The Art of Throwing Away Your Soap
Throw away your soap.
I wish that I could tell you that I read some esoteric, French, aristocratic social theorist book to justify this odd piece of advice, but the truth is I didn’t. I watched a TikTok.
It’s quite ironic that the inspiration behind this piece was a short form video built into an algorithm designed to trap you in vapid addiction. But the world is full of nuances! It’s overflowing with contradictions, with truths and lies, creation and destruction, life and death. We face the desire to transform our lives, yet we don’t.
I abandoned TikTok because it was controlling my life. While I continue to retain many memorable pieces of information, the few positive components I hold with me were not improving my life in the way that deleting the app away entirely has.
Throw away your soap.
There are three assumptions when making this statement: you shower, use soap in the process, and have very sensitive skin. Let’s look at two possible scenarios at play.
A friend gives you a bar of soap as a gift, perhaps a white elephant, and you excitedly bring it to the shower to try it. You have very sensitive skin and have had trouble using soap that doesn’t irritate it. Thus, when your friend gives you this new soap, you are eager to solve all your dry skin problems, once and for all, so you use it in the shower. But the second you dry off, you begin to feel a nagging, burning sensation crawl all over your body. Eventually, hives break out and the tingles turn into a full body reaction. Obviously, you throw the soap away because it was so damaging and it accentuated the problems you already had. Fed up with your whole body hurting, you decide to put in the work to find a good soap. You browse the web, perhaps read a book on soap if you’re feeling extra motivated, save up some money and invest in a good brand that will soothe your cleansing issues forever. Lo and behold, the effort was worth it and the new product softens your rash, and in no time your skin is as silky and smooth as ever!
An old drugstore soap has been sitting in your shower for what feels like years, but somehow it just won’t end. It cleans you, but dries out your skin and it doesn’t even get super sudsy. Your skin feels a tad itchy when you dry off, but not too bad at all. Manageable. There are solutions like moisturizer to solve most of the inconvenience, and while they don’t eradicate the problem completely, they sure do help. Why throw away your soap? It’s fine! It’s functioning. You probably still have a good amount of time left before it runs out. It does the job. So you keep using the soap and because you are too lazy to research another brand you just buy the same bar. You accept mediocrity. This cycle repeats over and over again, and you live out the rest of your life with moderately dry skin.
The point of this metaphor isn’t to villainize those who subscribe to the second scenario, but to rather point out the ease of accepting mediocrity. Why change something when it’s fine? It might not be great… but it sure is fine, and what comforting value there is in that!
For better or for worse, there is always a bright side to be found. The important ability is to distinguish true reasoning from an excuse. There are always going to be really funny TikToks; “buying new soap” will always be hard. I have spent far too much time bearing the weight of FOMO, fearing the loss of internet culture, a somewhat embarrassing but albeit uniting factor in our lives. There is this fear that you lose part of your identity once you break a habit, that once you relinquish your present circumstances, you will begin to miss them and inevitably crumble without them.
It becomes so hard to justify abandoning mediocrity in favor of another choice that isn’t even guaranteed. The world is shown in such high resolution when consulting the objectivity in what is inherently negative, but plunges into confusion and obscurity when dealing with the grey. There is so much that isn’t guaranteed in this life, that leaving what you do have can feel vastly scarier than leaving what you shouldn’t have. But this is what gives life zest: the endless, and constant, and annoying, and impossible search for betterment. The risks give us friction and without friction you cannot feel anything. They reignite the passion that can so quickly be forgotten in the ease of modernity. Feel the nagging grit of the soap and throw it away! You deserve better.
