He sounds like a wise man. The very best way to handle the “lost sock” problem is to have many many pairs of identical socks.
It is possible to have different 40 pairs of socks, lose 40 socks, and have no usable pairs remaining. But imagine this, with 40 identical pairs of socks, if you lose 40 socks, you still have 20 usable pairs.
In fact, if one buys, say, six six-packs of identical socks all at once, there isn’t any time wasted matching them to pairs either. Just grab two...any two. They all match, even as they fade!
The worst thing about lost socks is that I always end up with a bunch of lefts and have to start over.