> because almost no one had the money to decorate intentionally

Poor people always decorated and still do. There is basically no larger human culture where decorations dont take a place. The only ones I can think of are small religious orders that dont decorate to deprieve themselves.

You go to any poor area and see dirt, mess, issues and people showing off decorations in their houses or on themselves.

> Maybe, but really consumerism wasn’t a thing for most of history because almost no one had the money to decorate intentionally in the way we do today.

This reminds me of being a kid excitedly repeating the trope I’d just learned: “Back in your day it was nice because you didn’t need to lock your doors!”

To which she responded “Because none of us had anything worth stealing.”

A good depiction of the gritty realities and the meaning of material striving for the very poor in turn of the century farm life is the novel Independent People, by Halldor Laxness, an Icelandic nobel laureate.

My first exposure to this - tired of $40 particleboard bookshelves and tables, I went looking for solid wood furniture, reasoning it was fine to spend a little more for something that would last. I found it- and discovered humble, small tables were a months pay.

I don't want cheap crap, but I suddenly appreciated why we've moved away from tables that can support a car.

A lot of online culture laments the modern American life and blames the Boomers for all of our "woes".

The 1950s - 2000s post war boom was a tailwind very few countries get to experience. It's funny how we look back at it as the norm, because that's not what the rest of the world experienced.

There's a reason everything in America was super sized for so long.

Things have averaged out a bit now, but if you look at the trendline, we're still doing remarkably well. The fact that our relatively small population supports the GDP it does is wild.

It depends; it feels like in some categories the premium between a material that's very suitable, and some ersatz lookalike is massive and depressing.

I love a good petrochemical, but sometimes it would be nice if the cheap thing store wasn't so callously targeting veneers and pleathers that last just long enough to loose the receipt.

You could also try HMS Victory in the UK or the Vasa in Sweden (other really old ships are available and some are still sailing).

You might also note that the inhabitants of Hawaii had to have got there somehow and its 2000 odd miles to what is now the US mainland and still quite a long way from anywhere else, eg Tahiti.

As far back as we have written records, we have the notion that people in past were better and more honest and the present day is corrupted.

Modern manufacturing and materials science let us create imitation materials at huge quantity and low cost that wasn’t possible before about the ‘50s-60s.

So you just used to use real materials out of necessity

It's just focusing on different things. Sure they had wood and metal tools, but they also had literal snake oil, watered stock, and people selling you the Brooklyn Bridge.

People don't learn history, and I'm not talking about the wars and battles BS that they use to glorify going to war. I mean real history: biographies of the lives of real and ordinary people. Not the history makers, the people that lived through and had the mind to record their lives for prosperity.

Case in point, this notion that the past as "more real" and the present "more fake"... the amount of fake doctors, fake medicine, religious revivals that were actually fleecing entire towns into destitution was out of control. The "wild west" it truly was, and the law was owning a gun because everyone was desperate.

It has a lot to do with the way our memories form and what memories our brains choose to construct from experiences.

The past was not more "real" than present day reality.

People forget the ways in which the past was fake. Fake butter, for example, was more common than real butter from the 1950s up until the early 2000s. But most people don't eat margarine anymore and so most people don't remember it.

I mean - to one extent, concretely in the aesthetic ways I’m talking it was technologically we just had simpler materials. Cars had knobs and levers instead of touchscreens.

Like, so much of what I do today happens online instead of the real world, so I do think you can describe ways in which life or the world really has gotten more “fake”.

Though some of this is funny too? I remember things from the say 50’s to the 80’w as being more “real” and that’s also the like rise of TV dinners and everything eaten out of a can, rather than “real” ingredients.

People focus too much on the new and not enough on the rest. Of course what's new is going to seem fake because it is. Nobody has figured it out yet. The rest never changed or has improved significantly.

Anyone older than about 30 who takes a few minutes to reflect on all the little details of daily life could probably come up with a surprisingly long list of annoying little inconveniences they no longer have to deal with. Beyond that we've had decades worth of casually raising the bar for what is considered common sense and polite. These are the "real" things we take for granted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_sack_dress

> Feed sack dresses, flour sack dresses, or feedsack dresses were a common article of clothing in rural US and Canadian communities from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century. They were made at home, usually by women, using the cotton sacks in which flour, sugar, animal feed, seeds, and other commodities were packaged, shipped, and sold. They became an iconic part of rural life from the 1920s through the Great Depression, World War II, and post-World War II years.

Good, Honest, Old-Fashioned Clothing was Consumerism, too, bucko.

> During World War II it was estimated that 3 million women and children in the United States were wearing feed sack clothing at any given point in time.[7][14] One participant in an oral history project stated that "everything on the clothesline was from feed sacks."[2] The US Department of Agriculture reported in 1951 that 75% of mothers living in urban areas and 97% of those living in rural areas had heard of making garments from feed sacks.[15]

Did Granny make clothes from scratch? Did she, Hell! She bought cloth from a Large Evil Corporation what with the Dark Satanic Mills and Finance Capitalism and she was mainly unhappy she couldn't spend more:

> There was an element of shame experienced by those dressed in flour sack clothing, as it was seen as a mark of poverty, so efforts were often made to hide the fact the clothing was made from feed sacks, such as soaking off logos, dying the fabric, or adding trim.

Our ancestors would be appalled at people wanting to go back to The Good Old Days. They fought and struggled mightily against what the Cottagecore Losers on their Laptops and iPods want.