After washing a pillow's case and other protecting layers, or when preparing a new pillow for use, what's the optimal layout of its layers?

Most of this process is simple, but sleeping on a pillow prepared with the wrong strategy can be disastrous. The difficulty arises when selecting the algorithm for placement of the bad sides.

Each layer has a bad side. For the purposes of this study, an example has been chosen in which a pillow is surrounded by a protector and a pillowcase. The pillow's bad side contains a tag, the protector's bad side closes with a zipper, and the pillowcase's bad side has a flappy opening with a hard stitch pattern.

Entire societies have collapsed while battling over the bad-side placement algorithm. Traditionally, there are two opposing viewpoints:

Concentration All bad sides are placed on the same side of the pillow.

Alternation Bad sides alternate between each layer.

The Concentration strategy sacrifices an entire side of the pillow, disregarding all hope for its comfort, in favor of the creation of a single perfect side. While this reduces flexibility, it guarantees that when the perfect side is found during use, no further adjustments will be necessary and comfort is guaranteed. Unfortunately, the consolidated bad side is completely useless.

Alternation is a compromise. Neither side is perfectly comfortable, but both are reasonably comfortable. It can take advantage of asymmetric severity of the bad sides: for example, one zipper is often less comfortable than the sum of tags and and a flappy opening. Perfect comfort is rarely achieved, and adjustments are often required to manage the bad sides during use, but moderate comfort is always guaranteed.

While both strategies have their merits, I have solved this debate once and for all.

At any given time, you are only using one side of the pillow (or neither if you're using the middle). It is unnecessary to attempt to satisfy both sides. Therefore, it is never worthwhile to sacrifice some of your comfort when an opportunity exists to have 100% comfort every time.

The winning strategy is Concentration. Now, the world can finally put this debate to rest.