Episode 06 - Why Millennials Love Homemaking
Transcript
Ellie: 0:07
Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,
David: 0:09
And I'm David Peña-Guzmán. Welcome to Overthink.
Ellie: 0:12
The podcast where two friends,
David: 0:14
who who are also professors,
Ellie: 0:16
put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.
David: 0:18
Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. So you and I have known each other for a long time. We met in our twenties, now we're in our thirties. It's been a decade. And I guess we're adults now.
Ellie: 0:30
Thank God.
David: 0:31
And I want to know, what has really made you feel like an adult?
Ellie: 0:37
Oh, my God, this happened to me this summer. So I was on a one-year contract every year for the four years after I got my PhD, and then finally this year, I got my dream job: tenure-track position at Pomona College. And the first thing I did was to nail my Ikea bookshelves into the wall.
David: 0:59
Nailed it!
Ellie: 0:59
Yeah, exactly. So I have these Ikea bookshelves, and I had been living in my apartment for a few years here in Los Angeles, but I always thought that I might be moving in a matter of months, depending on where my job took me. And so once I secured this permanent position-
David: 1:17
Get out the nails. Give me the hammer!
Ellie: 1:21
Yeah, I mean, what happened is that I drove to my dad's house and borrowed his power tools because I don't have my own.
David: 1:28
I love that you're like, "Oh, you know, when I was an adult, when I had to ask my dad for a hammer and a nail."
Ellie: 1:34
How classic millennial, and it involves Ikea, naturally.
David: 1:38
Um, yeah I hoping to get something else, but I guess this will do in terms of adulting.
Ellie: 1:44
Um, okay, fine, what's your story??
David: 1:46
Uh, well, I mean, you had your little crucifixion with the bookshelves where you nail them and then they're there forever and they're paying for sins. So for me, it's also connected to my house and like you, I moved a bunch,
uh, over the last five, six years: 2:00
to Canada, New Orleans, Baltimore. I finally landed in San Francisco and I bought my baby, my purple Hawaiian tea plant for $125 plus $85 for the pot. And so I dropped over $200 on this beautiful purple plant. Oh, it was beautiful and I've never spent that much on pretty much anything before. It became my baby. And it sort of became this symbol of me being an adult who had to take care of this living thing that was turning what previously was just like a random room into my personal home.
Ellie: 2:43
Yes! So is your plant still alive?
David: 2:45
So, yes, but as you know, I am currently living abroad because of COVID. And so I had to entrust it to a very close friend to essentially like alloparent it in my absence. There will be a custody battle over this tea plant when I return.
Ellie: 3:01
What is alloparenting?
David: 3:03
It's what animals do when you take care of a baby that's not your own. And so somebody, my friend Francisco, thank you very much, is alloparenting my beautiful baby. This plant is the marker of my becoming an adult.
Ellie: 3:18
Bookshelves, plants, hygge, Marie Kondo, Le Creuset pots. Today, we'll be talking about millennial practices of homemaking.
David: 3:26
Millennials are obsessed with being domestic. How is homemaking among young people today different from previous generations of Americans?
Ellie: 3:35
Are these practices of domesticity liberatory or do they reinscribe conservative ideals surrounding consumerism, nationalism, and white privilege?
David: 3:44
Ellie, let's jump right in.
Ellie: 3:45
One thing I find really interesting about practices of homemaking among young people is that we're obsessed with our homes, none of us owns a home. The few people who are buying them are almost invariably getting help from their parents, right? And so like, there's this intergenerational wealth that's getting reproduced-- in the absence of that, we can't afford homes.
David: 4:07
I literally don't have a single friend that owns their home, who is under 45. So you have to be, uh, for the most part white, middle-class, probably be in a couple, these-
Ellie: 4:18
Definitely!
David: 4:18
with the help of two different sets of already well-established parent units in order to be able to have access to this very traditional interpretation of the American dream, which is buying a home.
Ellie: 4:30
David, we've talked about our own experiences here, which are obviously coming within a certain bourgeois academic setting, but let's look at some statistics to think about millennials more broadly and move out of the anecdotal. Why aren't we buying homes?
David: 4:43
Well, let's see.
Ellie: 4:45
One of the main reasons is that so many of us have student loans. 50% of people looking to buy homes under the age of 36 say that student debt is delaying their purchase. College graduates without debt take almost eight years to save for a 20% down payment on a house. But those with debt need four years longer.
David: 5:07
And that depends on the kind of debt you have, because let's be clear. I have some very close friends who have gotten bogged down by the student debt, predatory system. And they'll never be able to save enough money, with the debt that they have, to put that 15, 20, 25% down payment. And that's the sad reality about the millennial experience for a lot of people.
Ellie: 5:31
Definitely. And another thing is that post 2008 recession, a lot of banks tightened up their lending practices. And so this means that millennials actually have to save more. In many cases, they have to put down a 20% down payment in order to buy a house. Otherwise, they'll have a much higher monthly payment.
David: 5:48
Yeah, the statistics show that insofar as millennials continue to eat avocado toast, they will never be able. It's like, um, do I want a home or do I want an avocado toast?
Ellie: 6:02
I personally attribute my lack of being able to buy a home to a penchant for Korean skincare.
David: 6:08
Well that, and for me, it's bubble tea. Certainly something that economists need to start tracking down because you know, there is this trend about, like, these typically older economist and sociologists who are trying to figure out why are millennials not buying a home? Why are millennials not investing?
Answer: 6:24
because we're broke, asa generation.
Ellie: 6:28
We earn, as millennials, on average 20% less than baby boomers did, even though we're better educated.
David: 6:35
I'm going to throw two more statistics in the mix here, because I do think they're quite revealing. One of them is that 88% of millennials live in big cities. I mean, you and I fit that to the T. We've constantly been seeking, urban life in the city, uh, and a lot of people that we know also do too. So like, we're talking about almost 90% of millennials living in cities like New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, et cetera. But that already gives you a sense of the kind of social and economic contexts.
Ellie: 7:08
We're never going to be able to afford a home in those places.
David: 7:10
Exactly. Exactly. And the second statistic is that millennials are marrying not only less frequently than boomers, which makes perfect sense-
Ellie: 7:19
Down with monogamous nuclear heterosexism!
David: 7:22
Or if you want to go for that, typically you go for it a little later, because the second part of that statistic is that when millennials do marry, they marry when they're older. So we wait a lot longer than our parents did. And so it means that you have a lot less people in the kind of marriage arrangements that are typically a precondition for buying a home, or that is traditionally the first step to building up to buying a home.
Ellie: 7:49
Yeah, a family, right?
David: 7:52
Exactly.
Ellie: 7:52
And it's so interesting here because I think a lot of millennials are critical of the American dream, with its bourgeois ideal of domesticity and that heterosexual nuclear family. And yet we also long to have a home, to have a place to call our own. And we put a lot of time and money into creating spaces that feel cozy and safe. And a lot of times these spaces actually echo precisely the American dream that we're rejecting. So for instance, I, like many other people of our generation, am super into mid-century modern design. Mid-century modern? That's the kind of design that's precisely popular, right? The apotheosis of the American dream.
David: 8:34
Yeah, but you know, there is this nostalgia, but there is also a reappropriation on new terms, where we recuperate things from the past, but they look different and they have a different meaning when done by millennials. And so there are all these ways in which, you know, we are invested in making a home, but because we don't actually have houses, it has to take a fundamentally new form.
Ellie: 9:00
Yeah, I'm interested here in the way that the etymology of the word economy pertains.
David: 9:08
Oikos!
Ellie: 9:08
Yeah. So yeah, the word economy comes from the ancient Greek words oikos, which means household and nomos, which means law or management. And so economy in its original meaning meant household management. And it's only much more recently that we get the idea of the economy and the way we currently know of it as this sort of free-market sphere of exchange.
David: 9:33
Well, this is an argument that the French philosopher Michel Foucault makes in The History of Sexuality. He says, you know, we today associate economy with this very vast system of economic production that is largely impersonal. But for the Greeks, this ancient concept of the oikos-nomos, the governing of one's household, was really a way of styling yourself. So he uses this term aesthetics of existence, where the way in which a Greek person would relate to their home said something about how they related to themselves-- a very different meaning. And I think there's that connection here to this set of practices that millennials engage in, in relation to their home, where we fashion ourselves and create a specific identity, a specific style, based on a certain practice of domesticity.
Ellie: 10:24
So it's like we're rediscovering the original meaning of the word "economy."
David: 10:28
And we are very critical of the new model of economic production.
Ellie: 10:33
Definitely. Although, while we're taking up this old notion of economy, hopefully we're not also bringing along with it, the enslavement of women and other peoples that characterize ancient Greek and Roman societies.
David: 10:44
Yeah, the little details, you know? Uh,
Ellie: 10:50
So in terms of this self-fashioning of the household, David, what do you associate with the millennial home aesthetic?
David: 10:57
I think about things like the Marie Kondo trend that, you know, like swept over the U.S., I think about what you said about this relationship to furniture, you know, that moment when you finally upgrade away from Ikea furniture and you invest in maybe something else, or when you buy plants, all these things seem-
Ellie: 11:15
Still in process of doing that, haven't achieved that quite yet.
David: 11:19
But you have achieved the plant, and, uh, you strike me as a Marie Kondo millennial. So I'm gonna put my bets and say that you-
Ellie: 11:26
Dude, you have not seen my closet or my bookshelves because she would- she would really take me to task the bloated nature of them.
David: 11:34
Did you at any point in time actually try to implement the Marie Kondo method?
Ellie: 11:39
Yeah. I mean my dresser right now is completely Marie Kondo-ed out with her- her folding technique. I didn't take her up on the idea of getting rid of stuff, but I did take her up on the folding techniques, which are great for packing by the way. Not that I'm doing any traveling these days.
David: 11:53
And I love that a bunch of academics just sort of, like, let out a squeal as soon as she was like, you should only have 20 books. And I was among them. I was like, "Marie, girl, I was with you this whole time, Iwanted to reorganize and restructure my life and you lost me. I'm becoming a hoarder now because you no longer have any credibility."
Ellie: 12:14
Totally! But I think that obsession with Marie Kondo's minimalism, this life-changing magic of tidying up as she calls it, really expresses this desire for control that we have, you know, we have so little control about what goes on outside of our worlds. Not only can we not purchase homes, but we also have unprecedented levels of job insecurity even before the pandemic started, right? Millennials were in pretty bad shape-- racked with debt, we have really uncertain modes of connection now with the rise of social media, and so I think it makes sense that would be seeking this mode of refuge in a clean home.
David: 12:48
Yes. And it's not just that we want security and control, it's that we want to reclaim the concept of quality that we have inherited from the generation that precedes us right? We're like a good life is a life with a big house, with a lot of space, with two cars in the garage and, we're saying actually no, quality comes from somewhere else. It comes from a particular way of relating to your space that you can achieve in a small one bedroom apartment or in a tiny studio in LA or in New York or in San Francisco. So there is a security, and then there's also this affirmation of a new concept of what the good life is.
Ellie: 13:30
Yeah. And it's already an achievement for us to have carved out our own little corner of space given how many people in our generation don't have the privilege of even living on their own, right? So many millennials live with their families not that that's always a bad thing. I think that that can be a great thing in many cases, but sometimes it is a choice that millennials have to make that goes against their wishes because they simply don't have money to afford an apartment, even.
David: 13:55
Yeah. And I mean, when I think about Marie Kondo in particular, one of the things that's really appealing as you point out is the minimalism, right? This reduction in consumption that also ties in into something that we've discussed in the past, which is this millennial suspicion, that, capitalism maybe has been the lie we've been fed. And one way in which a lot of millennials sort of see themselves as resisting the logic of capitalism is precisely by minimalizing consumption, which fits into this minimalist aesthetic.
Ellie: 14:28
Totally. And paradoxically, however, it's still co-opted by capitalism in the sense that now there are all these products that help you tidy up, and that help you have a calmer relation to your home, right? And so it's like, now you need to get a bathmat with boobs on it. That was the trend a while ago, right?
David: 14:46
What are you talking about?
Ellie: 14:47
Oh, you didn't see this? Maybe this was like more of an LA thing. Um, so you have to have that. You have to have the parachute home sheets, you have to have the Nest mattress. And so you're like buying all of these things that are creating the calm space that you have.
David: 15:00
Yeah. And I mean, this speaks to what French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, uh, calls the re-territorializing and the territorializing force of capitalism, that it doesn't really matter what you throw at capitalism, capitalism, sort of, reabsorbes it, and then spits it back at you in a capitalist mode, right? It's kind of like the Borg that just assimilates everything that crosses its path, even things like Marie Kondo's brand of minimalism. But even so, I do believe that there is value in this minimalist approach to reducing the things that you have and trying to detach yourself from material possessions, even if we can't do it like a hundred percent.
Ellie: 15:40
For sure. And also investing if, and when you're able, in one thing of quality over a bunch of things. So there was that phenomenon recently where Le Creuset pots were all over Tiktok. This was like a phenomenon. Suddenly young people, especially gen Z, even more than millennials, are obsessed with Le Creuset pots. And if what you're taking from that is that a Le Creuset pot is a wonderful pot that you can create a warm nice stew in-- I wouldn't know, I don't have one-- uh-
David: 16:09
I do. And they are wonderful, really. I never exaggerate, but they change your life.
Ellie: 16:15
Oh God, wait, so now I need one. Why is it so good?
David: 16:19
I feel it in my bones.
Ellie: 16:22
Sounds like somebody has been co-opted by capitalism, not that I haven't.
David: 16:25
Look, if there is a path to liberation, it's Le Creuset pots. There's no question about it. It's the sleekness and the color and the weight, because you do feel like you're picking up something, that's like a relic, but that is also modern. It's a sturdy, old school pot where you only need one for your whole life and you can have it with you until you die. Like, you'll be buried in your goddamn pot if you have to, so they kinda transcend that dichotomy between modernity and tradition, where it's and hyper-traditional.
Ellie: 16:55
Hmm, which does seem to go along with this millennial aesthetic. And I think if you're buying a Le Creuset pot and you're getting wrapped up into this trend, which, you know, I'm definitely going to, once I get off this call and save up money to buy one of those $300 things after what you said, I'm so easily influenced it's horrible, um, but if you're doing that and you're buying one and you're having that and you're nurturing it for the rest of your life, great. But it's so easy then based on these kind of Tiktok trends for something like the Le Creuset pot to become a collector's item, where then suddenly you've got one in each, every limited edition color. And so it's not even so much about the particular products sometimes as it is the need to have more and moreof them.
David: 17:34
That's right. And I think this is where there is this back and forth between the fetishization of something and the turning of it into a commodity, and then hopefully the minimalism pulling us away from commodification. Cause I do love the pots, but I only want one. Now Ellie, it seems to me that a lot of these practices of homemaking, you know, the way in which millennials create a sense of home and a sense of belonging in the spaces that we inhabit sound to me like what the French philosopher Michel de Certeau calls tactics, which for him are ways in which individuals were still operating under a system of social control can find ways to exercise some level of freedom, some level of genuine individuality, even within the constraints, let's say, of capitalism. And one of the things that I really like about his philosophy is that he turns to the everyday, to the practices that we engage in on the daily, and that we don't think of as political, but he says, no, that's exactly where you exercise your agency. And so, for example, um, very early on, he wrote a lot about cooking and about how in the practice of cooking, you're operating under the constraints, let's say, of a recipe which here represents the social order, right. Something that constrains you from without, a set of laws or principles that you have to follow. And he says, within every recipe, there is wiggle room for innovation, for putting your own twist on the recipe and making it your own, and he introduces a distinction between what he calls strategies and tactics. Strategies are essentially power moves by the powerful. So, for example, the creation of the Prison-Industrial System, that's a strategy. The creation of sweat shops, that's a strategy. It's a power driven move, by the system, let's just put it that way. Tactics are more local, grassroots, from the ground up practices, where individuals like you and I find our way through these larger strategies. So tactics are counter-strategies. They are sites of resistance.
Ellie: 19:44
Absolutely. And it's so interesting that you mentioned that here, David, because in her recent work, the Latina feminist philosopher Mariana Ortega talks about Certeau's concept of tactics in terms of what she calls hometactics, and hometactics for Ortega are micro-techniques that produce a sense of familiarity in situations where we feel we don't belong. So they are ways of creating oneself by carving out a place for oneself. And what I find interesting about this approach is that it provides ways for us to think about how some of the features of millennial home-making that frankly rubbed me the wrong way, this idea that we're going back to a potential cult of domesticity that is likely feminine-coded in some dangerous ways, this idea that we are vaunting an American dream that none of us really has access to because we can't afford homes, Ortega provides reason to believe that there's maybe something more liberatory going on here, because she suggests, and again, this is, you know, in the context of hometactics in general, she's not talking about millennial homemaking, but she says that we need to go beyond the myth of home and move towards a sort of de-centered praxis of home-making. This de-centered practice of homemaking rejects the norms of the strategies that you described, David, these power moves, right? It might, in our case, involve rejecting capitalist consumerism, where we need to buy 10 Le Creuset pots, and is rather about sort of working within the constraints that we mentioned. I love that reference to cooking too, because cooking has been such a theme during the pandemic, right? The sourdough bread, the focaccia, all of that. It's always bread. The banana bread.
David: 21:28
But not having flour, like not having flour at the stores.
Ellie: 21:32
Oh my God, yes! The flour shortages!
David: 21:35
Well-
Ellie: 21:35
Why bread? What do you think about the significance of bread here?
David: 21:37
Well, okay. So I have some thoughts about this that I haven't processed very well, but I think it's two things. It's two, uh, things with three sub-points under each. No, no. No, I think there are two things that stand out to me initially. The first one is that bread is something that you need to be hyper-specific in terms of the recipe, right? You can't really round the amount of flour that you put. You have to be a little bit more exact whereas with cooking that's not baking, uh, like, you know, you can put a little bit more salt, it's fine. And so there is almost a pleasure in following a hyper-regimented recipe, that appeals to me in cases in which I am stressed. So I actually want to be told exactly what to do and just follow it to the letter.
Ellie: 22:20
Ah, I'm one of those people who did not make a single bread during quarantine, but that's a different story.
David: 22:25
Well, yeah, I fall into that category too, but nonetheless, I find gratification in highly regimented structures in some very limited cases. And I think bread and baking falls into that. The second one, it's this more symbolic, the rustic nature of bread, this notion of breaking bread as the first step toward building friendship and community, where a sense of family is- is forged at the table. So, Ellie, I haven't read Ortega's book, but it is on my to-read list. And is her argument that home is where you are and that you can turn any place into home or are there specific practices that she thinks count as hometactics for making a place your own?
Ellie: 23:10
So I think it's both. I mean, she's drawing her conception of home from Heidegger's notion of homeliness, heimlichkeit, and from a Heideggerian perspective, homeliness is just our constant state of being in the world, except when we get pulled out of it by certain moods, such as anxiety. There's a plug for our existential anxiety episode, which you should all listen to if you haven't yet. But homeliness is our average state of being in the world, so it's just a description of our situation. That said, Ortega does take issue with Heidegger's conception of homeliness because she argues that not everyone is similarly situated or situated to the same degree at different points. And so she draws on her own experience having been a Nicaraguan migrant, moving to the U.S., and says that she, in that particular social location, having been marginalized in many different respects, she also talks about her sexuality as a lesbian, and she says that she has had to carve out spaces because spaces have not immediately shown up as homely for her.
David: 24:10
Fascinating. And this speaks to me in a very personal way. It makes me think of when I moved to the U.S., uh, as a 15 year old immigrant, who didn't speak English. And I suddenly found myself not at home. It was not an experience of hostility, but it was an experience of not belonging. And I remember that I ended up finding morsels, little kernels of home, in the most unexpected places. So I remember by the time I came here and I was 15, I was already an atheist. I had already come out to my parents as not really believing in God. And yet I moved to Nevada to a town that was, like 85% white, 90% Mormon, so just culture shock.
Ellie: 24:55
90% Mormon!?
David: 24:57
Yeah, it was, I went to a, basically a Mormon highschool.
Ellie: 24:59
We're talking like peak white.
David: 25:02
Yes. I mean-
Ellie: 25:03
I always think of Mormons as peak white, as a white person myself.
David: 25:07
I mean it- maybe yes, they were really kind to me, um, but the point here is that I was this like, kind of semi-radical 15 year old, who was already openly atheistic, and I realized that I felt so not at home in this environment, in this small Mormon town, that the only place where I felt at home, interestingly enough, was the Catholic church, the one Catholic church in the town, because that's the only place that I saw Brown bodies.
Ellie: 25:34
Yeah. Yeah.
David: 25:35
I heard Spanish being spoken and so I would go to church and I would have this really valuable experience breaking bread with other Catholics. And I eventually came to identify myself as culturally Catholic. You know how people say, like I'm not really Jewish, I'm culturally Jewish. I would say I'm culturally Catholic because of the Latin American, uh, dimension there. And so I found home at the church as an atheist.
Ellie: 26:01
But David, this is such a great example because it reminds me of something that Ortega says about tactics following Certeau. She describes tactics as interventions aimed at producing favorable situations, but ones that don't have the power to abolish an entire system of domination or a system of power. And so I think what you're describing is this temporary intervention, right? Finding refuge in the Catholic church, and it produced a favorable situation for you as an isolated immigrant teenager, but it was at odds with your own very value system, because-
David: 26:36
Yeah.
Ellie: 26:36
It wasn't abolishing the system of power of the Catholic Church-
David: 26:38
Exactly. It didn't actually change the system, but it changed my life for a moment in the context of this system.
Ellie: 26:47
Then your relationship to the church fell away again once you found other communities you felt more at home in ultimately.
David: 26:53
Yes. I no longer need them to perform that function because I have found that sense of community elsewhere. I have my chosen family. I have my practices of homemaking, but nonetheless, I always remember what the Church did for me at a very crucial point in time when I was fundamentally alone as a sort of gay Brown kid where I- I really felt truly misunderstood by pretty much everybody around me.
Ellie: 27:23
Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review Overthink on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. So let's talk about the Danish art of hygge, or coziness. I'm probably pronouncing it horribly. It's H Y G G E, if you didn't know already. So this phenomenon caught on a number of years ago, there was a New Yorker article in 2016, that called 2016 "The Year of Hygge" and it basically puts forth this idea that good vibes and coziness in the home especially, particularly with other people, but it could be also by yourself, are ideals. So you've got these images of a warm mug of tea, cozy cashmere socks, snuggling up with a good book in the morning, candles everywhere. How aware are you of this David? Because I got really into it.
David: 28:17
You are such a trend follower. It's unbelievable.
Ellie: 28:21
It is. It is obscene. Like it's shocking that I don't already have five Le Creuset pots. Um, although you're pretty trendy too sometimes.
David: 28:30
So I- I know about it. I did not get into it, but I guess I don't- I don't get the hype around hygge. Is it just being cozy in your home?
Ellie: 28:40
So this New Yorker article that I mentioned, which is a few years old now, talks about how this art of hygge might seem neutral, right? We're taking- uh, talks about how this art of hygge might seem neutral, right? We're taking pleasure and gentleness, we're feeling soothed, but it also has a dark side, which is that it's super bougie. It comes from Scandinavia, which does not suffer from the kind of wealth inequalities that we have here, it's got a socialist infrastructure, right? And so there's something particular about the American co-optation of hygge that makes it accessible only to people who have a comfortable home, where they can buy their candles and they can have their fancy lattes. But one through line between the Scandinavian version and the American version is that it tends to really reject any kind of conflict. Hygge is anti-tension. The dark side of Huga is that it can actually be used as a tool for propping up existing social structures, especially white supremacy, right? Like calling people on their racist bullshit, on their microaggressions, is the opposite of huga. What does that say about this ideal? It's not chill. It's bad vibes. Good vibes only.
David: 29:57
Yeah, there was that term hygge racism, which is- it's this notion that because you want to be cool and cozy, you don't disturb the social worker.
Ellie: 30:08
And there's a way that also this sheltering in the home, this idea of home as our sort of space of domesticity away from the harsh world, is also easily wrapped up into the narrative of a kind of self-enclosed nationalism. And so one of the things that came up in this article was this idea that Danish culture might be multi-ethnic, but it's not multicultural, right. It's very hegemonic. And so is there this hegemony that carries over in American co-optation of hygge, is there this idea that "Oh, we just all need to accept the status quo and retreat into our homes and be cozy?"
David: 30:42
Yeah, there is- there's certainly a risk of an apoliticization. You get this sense that only people who are chill with what's happening around them are hygge. And so, let's say that I am a person of color in Denmark, and I'm just going about my day and I meet people, and somebody says something offensive. I- I wonder whether they would justify that along the lines of hygge, like, "Oh, it's just fun and we're being cozy." I'm usually very suspicious of seemingly apolitical concepts that only pick up or primarily pick up with a white audience, I will always have a raised eyebrow about that.
Ellie: 31:24
And I mean, I- I do think the image of homemaking in the U.S. Is definitely not necessarily white. I think there's a huge cadre, for instance, of black interior decor influencers on Instagram, many of whom I follow and I'm influenced by, and I'm thinking too about, you know, the aesthetics of shows like Insecure where Issa Rae and the other characters on this show really do have exactly the kind of aesthetic we're talking about-- this beautiful plant filled aesthetic. I think it would be very misleading to say that the image of millennial homemaking is white, but I do think you're definitely right that the image of hygge is white, right. And, and that has to do with not only superficial reasons of it coming from Denmark, but also for some of these deeper reasons.
David: 32:05
Yeah, like, I- I don't see what, the force of it is beyond an expression of upper middle-class or just middle-class Danish comfort, and I mean, I just wonder, if I were to Google hygge and then go to images, whether I will ever see a non-white person as the sort of face of hygge, even though, of course, we know there are a lot of middle-Eastern and North African s in Denmark. And so given what we know also over the last couple of years in Denmark about a number of political scandals involving politicians and racism, um, you know, I- I wonder hmmmm.
Ellie: 32:42
Well, and let me say that I'm looking at the Google search results for hygge and yeah, there is not any shade besides vanilla in sight.
David: 32:50
There is all kinds of white people in there.
Ellie: 32:52
Yeah, for sure. And I think too, something that comes up in discussions of hygge, is the way that it originates in Danish society's cold climate. And so when you find yourself in a climate that has really harsh conditions where it's dark for a lot of the year, you are likely to want to retreat into the home. And so that's, you know, a slightly different point from this idea of the monoculture, the hegemony that we have, in Danish culture, a little bit more innocuous, this idea about the harsh climate. But I do think there's a way that the importance of your home is tied both to the literal weather conditions and the metaphorical cultural conditions around you. And this is perhaps less pertinent for Denmark, cause I don't know as much about it there, as it is for the U.S. So I'm reminded of something that feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes in her 1903 book, The Home: Its Work and Influence. She talks there, before launching into an amazing feminist diatribe about the cult of domesticity and it's associated with femininity, that there's a strong connection between bad climates and the love of home. So if you live in a temperate, lovely climate, you're more likely to find life out in the streets, in plazas, in cafes, but where it's damp, dark, rainy, snowy, then you find people gathering around the hearth and talking about the hearth or the fireside as a virtue.
David: 34:14
Hmm. Interesting.
Ellie: 34:16
Yeah, now the U.S. has all kinds of different climates, so we can't talk literally about climate, but I'm wondering if there's a connection to me made with the rise of hygge as a value starting precisely in 2016.
David: 34:29
When what, it was colder?
Ellie: 34:30
When Trump was elected!
David: 34:33
Oh, oh, I see you went for the metaphorical interpretation case, rather than the literal.
Ellie: 34:39
Oh no, talking about metaphorically here, right? Is there a way that American culture, because of the increasing openness of cultural hostility among groups, is encouraging a retreat into the homes for those people who can afford that kind of retreat, which are the people who are going to buy into the hygge lifestyle.
David: 34:55
Yes, exactly. So I wonder for whom that kind of retreat is even a possibility. This is where I wonder whether there is a white face behind every cup of tea that's associated with hygge, because when you have the rise of something like Trumpism in 2016, you know, Brown and Black people, and indigenous people, we experienced that retreat into the home not as a time to be cozy, but like, "Oh my gosh, I need to find some moment of safety."
Ellie: 35:26
Yeah. I mean, so do you think that the idea of hygge can be used in any positive way, can it be a kind of hometactic as Ortega discusses it, or if we're talking about the specific kinds of homemaking that Black people and people of color are doing in the US, are we talking about something that actually is not hygge and it's a different and more radical version of a hometactic?
David: 35:48
I'd like the second version. And it's because I don't really understand what hygge is as a non-Danish person. So I only feel these sort of like flags going off left and right, but maybe it's such a culturally specific phenomenon that our notion of cozy doesn't quite capture. And so I just feel a little bit, both at a loss for words to talk about it, and at a loss of interest as well.
Ellie: 36:14
Yeah, I do think if we're going to take something from the concept of hygge, it's the idea that it often involves belonging. So like I said, I mean, you can be hygge by yourself, but hygge is often about being with family, friends, with a close knit community. And so this idea of taking refuge from a world that has all of these structures of oppression and finding space for a micro-community within the home, I think is actually quite radical and something that lot of Black self-care activists talk about. But yeah, I guess the question is whether that's hygge or not, and it sounds like, David, you're like, nah, next.
David: 36:52
Uh, yeah, maybe that's where I fall, but I think there could be ways to convince me to move a little bit closer. I'm just not hygge about it, you know? Like I'm just like, being like, man, hygge sucks. Um, no, but if we think about it in that way, I think you're right that there is revolutionary potential to forming alliances, to forming bonds with other people that make you feel at home, and I think that's, for example, what Ortega, is trying to get us to do.
Ellie: 37:27
So David we've talked about a variety of homemaking practices, but we haven't yet covered what might be the most important: plants. Why are millennials obsessed with plants?
David: 37:38
Yes, plants! Obsession is the key word here, because I think there is an almost psychic identification that happens between millennials and our beloved plants. So, you know, I already mentioned the fact that I love and adore my Hawaiian tea plant, and my partner too, has plants that he talks to and identifies with, and I assume Ellie, that you're not very far behind on this botanical neurosis.
Ellie: 38:05
Totally. I'm super into my houseplant growers group on Facebook. Love that place, you can get good tips. Sometimes you will just share their plants for fun. And I have a lot of plants myself, and I really take pride in taking care of them.
David: 38:18
And so what is it about plants? I want to hear what you have to say about this, because I feel like I'm very close also to my plant that I talked about, where there was this question when I moved away from the US of who is good enough to take care of my plant? Who can I-
Ellie: 38:33
Yeah,
David: 38:33
trust?
Ellie: 38:34
Literally, while we've been recording a friend texted me with a picture of his dead plant and it just made me so sad because we've been like trying to revive this thing.
David: 38:44
Was that his response to your text, "u up?" Just a dead plant.
Ellie: 38:51
It was completely out of nowhere, this is a picture of a dead plant. Yeah. So I definitely would associate the rise in an interest in plants with a couple of things. So for one, we said earlier that millennials tend to live in cities, 88% of us live in big cities. And so there's a way that we want to bring nature inside because we don't have access to outdoor spaces of our own. And we're often caught in sort of urban jungles. Another thing is, I think a lot of us, because we're delaying traditional markers of family life. If we're having them at all-
David: 39:22
We're all barren anyways.
Ellie: 39:24
Um, yeah, we're not having kids. And oftentimes we're not even having pets because of the itinerant nature of our lifestyles
David: 39:30
Our apartments don't actually allow us to have pets, you know?
Ellie: 39:34
Oh, touch, touch. So I think plants are a way for us to cultivate and nurture something, right? How that side of our personalities show up without the commitment of a child or a pet.
David: 39:45
Yeah. And there's this whole obsession amongst baby boomers, trying to understand millennials, like, "Millennials are not buying napkins, what's that about?" " Killing the Q-tip industry, what's that about?" You know, like, yeah. Just like, yeah, just like-
Ellie: 40:00
Because we figured out you don't actually have to put Q-tips in your ears. It's like bad for your ear wax.
David: 40:05
Anything that millennials are not buying that boomers are used to buying suddenly becomes this window into the millennial soul, uh, but there are all these articles online in places like The Economist or like Business Insider, where people are trying to figure out who millennials are so they can better target us as consumers. And one of these interviews trends around our obsession with plants. "Why are they so obsessed with plants? They don't even get the ones that give you vegetables. They're not even flowers that you can pick!" Sometimes almost what strikes me as a pathologization of millennials where it's like, "Oh, millennials. They don't really understand that they will eventually want kids, so they're using this as a replacement!" Almost as if we're really in a state of arrested development, and, uh, eventually we will come to see the truth of what is desirable and then we will get married and have kids and buy a white picket-fence house.
Ellie: 41:02
Uh, no, we've just like read people who critique these markers of the American dream.
David: 41:08
Well, and we want to live downtown. We don't want to live in your suburbs, right? That's why 88% of us live in cities, because we don't want to live in places that are away from bars, from restaurants, from social life, from political organizing, et cetera. It, for many of us, and I don't think this is a universal, um, but what worries me is that in some of these discussions about the millennial infatuation with plants, it's the sense that we're using them to replace children. And I get it, I get why they might think that. I think that sometimes we do a performance of that like, "Oh my little baby, my plant, who's going to take care of that." You're like, I even spoke about my friend. Uh, Francisco as alloparenting my Hawaiian purple tea plant. So I got it, but it seems to me a superficial interpretation.
Ellie: 41:57
Yeah.
David: 41:59
I don't really think we think of plants as our children.
Ellie: 42:02
Definitely not.
David: 42:03
And the appeal therefore has to be somewhere else. And I think there is something about the meditative nature of spending time with plants that is important here. Um, this kind of communing with nature, having a moment of inner peace, breaking away from worries about your job, about your neighborhood, about the state of the world that is appealing to a lot of millennials and, you know, Stanford Health has called millennials "The Wellness Generation-"
Ellie: 42:33
Yeah.
David: 42:34
as we've come to realize that certain small practices, some of these hometactics, to use that term from Ortega, it's not just that they're political, it's that they're actually making us live better. They increase our quality of life, right? Like being around plants feels good and attending to them feels good.
Ellie: 42:54
Yeah, and I like the way you put it. I think you're right about this kind of beautiful aspect of our relationships with plants that we have. I'm a little bit more cynical in the sense that millennial's passion for plants revolves around a specific few plants. It's not just plants, it's that we need to have the Instagrammable plants, the right plants. And so there's this quality of conformity there and this desire to be just having the right aesthetic that's part of it, right? You have to have the Monstera, you have to have a Pothos, maybe a Calathea, and they're- oh, oh, come on, I'm forgetting the queen of them all, Fiddle-Leaf Fig Tree, right? You have to have a fiddly thing. Okay. So I am the trend follower here. We all have the exact same plants. So it's a status symbol. We have the right plants, we want show off that we have the right plants, that we're of a certain class. And luckily it's kind of a low bar, right? Because a lot of these plants only cost like 30 bucks, but it still is a class marker, nonetheless.
David: 43:56
Yeah, but I cannot help but think of millennials with our plants, as engaging in a practice of meditation in the act of thinking about this. And it reminds me of the philosophy of Epicurus, a Hellenistic philosopher, whose interpretation of the good life basically was like, you should just hang out in the garden with your friends. That's was his philosophy that he preached.
Ellie: 44:20
The-
David: 44:20
In- in the- yeah. In the third century BC. There is this sense that, at least in Epicurious writings, that being in a small group, with friends, giving up fame and fortune, and groupies, which of course come to philosophers all the time.
Ellie: 44:40
Back in the day they did, when philosophers were cool, like in Epicurus' time.
David: 44:44
He just had a small garden and his- his philosophy was: detach yourself from all these other markers of success. His interpretation of the good life was the Greek notion of ataraxia, which is just peace of mind. And so if you want to know what the good life is, all you have to do is tend to the small pleasures, the intellectual pleasures, that bring you moments of tranquility, and that's what your way of life should be. And in this way, I think of him as like the millennial philosopher.
Ellie: 45:15
I hadn't thought about him in those terms, but he's always appealed to me quite a lot, and I find my students really are taken with Epicurus too. One thing that's interesting here, to think about, is that the word Epicurean, as it's used in English, does connote these sensual pleasures in a way that I think can be taken in two different senses. So on the one hand, you might associate an Epicurean lifestyle with a $200 bottle of wine that you're drinking in a chateau in the French countryside with foie gras, right? But that is a misinterpretation of Epicurus because as you said, he is really trying to vaunt this lifestyle of removal from focus on external markers of success. And so, yeah, it is right that Epicurus is all about pleasure, he is about taking joy and pleasure in what you experience, but that doesn't necessarily need to be found only in the finer things in life. It can also be found in, you know, the $8 bottle of Trader Joe's wine that you're drinking or in your knockoff Le Creuset, cause you can't afford the real thing.
David: 46:17
The drink that he advocated that all his followers drink was just water because of the simplicity. He said, you should drink water and you can add a little bit of wine occasionally, but the point, again, is to move away from those pleasures associated with class and with status. And I've taught Epicurus also in the past and my students love, uh, some of the details about his life. Like, you know, he was one of the first philosophers to let women into his, as his followers, as philosophers, um, as well as slaves. And he also was super iffy about marriage. He says at some point, "A wise person does not marry and does not have children."
Ellie: 46:55
So Epicurus is the millennial minimalist philosopher that we all need.
David: 47:00
like, 2300 years ago. I think that's right. Except that, I think a strict reading of Epicureanism might actually terrify a lot of millennials, like a lot of our pleasures, a lot of our Libertine pleasures, like we do want the fancy wine, we do want the fancy cocktail, we want our avocado toast, Epicurus would be like, "No, I really mean detach yourself."
Ellie: 47:25
Really? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean, in fact, I think one of the interesting things about Epicurus is that his philosophy is much closer to Stoicism than is ordinarily thought. They're sort of opposed in our common way of thinking about it, because stoicism is about removing yourself even from pleasure and Epicurus thinks that the meaning of life is pleasure, but the meaning of life being pleasure for Epicurus is actually much more ascetic than we would usually think about it, so it does align more with what we would think of as actually Stoicism.
David: 47:53
Yes. And I do read them as very similar. And one of the main differences for me is precisely that the Epicureans have as their model, of the space that you should inhabit, the garden. That's something that you don't really find in the Stoic tradition, and so this attending to nature, being with nature, and growing things as part of your meditative practice,
Ellie: 48:16
Yeah.
David: 48:18
unique to the Epicureans. And that's why I thought about Epicurus in the context of talking about, plants and, homemaking.
Ellie: 48:26
Definitely, because the gardening is a more sustainable source of pleasure than a lot of the things we would usually associate with pleasure. And so even though Epicurus is about pleasure as the highest goal of life, the problem with some of what we would consider the finer things in life is that they lead to pain, right? They lead to pain in your wallet. They lead to pain because the foie gras is over, and it's done with. Not to mention, you know, some environmental and animal concerns there. And so the pleasures that are going to be sustainable pleasures are not the pleasures that cause a spike in dopamine. They're the pleasures that are quiet. They're meditative, as you said.
David: 49:03
Yeah. And they bring peace of mind. They bring atraxia, uh, they quell your desire. They quiet your desire. And it's because Epicurus ultimately has a hierarchy of pleasures where some of the base pleasures actually take, um, the backseat in connection to intellectual pleasures.
Ellie: 49:21
Yeah. So let's all become Epicureans!
David: 49:25
Yes. And that means that we can put a little wine in the water. And hang out with women, in the garden, and upset social order, and don't marry, and don't have children.
Ellie: 49:41
I think we're already doing pretty well in a lot of those David, I have to go water my plant. Okay, talk soon.
David: 49:45
Okay.
Ellie: 49:47
We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
David: 49:55
You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice at DearOverthink@gmail.com.
Ellie: 50:03
You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.
David: 50:16
Thanks so much for joining us today!