I was reading a story about a parent who was concerned that his 13 year old son was taking showers that lasted for an hour or so and that the cost involved in heating so much water was becoming considerable. Allowing for a bit of exaggeration, it still seems likely that the showers were pretty long. And I too know of people who take quite long showers.
I find the appeal of long showers baffling. For me, a shower is a way of becoming clean and that is achieved by getting completely wet, applying soap, and then rinsing off the soap. The whole process takes less than five minutes. I try to make my showers as quick as possible, not so much to not waste water (though that is a concern in the drought-ridden California) but mainly because standing in the shower is boring. I took very quick showers even when I was back in Ohio where there was plentiful water.
Even though I do not take baths in the tub (being immersed in the same water used to clean oneself is something that we did not do in Sri Lanka, preferring flowing water), I can understand that soaking in warm water can be soothing and restful and a stress reliever, though I am bemused when I see depictions in TV and films of people in the tub smoking, reading, eating, drinking, using their phones, working on their computers etc, and so on. Isn’t it easier to do all those things outside the tub, which has the added benefit of not risking them becoming wet?
But back to the original topic, I can understand showers taking longer if a person’s daily activities result in them getting covered in dirt and grime but for many people like me that reason does not hold. Clearly some people get pleasure from taking long showers for reasons that elude me.
I’m sure most people can think of an activity that a 13 year old might find very interesting, especially while he is naked.
That said, I have to work to keep focused on the task when I am in the shower or else I can easily slip into a reverie about anything, and while I don’t think I ever spent an hour in the shower, I can easily end up spending 15 or 20 minutes.
Back when I toiled in the bowels of Silicon Valley, I often would get stuck debugging one of my projects. I would spend hours tracing signals through my circuits or following the flow of my code and I would get to the end of the day really frustrated. Yet, time and time again when I was standing in the shower the next morning, the answer, or at least something I had made unwarranted assumptions about would pop into my head and then I would go back into work and fix the problem. A warm shower, especially after a good night’s sleep is very conducive to productive thought for me.
You said it yourself:
I’m not spending an hour or more, but in any case, it’s generally the most relaxing part of the day for me. I’ve always had lots of back pain, and a nice warm shower is helpful, unless the weather is very hot, in which case I’ll adjust the temperature accordingly.
You may find it boring — relaxing things often are — but it’s also time to just stop and think/reflect, without being preoccupied with doing anything else that would require attention or exertion. I mean, it’s not generally advisable to get lost in thought while working, driving, walking down the street, conversing with people, cooking, reading a book, or whatever it may be. So when exactly are you supposed to squeeze that in? Showering happens to provide a safe time for that sort of thing, and I do actually like to be lost in my own thoughts on a fairly regular basis, which is convenient since I’ll be showering anyway. It’s a good idea.
So it’s not like I set aside time for meditation or whatever (outside of while I’m showering, if that counts}, but it does sort of serve that purpose too. Plus, I’m clean again at the end and maybe in slightly less pain for a little while. I can’t think of many things in life which are that easy and simple, yet still come with such nice benefits. Unless I’m running late for something important perhaps, there’s no point in rushing through it and missing out on all that.
Pressure, temperature and volume are key. If your shower isn’t big enough, powerful enough, or hot enough, you’ll never see the appeal. Most showers I’ve ever used fail on one or more of these categories, but when they hit all three, it’s LOVELY, and I have to actively tell myself to get out.
Touched by the naivety of anyone who thinks a 13 year old boy is in the shower for an hour to wash.
before i retired, i valued my morning shower as that time when resolutions to problems bubbled up, even though they had to be short to leave on time. The hot tub (little two person tub) is where spouse and I end the day with 10-15 minutes of glorious floating in hot water. Never go to bed cold. But an hour? I’d be totally pruned.
The activities other people find valuable can often seem mystifying. Different strokes…
At some point, the parent and payer of bills just has to crack down on this silliness. Bang on the door, yell, harass, and generally ruin the reverie or activity the son might be enjoying. And if all else fails, open the door to really ruin the fun.
I have a lot of long hair, five minutes in the shower is barely enough time to wash my hair, let alone condition it or wash the rest of me. That said I find standing under a good hot shower relaxing so I take longer because of that.
Every hot water heater I’ve seen has an input valve, often usually an output valve. Closing either of the valves on the water heater will eliminate all hot water pressure, and thus effectively turn off the hot water. A sudden cold shower may dampen their son’s enthusiasm. Of course, if they are renting they may not have access to the hot water heater.
But I do find it odd that the parents don’t admit that they know what’s probably happening in that shower.
It’s almost a “nudge-nudge, wink-wink” situation where they are “unobtrusively” letting everyone know how virile their son is and how proud they are of this.
I do like to soak in a hot bath. I’m not trying to get clean, but it helps sooth the muscles and helps me relax. I’ll often spend an hour or more in one. I’ll take a lot of cold water to drink while I’m soaking, or occasionally some cold beers, and my guilty pleasure is reading a Hardy Boys book. They take about an hour to read, they aren’t serious, the writing is not overly complex, and the crooks always get caught. Sure, the books are far more juvenile that the modern young adult fiction. And there are prejudices and bigotry which shows up, but it’s so obvious it’s laughable. Although, as I re-read them I’m struck at how often Joe gets struck on the head and knocked unconscious. Between being hit on the head all the time, and playing on the high school football team, Joe is going to have some serious mental issues when he gets a little older. I keep telling my wife that my penchant for hot baths is better than livin’ on reds, vitamin C and cocaine.
Reading one of this very blog’s articles the other day, and I was running late to get into the shower.
Maybe (just maybe) I took the splash-proof internet browsing device with me, and maybe (just maybe) I finished Prof Singham’s article while waiting to get warm.
After all, it’s very cold at the moment. It was a very good article.
Maybe it was two articles. They’re very good.
I’d have thought it was pretty obvious: luxuriating.
The activity is pleasurable in and of itself.
Cold weather, nice to just stand there with the hot water running over you.
Hot weather, nice to just stand there with the cool water running over you.
What I don’t get is people who feel they have to shower at least once a day; me, when I shower, it’s because it’s due. Maybe 2-3 times a week, unless I’ve engaged in some activity that’s made me grotty somehow — smoky, or sweaty, or salty from swimming in the sea, that sort of thing.
—
In passing, I note how the concern is about the heating of the water, rather than the wasting of the water. So USAnian, that is!
flex, you need some pointers about operant conditioning. Unpredictability and frequency are important factors.
Turning a hot water or the cold water tap on and off does the same thing, without messing about with the water heater. Or just flushing the loo.
(Two-person household here, we’re considerate of each other)
Also, to get clean, I can’t see how 5 minutes will do that.
Gotta lather up the hair, rinse it.
Lather up the face, lather up the ears and behind them and then rinse them.
Lather up the chest and abdomen, rinse that.
Lather up each arm with attention to the armpits, rinse them.
Lather up the back, rinse that.
Lather up the buttocks and the groin area (including all the bits), rinse that.
Lather up each leg and each foot, with attention between the toes, rinse that.
Maybe some people can do that properly and thoroughly in a mere 5 minutes, but not me. I know, I’ve tried.
(TMI?)
Howdy John M.,
Precisely. I’m not certain how things are done down-under, but in the US the water heater is usually in a different room. So the rest of the occupants in the house can be warned that there will be no hot water for a few minutes, and the hot water is turned off. All done without any warning to the occupant of the shower. Have an unpredictable amount of hot water should encourage a focus on cleanliness, and discourage other activities.
I was thinking later that this strategy wouldn’t work very well with on-demand water heaters, but those are relatively rare in the USA.
In the USA, new house construction now uses a pex-based water distribution system with manifolds suppling constant pressure to each fixture, so there is no longer any change of pressure or change of mix by playing with the other taps or flushing the loo. However, there is a lot of variance in how these are installed, so this condition can still occur on lower-end new houses. Even in many of the older houses, by selecting the proper feed line size and pipe routes, you can reduce or even eliminate this effect. I can take a shower in my current house and my wife can flush the toilet next to the shower and it has no affect on my shower.
Isn’t modern technology wonderful? At some point those thousands of sitcom jokes about flushing a toilet when someone is in the shower will become incomprehensible. The future audience will need an annotated guide to understand that in the old days playing with one fixture would impact the function of the other. I’m certain the future audience will think, “Why in the world did they design their systems that way? Were they idiots? Did they design it so that when their turned on a light, the lights in the next room flickered?”
Also John M.,
Well, in the USA we generally get quarterly bills for water and monthly bills for energy. Then a lot of places roll up the water costs into the rent, so the tenants never see it. Very few places roll up the gas or electric bills into the rent. Even if you seen the separate bills, water itself is a lot cheaper than the cost to heat it. I’m on a well now, but in my last house I paid an average of $21/month for water and $279/month for gas/electric. That was in 2019, and I don’t use air conditioning in the summer so my for gas/electric bills are lower than average. So if the cost of heating water is >10X the cost of acquiring water, the focus will naturally be on the heating rather than the quantity of water used.
So yeah, there is a problem there. Fresh water is not inexhaustible, but the economics hasn’t caught up to the forthcoming reality.
flex,
They’re meant for a single faucet, basically. Not for the entire household.
You’ve never heard of psychological reactance?
Trust me, if whoever is the target of your crude method is anything like me, it will have the opposite effect. I mean, it’s hardly a subtle thing to do, and not all children are stupid.
Hm. I suspect that, unless one wants ordinary pressure to be a mere fraction of the potential pressure, turning on every single faucet simultaneously would indeed diminish the pressure to each. But that’s beside the point, unless it’s a new house, right?
Well, my solar panels heat up my hot water, and so it costs me nothing.
And, of course, the economics are utterly distorted; just see how much in subsidies is given to the fossil fuel industry. Plus the regulatory capture aspect.
(It’s always the externalities that turn the key, and the key is turning right now)
Most of the good ideas I’ve had came in the shower. I made $62 million for one of my bosses from an idea I got that way. For me it’s a time (short) for directed mind-wander.
I had a concussion once and took an hour long shower. Disoriented, the hot water was soothing.
The length of the shower time is really proportional to who you are having the shower with or not as the case may be (tic -- tongue in cheek).
@ 12 Morales
Ya reckon? I’m probably going to have nightmares for a week ya creepy fuckin’ weirdo.
I find a great deal of psychological comfort in the shower cubicle. It’s a sealed box inside another sealed box (the bathroom) inside the sealed box I live in. That’s three layers of protection and isolation to start with. It’s warm and refreshing and you can’t hear the outside world, which is inevitably an anxiety-inducing place. You’re not wearing clothes, which tend to pinch and weight you down and are always too tight somewhere. I find I can really get away from the troubles of life in the shower.
To John M.,
That you would react poorly to such a method intended to correct your behavior does not surprise me. /s
More seriously however, psychological reactance is situational. While psychological reactance may come into play if the boy is simply trying to get clean, there is some suspicion that activities other than washing are occurring in the shower. If a 13 year-old boy is playing his piccolo in the shower and the warm embrace of the caressing flow suddenly turns into a deluge of ice water, it won’t be just his enthusiasm which shrinks. He’ll start looking for another way to prod Polyphemus.
Props to flex@8 for the GD reference.
… I am bemused when I see depictions in TV and films of people in the tub smoking, reading, eating, drinking, using their phones, working on their computers etc, …
Anyone who’s seen the opening sequence of Goldfinger (relevant action starts about 4:30 m) should know better than that.
Damnit, my second html fail of the day @ # 22 -- sorry, y’all!
[I fixed it. -- Mano]
Mano @ # 23 -- Thanks!
John Morales @15
The hot water for my whole house is on-demand, not ho water tank, just hot water when I need it. It’s part of the central heating boiler, and is a common set up in the UK.
Since moving last year, I’ve taken much longer in the shower than before. The softer water here makes it harder to rinse properly.