This is what happens when you never do laundry in The Sims 4

The Sims 4 will allow you to let your sims live in hoarder conditions. Depending on what traits they have, they may never pick up a sponge to clean a sauce crusted fork on their own unless you force them to. Living in a dirty house doesn't bother them, but the Monica Gellers of the sim-world? They can't handle it. If you're into the whole slow torturing your sims thing, you'll need the Laundry Day Stuff pack. It's the only place you'll find laundry baskets, and to make the game generate laundry you need at least one basket somewhere in the house. Once it overflows, the sims will leave their laundry on the floor.

I thought it would be fun to see what happens when you force these sims to live in a house filled with steamy hot piles of dirty laundry. It turns out that they won't die solely from their living conditions, but it's the catalyst that can make them die from something else.

After randomly generating a sim family of eight and giving them all the neat trait, which makes them more emotionally susceptible when living in filth and squalor, I moved them into a large house, placed a single laundry basket in the center of it, and let the family generate smelly, dirty piles of clothes all around the house. 

Oh, and this house had only two-and-a-half bathrooms. This detail will be important later.

As the piles of laundry started to multiply, there sometimes wasn't enough room on the floor for their clothes. So, I had to manually place the laundry around the house, encircling beds, couches, any and all space on nightstands and bathroom counters. Eventually, the laundry started to spill out into the hallway and then down into the kitchen, making its way on top of the counters and tables, forcing my sims to stand in the middle of their own filth while eating their breakfast.

At that point, I thought about getting them a washing machine, but decided against it after I realized how long it would take. And who likes doing laundry? No one. I knew things were going to take a turn for the worse, but I needed to know how far I could take this experiment.

The teenagers in my household were the first to rebel. Unable to stand the stench, they refused to do their homework because they were too uncomfortable. Their grades dropped from Bs to Fs, and they failed out of high school. The kids held on longer, but some of them stopped doing their homework too, and failed out of grade school.

For the parents, as they grew increasingly uncomfortable, they no longer wanted to build on the skills that would help them succeed in their careers. They didn't lose their jobs, they just stopped getting promotions. This made Wanda, the mother, unhappy most of the time, as she had the ambitious trait. Stalled movement up the corporate ladder sent her into raging fits at times and she'd yell at her children for no reason.

Fun fact: if I forced them too, Wanda and her husband, River, would still WooHoo. I guess the prospect of sex will always win over the overpowering smell of laundry that has been sitting on your floor for months.

Piles of laundry were every where at this point, blocking some of my sims from getting into their beds to sleep. They started napping on the porch benches outside or in their parents or siblings beds. (One of them napped in the bathtub.) The children started regularly passing out from exhaustion as soon as they walked in the door from school. Dad stopped cooking dinner, so everyone ate cereal and peas all the time.

Okay, now here's the part about the bathrooms.

Since there were only two full bathrooms for eight people in the whole house, that meant a lot of competition for the toilets and showers, which also meant they got dirty fast. Thankfully, up until this point the daily maid hadn't abandoned my sim family, but then all the toilets, showers, and sinks started breaking and that maid was like 'this is not part of my job description' and stopped showing up. And because all my sims had the neat trait, they were constantly mopping up the floors instead of fixing the sinks and showers.

With no way to stay clean, the mental health of my sims took a fast downturn, and with laundry now covering almost every square inch of floor space in the bedrooms, it was only a matter of time before one of the sims got stuck in place—and died.

Mom and one of her sons headed to the bathroom at the same time, but he made it there first. This triggered a cascade of unfortunate events that caused mom to not do anything for the rest of the evening. She peed her pants. She didn't shower. She didn't go to the kitchen for a bowl of peas to satiate her hunger. She crawled back into bed, starving, embarrassed, and filthy, then woke up the next morning to get stuck in the same spot all over again.

Mom died at 4:26AM on a Tuesday morning, as her husband trolled the forums on the internet and her eldest son grilled hamburger patties in the backyard. Her urn remains on the floor because there's no dresser or counter space to put it on, and every so often her spirit roams her laundry-laden home in the middle of the night, breaking electronics and wrecking havoc because she died alone.

That's when I finally bought the family a washing machine.