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First of all. Kids. Ha. No.
However, this is an interesting observation, since homes used to be placed where you entertained guests. You had people over for an evening to drink and share stories and everything.
But, we’re not a sentimental age. Millennials, Gen Z, etc… Everything has been made to be temporary for us. There is no permanence. We don’t buy homes, we have to rent because all of the homes are being purchased by a handful of people in that area and their being converted into rentals. The most expensive things we own are our cars, and even then, it’s probably a lease, so that’s basically like renting the car anyways, just with more steps. We don’t need to get together for social time in our homes. We tend to go out and borrow a table for an evening at the local pub, or go to the beach or something. We rarely meet in person, often drinking alone but together over the vast world wide web.
Speaking of the Internet, there’s so many people on there, that most of our connections become extremely temporary. We’ll meet, play together, laugh together, and depart within hours. The likelihood of seeing eachother again is slim to none, and even if it happens, we probably won’t remember.
We’re in an age where you’re not friends with the friends you have on Facebook… Your Facebook friends is a long list of people you met once or twice and never saw again, now permanently a part of your life on a friend’s list you never look at. It’s become a meaningless thing to be on someone’s friends list.
All of the things that should be permanent are so ubiquitous that they’ve lost any meaning that they had, and that’s how we live. Temporary particle board furniture, that will swell up and disintegrate with high enough humidity. Temporary connections from tinder or whatever. Temporary hangouts at a local location… We don’t “do” hosting anymore, and when we do, everyone is too focused on a screen to notice that your furniture is falling apart or that you have no unnecessary stuff . Having things is a statement of wealth, because you need to have some place to put them, which means real estate. We are not wealthy. Our parents generation ensured we couldn’t be when they became capitulent in the dismantling of unions, and the destruction of the middle class. They spent their wealth and our inheritance on retirement, which was made to be worthless sums of money by the economic inflation that they wrought.
The current generations have been beaten into submission to accept everything as temporary and be happy about it. We are frequently convinced that we like it like this.
We do not value these things because it represents a permanence that we neither care for, nor have we ever enjoyed.
There’s a song about this phenomenon in Québecois French called Dégénération, from Mes Aïeux.
It starts with your great great grand father clearing the land, your great grand father plowing the land, your grand father making a profit out of it, your father selling it to be a white collar, and you, living in a one room apartment, owing debts to corporations.
The lyrics are pretty conservative and portray a rosy past, but it goes with the traditional style and the fact the band’s name means “my ancestors”. This being said, the song is still pretty spot on about this phenomenon. Here’s a link to the translated lyrics, and the song.
EDIT: Oh and there’s a parody (no translation, sorry) stating the obvious, like “your great great great grand mother, she took dumps in a bucket, and she only had three teeth left, but it was paradise.”
Oh no! A drop of water fell on it and it’s swollen and fell apart.
Sorry, people who came before me. My storage is way more space-efficient. It’s not like I’ll ever own a house, so this is a priority.
Op can afford to have kids :O
The crazy thing about the modern economy is that we’re - on paper - significantly wealthier per capita than our predecessors. But the social expectations of our progeny are so much higher (I’m not having six kids and expecting them to all just become subsistence farmers like I was) and the social infrastructure has degraded so rapidly (sending my son to a public school in Texas feels like borderline child abuse). Children are viewed as a strategically planned luxury - like a vacation home or a retirement account - instead of a natural consequence of two people having lots of unprotected sex in their 20s.
What’s more, what we have normally viewed as a valuable domestic asset - a large number of young, healthy, educated people - is increasingly booked as an expense bordering on extravagance. Meanwhile, what we have normally viewed as an expense - a large, heavily manned security state - is now seen as a critical cost-saving tool to mitigate the risk of foreign 20-year-olds sneaking into our country to do highly profitable labor.
All this in a set of countries regarded as the wealthiest in human history. We’re too wealthy to have kids. It’s all so fucking backwards.
My parents raised me on an acre in a house that my parents built with them both having reasonable salaries. My partner and I make more combined than they ever did we would never be able to give kids a life even close to as good as we had growing up.
So we aren’t having kids, we will just live as good a life as we can and her nieces will inherit what we have when we die.
My parents raised me on an acre in a house that my parents built with them both having reasonable salaries.
I mean, if your parents built a whole house by themselves, that’s incredible. My parents just bought a new home way out in the Houston 'burbs, which forced my dad to spend hours commuting every day when he wasn’t overseas on contract.
I’m in a smaller house inside the loop and I’m paying maybe 2-3x as much for a postage stamp of space, but my commute is 15 minutes. If I’m feeling crazy, I can even bike to work. That gives me far more time to spend with my son.
That’s not even to say there aren’t expenses and struggles. Daycare is looking like it’ll run me a full second mortgage payment. If we weren’t both professionals, it likely wouldn’t be worth the cost of care to keep up two incomes.
But you don’t need a acre to raise a child. My mom grew up in a smaller house than I own, and she had four sisters.
These are, fundamentally, decisions we’re making driven by cultural expectations.
You absolutely don’t need an acre to raise a kid, but I don’t think people can raise kids as well today as they could 40 years ago because the world is falling apart from capitalist greed.
I don’t think people can raise kids as well today as they could 40 years ago because the world is falling apart
I mean, I can’t imagine telling a survivor of the Great Depression “Yeah, sure, have six kids. Now’s the time. Because in a century we’re going to have cheap energy and enormous food surpluses and highly advanced industrial machinery and we won’t be book-ended between World Wars or have a smallpox or syphillus or polio epidemic.”
Like, sure, fuck capitalism. But we’ve had capitalism for 400 years.
Look at this dood, showing off their wealth being able to afford EKETs.
It won’t last that long.
Why did you get rid of the nice furniture your grandmother left you???
Did a buddy leave a cup-ring & you decided to put it out on the street? Or did you sell it for a video game or drugs? Was it smashed during a really wild party by a sledgehammer man wearing leather chaps?
Destroyed by mold. Could not afford to fix the roof leak above it.
Had to move to a smaller apartment and couldn’t reasonably fit it =/
I really like the old style furniture but one thing quick to realize is that most of it doesn’t really have much organizing space.
It’s a show of craftsmanship, it is something to look at but that is it.
I’m planning to build a lot of furniture for myself and the top requirement is internal space, followed by ease of assembly and modularity.
Visual impact can be achieve by different varnishes or finishes or, what I’m considering lately, pyro engraving or ink line work, underneath the varnish.
this is why I’m into shaker style furniture. simple, elegant and practical.
Shaker style furniture? Pictures, please.
This kind of furniture was designed to impress the neighbours, not for practicality. But people also had far less stuff back then.
You have a point, there.
It’s a show of craftsmanship, it is something to look at but that is it.
It’s also a pain in the ass to dust with all those nooks and crannies. I can appreciate the craftsmanship but I won’t bring anything like that into my house.
I remember my grandma using these anti static wood cleaning spray for it and it worked. Or just plain cedar oil.
Yeah I know how to clean this type of furniture, it’s just a lot of work that I’d rather not have to do. All of my furniture has minimal detail and no filigree. It looks way less gaudy and is so much easier to clean.
I agree. It’s a relic of another time, when having servants was common fare or it was obligatory having one person always at home, usually the wife.
I also planned on such, but the desk would require a metal frame, and that means either expensive aluminium profile with even more expensive bolting hardware, or welding. Learning to weld properly would take a while, and my father doesn’t wnat me to use bolts or make it anywhere “modular” to make it “very strong”.
There’s absolutely no reason a metal frame is necessary for a desk.
What kind of a desk are you thinking about?
A big desk for computer and other stuff. Don’t want those standing desks either, the mechanism would cost a fortune, and also limit my desk size.
Edit: I might look into hardwoods, that might be my only way, I just need to get some power sanders.
You might find some inspiration in this desk I built.
You can build a big desk that is more than strong enough for you to stand on using nothing but basic pine from the likes of home depot and some screws or glue.
I actually just built one that’s 5 feet long and am assembling another that’s 7 feet. They will fit together to make a big L-shaped desk for a couple PCs and some other stuff. I use 3/4" plywood for the top surface.
I’m making a 3-foot long one too that’s going to be a stand for a 55 gallon aquarium. That’s about 450lbs / 200kg if completely filled.
Why couldn’t you make that with wood? I don’t think it has to be hardwood even, but sure, that’s always nice.
Edit: check out this book about building a workbench for woodworking. You probably don’t need such rigidity but it’s a could be good to use as reference.
I am not leaving anything to anyone
They get my pirated movie collection and my steam account
Their ship sinks with them
Lots of old people still offload hardwood furniture on kijiji (local buy&sell) or ReStore (2nd hand warehouse here) here it’s not expensive to aquire if you happen to like orange and brown furniture. Or can stand to put some time in refinishing stuff or even repairing the more worn pieces that sell for even less.
I love ReStore. I’ve had some lovely finds there. Same with Goodwill. Found a beautiful wooden dresser built in 1998 there last week in perfect condition. I wish I could use Facebook marketplace, but I refuse to use Facebook. I wish I had an app like Kijiji to use instead.
Give BuyNothing a shot if you haven’t already!
They have an app and facebook groups depending on where people are willing to use it, but instead of it being a marketplace, everything on it is free. (though you can offer to pay shipping from a local provider)
Lots of people offer up furniture, especially older/antique stuff on there all the time, as well as tons of other stuff. Also a great way to get rid of things you don’t personally want anymore but don’t want anyone to end up paying out of pocket for.
my family still got our ancestors’ furniture 😤
Mine had it until my mom’s generation. She seemed to take pleasure in telling me she was going to throw it out unless I took it while I was living in a place where I couldn’t.
Kallax is great, it can git so many board games.
Yes, there are plenty of other factors for the enshittification, but…
Furniture used to be a thing you saved for and bought once, for life. Consumers used to think in those terms, now we’re like, meh, it’s cheap enough. Same for appliances. There was only a few choices in the refrigerator space. People talked, compared notes, knew what brand ranked where in quality. Now we’re overrun with choice, aim low and bitch about quality.
Also, if you want nice shit, the used market is booming. And more, I’m shocked what I find on the side of the road. Right now I’m looking at a perfectly nice, solid wood table getting stormed on. Wife found it last week, no room in the house or use for it, so there it sits.
Furniture used to be a thing you saved for and bought once, for life.
And if you were poor you got used furniture. Still much more expensive than Ikea furniture, but your “new” furniture would have scratches and dings from the previous owner. If you were really poor you got used furniture that had been damaged in a fire.
Now, you can get something that’s built from cheap parts and doesn’t last that long, but you can get it brand new.
There was only a few choices in the refrigerator space. People talked, compared notes, knew what brand ranked where in quality.
These days people talk even more, compare even more notes, there’s pages and pages of information about the quality of things available on the Internet. The problem is that it’s much less authentic.
In Ye Olde days, the people you talked to about a new fridge would be friends, cow-orkers, acquaintances from church, the guy in your bowling league, etc. These people didn’t have any reason to lie to you, so you’d mostly get honest feedback. These days there’s way more “information” available online about everything you might want to buy, including thousands of amateur reviews, and dozens of professional reviews. The problem is that the reviews are all from strangers, many of whom are probably shills for the company trying to sell something. The professional review sites frequently care much more about getting traffic than they do about factually reviewing things.
And then there’s Google. In the ancient past it used to use a system called Page Rank (named after Larry Page, not webpages) that was, for a time, a foolproof way to get high quality results. But, for a long time Google fought a war against Search Engine Optimization operators who wanted their sites to rank highly despite being of dubious quality. Eventually Google realized that rather than fighting SEO, they could actually make more money by letting the SEO spammers win, because the SEO spammers just wanted to show ads, and Google had a monopoly on website ads, and a monopoly on search, so what were its users going to do – switch to an alternative?
There’s a very good summary of the enshittification of product reviews here:
Wasn’t ignorant of review gamification, but damn, it’s even worse than I thought. My point was that we’re flooded with reviews and opinions and products, too hard to discern quality.
Great comment!
People used to have money to buy nice things and now we don’t. That’s the reason.
For me it’s more that I have to move all the time to keep the rent down and moving solid wood furniture is a nightmare.
In all honesty, I’m glad that I dont have any of that shit on the left.
Dealing with an estate is enough work without adding guilt into the equation, my will for my daughter literally says “If I did my job right, this is all just stuff. Dont be precious about it because its mine, unless its specifically mentioned I really dont give a shit about it. Do what you need or want to do.”
This is the way.
I would love passed down high quality simple and timeless furniture. The one on the left is highly stylized and gaudy in my eyes.
Exactly, give me the one on the right, but built out of solid wood so it’s as strong as the one on the left
