Stuck in the Past

Time to move away from homes as a status symbol & toward more functional housing

Shelly Fagan
3 min readMay 5, 2024
Photo by Jemima Whyles on Unsplash

In my home, holiday celebrations of the past featured a fancy table with linens, crystal and fine china. While harkening back to days where these luxuries symbolized wealth and sophistication, they have since become unwanted relics of a bygone era.

At best, we view a silver tea service with an eye toward nostalgia when social standing was dictated by such external trappings, where dressing for dinner and eating by candlelight seemed so romantic — and is now considered a little backward.

Very few of us want to return to such an opulent lifestyle as evidenced by the hoard of abandoned dinnerware at thrift stores. We have moved on to eating utensils that better serve a modern lifestyle and few are fighting to return to that quaint nonsense.

Maybe this shift is occurring to more of modern civilization than we recognize or care to acknowledge. And like Grandma’s beloved china pattern, many more of the traditional trappings of so-called “modern civilization” need to be relegated to the past.

Is it really a lack of housing?

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Shelly Fagan

Complicated subjects made accessible. Politics, Basic Income, Philosophy. I follow back.