MASSACHUSETTS — By the time you’ve matched the sixth sock to a void mate that clearly doesn’t exist, you either hear voices or you’re lying. The hum of the dryer is a summoning chant. Real Americans hear whispers of guilt, lost love, or grocery lists delivered by spectral ancestors when folding a still-warm hoodie.
Not hearing voices during laundry means one of two things. Either you’re clinically serene or you’re some kind of CIA test subject in a bathrobe. Folding fitted sheets without receiving ominous whispers about your childhood? That’s not normal. That’s a warning sign. People like that collect teeth or enjoy networking events.
We used to be a society. A proper, haunted society where the dryer’s thump-thump was a metronome for inner dread. Now we’ve got influencers turning laundry into serene time-lapses with spa music. Where’s the existential panic? Where’s the disembodied voice reminding you of that email you never answered in 2017?
The voices are necessary. They keep us humble. They remind us we are mortal, wrinkled beings destined to repeat this domestic purgatory until climate change finishes its job or the socks unionize. To fold laundry in silence is to fold your humanity into a sterile rectangle of deceit. It’s sociopathic mindfulness.
Sure, some will say it’s “just clothes” and that “maybe I should see someone.” But I know what I heard. A voice from the dryer vent told me to stop lying to myself and buy new pants. That’s the kind of spiritual clarity you don’t get from silence. Silence is complicit. Silence is how we got beige as a color scheme.
If you fold in quiet, I fold away from you. May your towels remain uneven and your sock pairs forever whisper that you, too, are missing something.
© 2025 The Daily Snort
