Americans live in a minimalist age. Just not quite as minimalist as the reigning cultural tastemakers and our machines want us to believe.
There is trouble, you see, in no-frills mid-century-modern paradise. The aesthetic of the aging rich baby boomer, who has moved on from accumulating the most stuff to achieving curation enlightenment, faces a growing challenge from Americans of all ages who feel a proper romance around the reality of everyday life — lived in and rich with memory, warts and all.
A recent sign of the cultural turf war is visible in the online debates surrounding Marie Kondo, the sunny neat freak whose “Does it spark joy?” mantra has captivated a generation ready to live in the now. Get rid of it, counsels Kondo, unless it meets either a utilitarian or an emotivist criterion.
At a time when the likes of Jordan Peterson can command the loyalty of huge audiences by shaming them for their dirty rooms, it’s little surprise that Kondo has gained such traction putting an uplifting spin on the same paternalist or materialist credo. But she has unwittingly earned the half-joking wrath of the online bibliophiles (or else knowingly picked a fight with them), now memeing furiously against her rule of thumb that 31 books is one book too many.
And there are subtler signs that today’s cult of antiseptic minimal living — with the house as upscale hotel room — demands of baby boomers a sacrifice of nostalgia more drastic than they are ultimately willing to accept.
Recent blockbuster films grappling with our digital lives, ranging from “Ready Player One” to “Bumblebee,” center their protagonists’ world and identity in the cultural ecosystem of their bedrooms, teeming with pop detritus, reverently pasted-up posters, and cherished artifacts big and small layered and draped across furnishings clearly inherited and lovingly inhabited.
Who we are, these films clearly argue, arises powerfully from our environment — not just the one we shape for ourselves through the filters of our cultivated personal tastes, but the one we are handed, by high, middle, and low culture. And just as important, intimately, through hand-me-downs and the humble structures of family home.
The burial flag of a child killed in action might spark pride, grief, and humility in equal measure; novels or movies we love with characters we hate can inspire a mix of dread, elation, guilt, and hope; games we can count on our siblings to beat us at playing, or toys our children long since outgrew, often carry a measure of fondness mixed with that of frustration, loneliness, even fear. An old trophy from a time when we were younger, more attractive, more athletic, looks back at us with feelings we cannot always describe, but which we know would be foolish — even wrong — to discard.
As potent a force for good as joy and personal responsibility can be, life’s profound depths and gentle comforts both depend on other, more layered sensations and states of mind. The accumulated evidence of a life of ups and downs, triumphs and tragedies, looks a lot different than a cute row of Instagram-ready novels or a smartly made bed.
Nothing against just-so shots of beautiful books or a top sheet that can bounce a nickel, of course. But in the same spirit, let’s not mistreat the messy, ambiguous, not-wholly-our-own parts of life, and their manifestations in our everyday world — especially in our inner sanctum. A fresh, clean room is a pleasant thing, but a person whose bedchamber resembles a cowork space, scrubbed of all traces of history and personality, just might come off as a sociopath.
The desire to be perfect in the way of our ever-more-capable devices pushes us toward an aesthetic where human curation is obsolete and the living world becomes an empty eggshell. True, there is no going back to the dizzy, DIY world where everyone had twelve favorite bands and worked in a shop and dug their toes into old shag carpet. Nor do we need to feel guilty about that.
Nevertheless, walking away from the jetsam of late-20th century creative consumerism doesn’t mean we need to make like Hamlet. “From the table of my memory,” he vowed, “I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, / All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, that youth and observation copied there.” We know how that turned out.
James Poulos is editor-at-large at The American Mind and contributing editor at American Affairs. He is a fellow at the Center for the Study of Digital Life and the author of The Art of Being Free.
