3 ms·

I remember visiting my grandparents houses and they had curios everywhere. Just cabinets of dishes and Royal Doultons and silver spoon collections and such. And

I remember visiting my grandparents houses and they had curios everywhere. Just cabinets of dishes and Royal Doultons and silver spoon collections and such. And these were not wealthy people by any means. Growing up, my parents had similar. Copper cookware hanging from the wall that we never used, an entire room with a piano and sofas and more curio cabinets that we went into twice a year: Thanksgiving and Christmas. A big issue is that all that stuff ended up with my parents and their siblings, and now all their stuff is ending up with my siblings and I. And none of us want any of it. I got to thinking: why did they collect all this stuff? And I came up with two guesses: 1) historically it was seen as a good way to "store" your wealth. My grandparents grew up in an environment that deeply appreciated the Great Depression. My parents were raised by parents who experienced it. 2) When you have money and there aren't GTX 3080s or smartphones to buy, you find things to spend it on, even if they're not as practical. I'm not saying this doesn't exist anymore: collectables is a massive thing. But I feel, in general, my siblings and my friends and I all kinda feel the same way: "why would I want an extra room we never use? Why would I want all that stuff I don't use?" I'm wondering if this is purely a generational cultural transition: we are finding less value in expensive do-nothings now that there's a thousand-and-eleventy ways to spend that money in a more usable way?

solardev 3y ago
Isn't that the whole quintessentially Millennial "buy experiences, not things" meme? In the old days, a middle class income buys you a good house and some trinkets to fill it with. Nowadays a middle class income buys you nothing except a few fun trips. Might as well make the best of it.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  Yeah, that concept may be quite related! This also reminds me of when I bought my house, my agent had mentioned how homes with all these superfluous rooms are becoming more difficult to sell because as prices go up, buyers just see useless space that costs money. (And now I'm also reminded about the sickening ostentatiousness of growing up in a home with so many rooms that as a kid I'd sometimes think, "hey I haven't been in this room in six months. Let's go inside just to... be inside for a minute.")
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    What drives me nuts are the goddamn desks in kitchens. Someone in the 80s looked at room-use studies, saw that the most important part of the house, the hub of family life, was the kitchen table but it was mostly used as a desk and/or document storage area, and thought “oh, this means I should build a desk into the kitchen cabinets!” It’s a bone-headed, ugly, inconvenient failure of an home design idea that afflicts tons of houses built in the 80s through the very-early 2000s.
    - solardev 3y ago
      Wait, what? Was this in the US? I've never heard of or seen this, I don't think. Got a picture of an example?
      - hotnfresh 3y ago
        https://carlaaston.com/designed/desk-in-kitchen-design-feature-of-the-past https://carlaaston.com/designed/desk-in-kitchen-design-featu... The “before” picture with the oak cabinets somewhat down the page comes the closest to what most of these look like, in the wild. Often their placement is even worse than that, though. They almost always end up a chaotic dump-area for miscellaneous crap, in my experience, and usually end up even worse-off if the owner attempts, initially, to use them as an actual desk, because then they’ll have the clutter of a desk chair and maybe even a monitor and keyboard among the pile of other junk. They are basically never better than having more ordinary counter space or a cabinet pantry in the same spot. Usually they occur in houses that are plenty large enough to have other desks in several places, not little space-constrained apartments. They come from a fundamental misunderstanding of why kitchen tables end up used the way they do. I’ve never seen them successfully replace the kitchen table as the shared family desk and hub-of-organizational-activity, because they’re much worse for that than the table is.
        solardev 3y ago
        What was the reasoning behind this...? Why would anyone ever want to work on a tiny desk by the fridge? Lol I feel like I'm getting a history lesson from aliens. It's so bizarre!
eropple 3y ago
I think it's just changed. Tons of people I know with disposable income buy retro gaming systems, collectible old cartridges, etc., when a MiSTer (or even sufficiently advanced software emulation) can do. There is still some affinity for Stuff, it's perhaps just that there are more readily-available things to attach oneself to rather than the stuff your parents or grandparents attached to. I don't want my grandparents'/parents' Hummels stash, either. My hypothetical kids probably won't want whatever I end up into.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  Yeah that sounds quite plausible. Instead of pulling out the nice dishes once a year, we pull out the Atari 5200 once a year.
hotnfresh 3y ago
Fussell marked a lot of this behavior as related to class-socialization. I’ve sometimes found it hard to tell where my attitudes differing from my parents’ and other older relatives’ is part of a generational shift, and where it’s because theirs all fall very much in a range of every-flavor-of-prole through middle (in Fussell’s terms), while I’ve both accidentally and on-purpose adopted a lot of upper-middle (again, as Fussell breaks the terms down) preferences and attitudes. This can easily happen entirely unconsciously just from, say, going to college. I’m with you on disliking useless or near-useless rooms (formal dining room when we already have a large eat-in area in the kitchen? LOL no, that’s an office now) and finding “collectibles” or curio cabinets full of never-used and not-even-particularly-nice (but even if they were—you should use things unless they’re purely art!) e.g. dishes practically repulsive, but I’m not sure how much of that’s generational and how much if it’s my own small, but significant, class shift.
gangstead 3y ago
I've been going through some of this after inheriting all my parents stuff. I feel some guilt about tossing so many things that they hung on to so they must have valued them (but I don't feel enough guilt to keep all this stuff). I think there is a third possible cause to add to your list: companies exploiting something that maybe used to be sort of true but our parents hadn't realized it no longer applied. Collectible things might have been expensive and slow to produce when they were hand painted in upstate new york, then they started to be machine stamped across the world for pennies and for a while they could still fetch the old price and sentimentality as the market was saturated and then some. I sometimes wonder if I'm going too far in the other direction and not sentimentality in at least a few things and preserving them. Maybe I'm setting up the pendulum swing in the other direction and my kids will have interest in collecting something when they grow up.
Balgair 3y ago
We finally became real adults the other year, in that we were hosting a big Thanksgiving at our own place. When we pulled out all the fine china that we'd been handed down we found that we were going to be short some table settings. We looked at all the traditional stores (Penny's, etc) and found the prices for new china sets to be quite a lot. On a lark, we went to the charity shop to just see what we could find. Hey, maybe, just maybe, there would be a set that matched what we already had? The kitchen area was just chock-a-block with fine china. Glasses, plates, little forks, you name it. The silver was real silver judging by the tarnishing, still in those wooden velvet lined boxes. A bit of cellotape binding all the various items together. A whole coffee pot, pure silver, just sitting there next to dozens more. Any style or coloring or gold plating that you liked. Yeah, some of the sets were incomplete. Missing a tea up or a spoon. But no gold lined dinner plate made in Italy or Japan was ever more than a dollar. We pieced together a whole set for 16 people of everything we could think of for under $200. Little oyster forks, big dinner plates, gold plated napkin rings, you name it, we have it now. And if we ever break anything, back to the charity shop to just replace it for under $0.50. Get a whole new set of them for under $10. People are practically giving away all the fine china in my part of the world, and they still can barely find anyone to take it. I don't know what our ancestors were thinking with this stuff, but I doubt it turned out like they thought it would. A good lesson to us all.
- eestrada 3y ago
  I remember hearing from my mother about how her grandmother (my great grandmother) got her chinaset. It was during the great depression, and some flour companies held long running promotions where a piece of China would be placed inside the bag of flour. If you ended up with too many pieces of one type (for example tea cups), you could trade with your neigbors to equal out your set. It was a way of buying/owning something nice when you barely had money to pay for the food itself. I'm not sure how apocryphal this story is though. Could the China really have survived transport that way? Maybe the purchaser redeemed the China piece another way. They would also use the bag the flour came in as material to make underwear. Literally nothing was wasted. That is probably also why this stuff got passed down to our generation: they couldn't bear to part with anything.
- 3y ago

solardev 3y ago

Isn't that the whole quintessentially Millennial "buy experiences, not things" meme? In the old days, a middle class income buys you a good house and some trinkets to fill it with. Nowadays a middle class income buys you nothing except a few fun trips. Might as well make the best of it.

Waterluvian 3y ago
Yeah, that concept may be quite related! This also reminds me of when I bought my house, my agent had mentioned how homes with all these superfluous rooms are becoming more difficult to sell because as prices go up, buyers just see useless space that costs money. (And now I'm also reminded about the sickening ostentatiousness of growing up in a home with so many rooms that as a kid I'd sometimes think, "hey I haven't been in this room in six months. Let's go inside just to... be inside for a minute.")
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  What drives me nuts are the goddamn desks in kitchens. Someone in the 80s looked at room-use studies, saw that the most important part of the house, the hub of family life, was the kitchen table but it was mostly used as a desk and/or document storage area, and thought “oh, this means I should build a desk into the kitchen cabinets!” It’s a bone-headed, ugly, inconvenient failure of an home design idea that afflicts tons of houses built in the 80s through the very-early 2000s.
  - solardev 3y ago
    Wait, what? Was this in the US? I've never heard of or seen this, I don't think. Got a picture of an example?
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      https://carlaaston.com/designed/desk-in-kitchen-design-feature-of-the-past https://carlaaston.com/designed/desk-in-kitchen-design-featu... The “before” picture with the oak cabinets somewhat down the page comes the closest to what most of these look like, in the wild. Often their placement is even worse than that, though. They almost always end up a chaotic dump-area for miscellaneous crap, in my experience, and usually end up even worse-off if the owner attempts, initially, to use them as an actual desk, because then they’ll have the clutter of a desk chair and maybe even a monitor and keyboard among the pile of other junk. They are basically never better than having more ordinary counter space or a cabinet pantry in the same spot. Usually they occur in houses that are plenty large enough to have other desks in several places, not little space-constrained apartments. They come from a fundamental misunderstanding of why kitchen tables end up used the way they do. I’ve never seen them successfully replace the kitchen table as the shared family desk and hub-of-organizational-activity, because they’re much worse for that than the table is.
      - solardev 3y ago
        What was the reasoning behind this...? Why would anyone ever want to work on a tiny desk by the fridge? Lol I feel like I'm getting a history lesson from aliens. It's so bizarre!

eropple 3y ago

I think it's just changed. Tons of people I know with disposable income buy retro gaming systems, collectible old cartridges, etc., when a MiSTer (or even sufficiently advanced software emulation) can do. There is still some affinity for Stuff, it's perhaps just that there are more readily-available things to attach oneself to rather than the stuff your parents or grandparents attached to. I don't want my grandparents'/parents' Hummels stash, either. My hypothetical kids probably won't want whatever I end up into.

Waterluvian 3y ago
Yeah that sounds quite plausible. Instead of pulling out the nice dishes once a year, we pull out the Atari 5200 once a year.

hotnfresh 3y ago

Fussell marked a lot of this behavior as related to class-socialization. I’ve sometimes found it hard to tell where my attitudes differing from my parents’ and other older relatives’ is part of a generational shift, and where it’s because theirs all fall very much in a range of every-flavor-of-prole through middle (in Fussell’s terms), while I’ve both accidentally and on-purpose adopted a lot of upper-middle (again, as Fussell breaks the terms down) preferences and attitudes. This can easily happen entirely unconsciously just from, say, going to college. I’m with you on disliking useless or near-useless rooms (formal dining room when we already have a large eat-in area in the kitchen? LOL no, that’s an office now) and finding “collectibles” or curio cabinets full of never-used and not-even-particularly-nice (but even if they were—you should use things unless they’re purely art!) e.g. dishes practically repulsive, but I’m not sure how much of that’s generational and how much if it’s my own small, but significant, class shift.

gangstead 3y ago

I've been going through some of this after inheriting all my parents stuff. I feel some guilt about tossing so many things that they hung on to so they must have valued them (but I don't feel enough guilt to keep all this stuff). I think there is a third possible cause to add to your list: companies exploiting something that maybe used to be sort of true but our parents hadn't realized it no longer applied. Collectible things might have been expensive and slow to produce when they were hand painted in upstate new york, then they started to be machine stamped across the world for pennies and for a while they could still fetch the old price and sentimentality as the market was saturated and then some. I sometimes wonder if I'm going too far in the other direction and not sentimentality in at least a few things and preserving them. Maybe I'm setting up the pendulum swing in the other direction and my kids will have interest in collecting something when they grow up.

Balgair 3y ago

We finally became real adults the other year, in that we were hosting a big Thanksgiving at our own place. When we pulled out all the fine china that we'd been handed down we found that we were going to be short some table settings. We looked at all the traditional stores (Penny's, etc) and found the prices for new china sets to be quite a lot. On a lark, we went to the charity shop to just see what we could find. Hey, maybe, just maybe, there would be a set that matched what we already had? The kitchen area was just chock-a-block with fine china. Glasses, plates, little forks, you name it. The silver was real silver judging by the tarnishing, still in those wooden velvet lined boxes. A bit of cellotape binding all the various items together. A whole coffee pot, pure silver, just sitting there next to dozens more. Any style or coloring or gold plating that you liked. Yeah, some of the sets were incomplete. Missing a tea up or a spoon. But no gold lined dinner plate made in Italy or Japan was ever more than a dollar. We pieced together a whole set for 16 people of everything we could think of for under $200. Little oyster forks, big dinner plates, gold plated napkin rings, you name it, we have it now. And if we ever break anything, back to the charity shop to just replace it for under $0.50. Get a whole new set of them for under $10. People are practically giving away all the fine china in my part of the world, and they still can barely find anyone to take it. I don't know what our ancestors were thinking with this stuff, but I doubt it turned out like they thought it would. A good lesson to us all.

eestrada 3y ago
I remember hearing from my mother about how her grandmother (my great grandmother) got her chinaset. It was during the great depression, and some flour companies held long running promotions where a piece of China would be placed inside the bag of flour. If you ended up with too many pieces of one type (for example tea cups), you could trade with your neigbors to equal out your set. It was a way of buying/owning something nice when you barely had money to pay for the food itself. I'm not sure how apocryphal this story is though. Could the China really have survived transport that way? Maybe the purchaser redeemed the China piece another way. They would also use the bag the flour came in as material to make underwear. Literally nothing was wasted. That is probably also why this stuff got passed down to our generation: they couldn't bear to part with anything.
3y ago