I almost never shave. I hate the feeling, somehow manage to draw blood even with electric razors, and it wastes time I could put into something else. Instead I enhance and channel my natural trichotillomania urges into continuously plucking my facial hair one by one with tweezers. I usually don't even pay attention anymore, so that I can still do something else like reading at the same time, and there's never more than handful of hairs that need removing from day to day unless I stop for a few days. It doesn't really hurt either, not after the first few times anyway. Plucked hairs will not become apparent again for days.
Someday I'll probably just give more definitive hair removal methods a try. This might actually be even more cost effective than having to set apart some of my time each day for decades to shave.
(Assume 10 minutes a day, time valued at least at $10 / h (assuming San Francisco and assuming it won't change for a long while)(and I'm not even counting the initial price of an electric shaver, neither of all the electricity needed to operate it). That's $608 per year. Average laser hair removal cost would be around $1649 if I am to believe this, and time put into it would be negligible (like around 10 hours at most?). Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that like investing $1749 now and expecting continuous fixed dividends of $608 (~ 37%) every year for several decades? (Assuming hair removal to be definitive of course. Even if not, settling for a few years may already be enough to amortize the investment. Let's say in that case, with a discount rate of 8% on 5 years I think the present value of all the money saved would be around $2 427, $678 in excess of what's been invested. ))
OK, OK, it's not the weightiest of topics, and it's not rocket science. But I searched the site for "shaving" and "razor" and didn't see where it had been previously addressed.
I had a beard for nearly 30 years, but have been shaving again the last 6. I have always (since a brief experimental period in high school) used an electric razor for shaving. So did my daddy and his daddy before him, back through history.. wait, that can't be right. But my daddy and his daddy did, anyway.
I can shave with my electric in about 45 seconds, or maybe twice that if I'm trying to do a great job. What on earth do men see with wet shaves? Assuming they don't find the process inherently rewarding, the only argument I've heard is that you can get a closer shave. Which brings me to rationality.
Why does one want a close shave? Beard grows continuously throughout the day and night. Let's take as a guess that after two hours, beard growth will transform a very close wet shave into hair length immediately after an electric shave. Assuming it is the ratio of hair length that determines the relative utility of two different beard configurations, the advantage of the closer shave falls throughout the day. The ratio would be 2.00 after four hours, 1.50 after six hours, etc. If wet shaving takes something like 10 minutes, if desired one could do a second electric shave in the men's room late in the afternoon and come out with less stubble for the vast majority of the day with less total time invested.
If there is some particular moment at which the least possible beard growth is desirable, for instance for a photo shoot, then I can see the advantage of the closest possible shave. A date is another possibility, though there is anecdotal evidence that some women prefer a hint of stubble to a smooth baby face.
But with those rare exceptions, the goal isn't to have zero stubble. It's to have stubble that's less long.
Similar arguments pertain to various sorts of housecleaning. Since whatever you're cleaning starts getting dirty again immediately, putting lots of effort into extraordinary levels of cleanliness seems to have little value unless you inherently value that moment of extraordinary cleanliness.