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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.”
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.
I mean, it’s not surprising when you’re not sure if you’re going to be where you are in even three years.
I love the furniture on the left, but until I bought a house I was NOT gonna put that into an apartment. I never spent more than five years in an apartment. The longest I ever spent in a single location was the house I lived in college where I lived with five other college goers and grads about 7 years.
You can genuinely get some fantastic deals on furniture like the left. I got a gorgeous 4 poster queen bed for 15 bucks. It was an absolute nightmare to move, had to rent a truck to move it, it works great though. If I had to move it every three years though, fuck that.
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.
I very much 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.
An imperial like desk?
I am not leaving anything to anyone
They get my pirated movie collection and my steam account
Their ship sinks with them
I can barely enjoy a properly thoughtful gift. A random item I’m responsible for is like 1/1000
I was expecting to see a comment like this and I am not disappointed.
It won’t last that long.
What grandkids?
Wage slaves who, without consent,that support landlords unwillingly.
And covers the social security (ubi) and Medicare for old people. Need slaves to pay in so those who make it to old age can survive off them.
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.”
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
This is the way.
Well no, because the left will still be in perfect condition when you die but the right is a cheap piece of shit that will disintegrate if you sneeze on it.
Bold of you to assume that I can afford to keep nice furniture like that
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.
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 think the table on the right needs to be rotated ninety degrees.
I found the structural engineer!
No, seriously though… I’m shocked at how many people don’t recall “building block” level logic (as in the toys for babies). I even find contractors willing to make structural modifications to homes, bluffing their way through absurd structure ideas (where my roof would have to magically be floating in the air) where the consequences include human life.
IMO, we should all see the image on the right as wrong, as the entire surface payload (whatever you place on top of it) is resting on the four fasteners (and a shearing force on a tiny bit of the particle-board wood).
but then you can’t see the open front
jk I hate it when I see sideways KALLAX
Old school Expedit crew unite!
I know right?
It’s just crying out in pain.
The worst is when you see them the wrong way like this and with vinyl records in them, they’re very popular with collectors since they’re just the right size and you can keep adding more of them easily as your collection grows, but records are damn heavy so having themn the wrong way around is a disaster waiting to happen.
