "5" -> true

All that said, people clearly have different washing demands. Manual workers, people who sweat a lot, and people, like the GP poster, who clearly smelt to third parties. There are folks, though, who can go a while between washing without becoming pongy though, in my experience.

At the end of the week, I was swimming in the water for half an hour, and it didn't bother me at all. A tremendous sense of elevation.

While it does remind me of why are you hitting yourself in the head with a hammer? Because it feels so good when I stop, to defeat discomfort is somehow profoundly affirming of freedom and self-determination.

People think that it'll be unbearably cold or simply intolerable without all the fancy stuff -- but you plunge in and your body adjusts so fast. You described it very well: FREEING.

And have a deep capacity for self-criticism, right?

Things we take for granted such as paved streets or cars are tremendously expensive. San Jose (Costa Rica) has one 4-lane US-style highway that goes through town for a few miles, then it turns into a 2-lane concrete and eventually dirt road. And that's a healthy country with a decent-sized middle class.

I actually like to see these kinds of experiments since the fact that they exist means our society still has wealth and opportunity. Just don't confuse them with actual sacrifice.

Setting a goal of say genuinely helping X number of people on stackoverflow or http://ask.sqlservercentral.com is more significant than setting a goal of a high record in Asteroids. Helping the poor or setting a goal of making a useful open source project are more significant still.

In short, succeeding in doing something both productive and challenging > succeeding in random challenge that is not productive.

second paragraph: I didn’t really have a clear reason for doing this

I'd argue that the blog post pretty well fails to deliver on the promise of the subject line.

Pretty incredible to think about how almost everything consumed in the developed world is a luxury...yet we tend to think of them as necessities.

Therefore, we can know a want from a need because a need is anything that if you were to go without it, would result in your death or stunted growth.

This piece, like Walden, is about how we can trade what we have mistaken for physiological needs for legitimate psychological needs.

Drawing on what aspirant said, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a very good way to provide that context: at the level of physiological needs, you can consider "safety" level needs as "luxuries"; on the other hand, you would consider them as "necessities" from the "love/belonging" level.

He should have omitted that sentence. It make him sound more like a whacked-out weirdo/dirty-smelly hippie, and undermines credibility of the experiment.

The purpose of the piece, I think, is to relate his experience. And this is certainly a part of the experience, perhaps an important part because it illustrates that the experiment does have some effect on others.

In the bigger picture: why do we write? Is it that we're trying to fool others into accepting an idea? Or because we want to help them understand an idea? I can't see any reason to omit the sentence, short of being deceitful.

So how often do you shower, then?

The whole experiment seams to be about his ego, I wish he tried to gain more insight into other reasons people chose to stay clean enough to not offend their peers with their smell instead of just concluding:

"I felt myself standing apart from the sheep-like masses who had been led to confuse their wants and needs."

However, after 20 years of doing this I can tell you that you can get by using only a few gallons per shower. If you want to do this for enviromental or budget reasons, these are my tips.

1) Use luke warm rather than hot (cold is for masochists). Cold water is usually relatively unlimited.

2) Turn it on to rinse, turn off to soap, turn it back on to rinse again.

3) A hand held shower head is better than a wall mounted one, you need less pressure to affect the same amount of showering.

We also have a solar shower bag to augment the water heater, you fill it up with 10-15 gallons, leave it in the sun for an hour and rinse off with it. We would shower every day and use barely 25 gallons of hot water for 4 people taking showers. Contrast that with at home, taking 10 minute steaming showers where I'm sure I burn through 25 gallons of hot water myself each morning.

If you're going to follow this as a regular practice while working with a group of people in a professional environment -- well that's just obnoxious.

I wonder what things I do to test my resolve that I'm not currently aware of. It took him a year to figure it out for himself.

Hygiene works because bacteria are flushed out, not because water kills them (ok, antibacterial soap may kill some bacteria, but not much).

Everyone has loads of bacteria all over them, the vast majority of which are completely benign. AIUI, there's a little ecology there, with all of them competing to survive.

So if you kill them all by sterilizing your whole surface, you create an opportunity for the bad bacteria to gain the initiative and take over the ecosystem when the benign stuff can't fight back as well. The end result, then, could be that where you'd had just a few of the bad guys, you're now covered with them.

no.

That's why sterilization uses steam and / or boiling.

But people gave me a lot of crap about using cold water anyway. So part of my process, just to be safe, was to ensure the clean dishes dried very well, next to a window, in the sunlight.

The only stuff that warm water doesn't work well for are as far as I know dairy products and egg-white, because they solidify when warmed up.

Also, there is not much point in thinking you're killing bacteria and then using a dirty dishrag to dry off the dishes :)

Bacteria are pretty hardy, some of them even survive at temperatures above 300 degrees celsius, but you're not likely to run in to them in the home (unless you live in a sulphuric hot spring).

edit: I hope that's 90 degrees Fahrenheit you are referring to.

I began my own experiment over 3 years ago, where I stopped using shampoo to wash my hair, and instead, wash it every day, but only using water.

I've found that my hair is only slightly oily. And by that I mean it has a natural coating - not something you'd notice.

It doesn't look, smell, or feel any different to when I used shampoo, but I guess I've saved a bit of money, and have removed one set of chemicals contacting my skin.

I wouldn't say it's changed my life, but there is a sense of sense of happiness(smugness?) in knowing that I don't need whatever they're(advertising) selling.

Now, how to over come my addiction to tech...

"Reduce your water heater temperature from 140f to 120f. you will not notice much difference and you will not have to mix cold water to bringdown the temperature of really hot water."

"Legionella will grow in water at temperatures from 20 to 50 °C (68 to 122 °F)."

130 °F sounds like a safer compromise.

FWIW, my tankless water heater cannot be set any hotter than 120.

EDIT: To elaborate a little, they would do it in part because they felt that facing uncomfortable situations on purpose prepared them for facing uncomfortable situations not of their choosing.

I understand the psychological benefits of doing something difficult that you don't need to do. I do it often with physical activity. But denying yourself hot water does not deal a blow to the status-quo. I think the benefits of doing something hard are negated if you shower yourself with congratulations over it. (Note: this is not the same as being satisfied that you did it.)

Though I don't think I'll be going back. Unlike the shower experiment, what I discovered was that not only did I not feel any different, nothing had really changed. I still enjoy my food more and more every day, learning new recipes and finding new restaurants. Main difference is I don't have to worry as much about sterilizing my kitchen.

Also, giving up meat completely isn't easy if you go out to dinner with other people. And it gets exponentially harder the more people you go out with, given the low odds of everyone being vegetarian, or wanting to go to a vegetarian restaurant.

I think that severely reducing meat consumption is a good idea in general, but quitting cold-turkey is pretty inconvenient.

Clean things, sure, but sanitization is overkill because the world is not a sanitary place to begin with. If you're not living in the world when it intrudes, it seems unlikely you'll be prepared. And antibacterial soap is ridiculously excessive for anyone not in healthcare; it all washes down the drain in the end, boosting diseases' resistance to it.

As to meat, I generally have found that less is better, and American diets tend to have a ton. I have doubts that zero is more healthy (and don't bother quoting / linking, I've read tons) than small amounts, much less veganism, but I definitely do better when I keep it pretty low.

""" Then her diarrhea turned bloody. Her kidneys shut down. Seizures knocked her unconscious. The convulsions grew so relentless that doctors had to put her in a coma for nine weeks. When she emerged, she could no longer walk. The affliction had ravaged her nervous system and left her paralyzed.

Ms. Smith, 22, was found to have a severe form of food-borne illness caused by E. coli, which Minnesota officials traced to the hamburger that her mother had grilled for their Sunday dinner in early fall 2007. """

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/health/04meat.html

As to the severity, apparently she got one of the nasty strains of E. Coli, where death isn't exactly uncommon (3-5%)[1]. Ever read the under-cooked meat warnings all restaurants stick on their menu? This is why.

Specifically with respect to the article you linked, did you watch the video?[2] The burgers they made were totally free of E. Coli, because they were fully cooked: only the cutting board, which was apparently wiped (shown by the video, at least) with a sponge, not rinsed, soaped, etc, had any. To which I say shock and awe. I did find it odd that it didn't transfer to the veggies, but meh. You use separate cutting boards to prevent this sort of thing in the first place. If you don't, you're essentially asking for trouble.

[1] http://www.emedicinehealth.com/food_poisoning/page3_em.htm [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=859ZHzK9_X4

Me too, except that after about 3-4 months I restarted eating meat and I've been dreaming of going back to vegetarianism ever since.

So you can't actually willfully induce these 'sudden' decisions.

It takes about a week to get used to cold showers after which the "holy shit" feeling lasts for about 10 seconds, and after 1-2 minutes you enjoy it.

Washing oneself is not about fitting in, it is about hygiene.

Sometimes, I don't shower for 3-4 days. You don't sweat that much if you are hacking away at a keyboard for 12 hours a day.

I don't see how showering ever day is hygienic. You are stripping your skin and hair of natural oils,bacteria and whatnot. Then you have to use more substances to fight the negative effects of the above. On top of that, you spray yourself with long-lasting synthetic smells or things that stop your armpits from sweating.

I shower every other day, more or less. I don't use deodorants. I don't use colognes, except on rare occasions. Haven't had any complaints from other people.

I require more information here. Actually... on second thoughts, I do not require more information here.