Trouble is, I'm out of the habit. I've always put off washing up, and since the dishwasher I got into the habit of not running it until it was full or I ran out of cutlery, which is generally about every three or four days. Without the dishwasher, except as an oversized draining rack, I really must start doing it more often.
Washing up has always been a source of pain to me. My mother was always trying to get me to do it, and I avoided it whenever possible. Living on my own I left it a couple of days at a time before cleaning anything, and while married my slightly OCD ex took a long time to come around to steadfast refusal to wash up several times a day as she preferred.
But I'm by no means immune to mess. When living as a student I lived with several people who seemingly would never wash up at all, and after prodding them a few times just gave up and accepted washing their leftovers along with mine. You will never see me on How Clean Is Your House, because whilst I do have an annoying tendency to just leave things where they fall (because I'm dyspraxic, and I do that a lot), my tolerance for such things lasts a week at most. I usually have a clean and tidy a couple of times a week, to coincide with the start of my days off.
The trouble is with these things that it is an iterated Prisoner's dilemma. For those unfamiliar with game theory, the prisoner's dilemma is the scenario where you have two criminals and they're presented with a choice: confess to the crime and implicate your friend, and receive a small sentence, or keep quiet whilst they do and receive a death sentence. There's also an unspoken third option, of course, of both keeping quiet and walking free. Since the worst option is so much worse, the logical course is not the one most people pick, of keeping quiet, but rather of confessing. For some people to see it's easier to see if you assign numbers to the values (n this particular set of values the idea is to come out with the lowest score possible)::
The iterated, or repeated, prisoner's dilemma is slightly different. This is the much more minor scenario, like the washing up, where the pattern is repeated. In this case my punishment for not washing up may be vastly different from yours, as in myself and my ex. If that applies, then it doesn't matter that I still have a punishment for not washing up, which builds day by day, the other person will always reach their limit before I do and do the washing up, as with myself in the student house. It might look, in that case, like the person you are living with is a complete slob, and just never washes up, or cleans, or tidies, or anything, but all it may actually be is that their tolerance is the tiniest amount higher than yours.
In the iterated PD, we find a model for much of life. We find the greatest store of happiness in a society served by co-operating, but sadly for an individual the occasional defection can pay dividends. Right now it seems we have a society where 1% at the top of society are constantly defecting, and we aren't punishing them for it; indeed we heap reward after reward upon them for it. What does it take for us to turn around in our much greater numbers and say wait a minute, this game is rigged?
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