Millennials, eh? According to the media, they’re just killing everything.
There’s no shortage of thinkpieces on the subject, including huffy editorials about these damn young people not wanting Georgian antiques when they move out of home, or snide articles about how young people sleep on floor-mattresses like animals. Have they no dignity, much less taste?
And of course, the reason is more economic than aesthetic. It’s not because young people hate nice things.
It’s because millennials, on average, aren’t buying their own places and then festooning them with all sorts of lovely pieces the way that, say, boomers did.
The reality these days is that folks in their 20s and 30s (and, increasingly, beyond) live in smaller places for shorter periods of time, often with groups of people, and showing up at a share house with a giant wardrobe and a gorgeous handcrafted dining table is just looking for trouble.
That lifestyle – one necessitated by uncertain employment and a housing market where buying is unlikely and renting is competitive – means lots of moves, and moves mean either having to shove nice things along stairwells and into borrowed vans, or hiring people to do the lugging and lifting. And either way, stuff is going to get broken.
Thus younger people tend to travel light, and what furniture people have tends to be stuff which could be abandoned without breaking anyone’s heart.
Gran’s piano is going to judge you if you leave it by the side of the road, but no-one has ever bid a tearful farewell to a $30 chipboard bookcase gaffed together because the pins fell out two moves ago.
On the plus side, if you have to rush out from a burning building, you’ll be able to bundle everything you value in a doona.
So… yay?