Instagram is Making Me Buy Too Many Cushions

A good home is a balance between aesthetics, and comfort & practicality – probably leaning a bit more to the comfort and practicality side.

I grew up absorbing- inadvertently- firm notions of patterned bed linen and dark coloured sofas to hide spills and stains. We had limited art work on the wall to avoid holes and cracked plaster, and used shelves as storage for books, cosmetics, toys. 

It makes sense – have your dustbin accessible in the kitchen, all your toiletries within reach and sight in the bathroom, use your bedside table for things you need at night – a book, your glasses, laptop charger, a coaster for your glass of water if you’re OCD like me. Your bed would have two (or maybe four if you’re really lavish) pillows, definitely no more than one quilt because that’s what you use at night. You’ll probably keep your coffee table in the living room empty because you want to be able to pull it close to the sofa so you can put your feet up – you might have a couple of cushions on the sofa for extra back support.

Yep – makes sense.

And then came Instagram.

It starts innocently – oh how pretty, how lovely, so CUTE!

Is it a bit made up? Yeah.

Artificial in a way, like heavily edited photographs, but then isn’t that just another form of art?

You need an eye for flat lays, you need to be able to create pastel memorabilia in a half arc, figure out which books look good with what kind of jewellery and almost always sprinkle a few flower petals in the corner...

And suddenly, homes become stylized works of art that you can take photographs of and hang on your own imperfect wall in your own imperfect house.  

And there are so many of them! The bohemian homes with their idiosyncratic cluttered charm, the minimalistic apartments with clean sleek lines and limited modern furniture, a solitary pale blue vase with a white flower on the spotless dining table – you have your colourful cottages with bright pops of pink and yellow lamps and rugs, you have your pastel townhouses where pale blue and aqua reign supreme.

Kitchens with no crumbs, counters without coffee spills, never a dirty dish in the sink.  Floors with no hairballs, no dust on the sills, the beds are always made or in some rare cases fashionably tousled just so to invite cute messiness.

I walk into my home and it really doesn’t look like that – there are stains on the walls, the fridge always has smudgy marks on the handle, cobwebs appear in all corners magically in just one night, my kitchen floor is never clean for more than two hours and my espresso has the powdery white stains of limescale.  Our bed is always unmade because we’re plopped on it. The worst part is, I want my house to look like the stylized perfect homes of Instagram. 

We all know social media is just a fragment of reality, and especially in the case of Instagram, often an artificially, meticulously constructed reality.  The problem arises when these are the only fragments we see and when we are in persistent, consistent contact with it. 

When we’re scrolling sleepily at 1:30 am, when our morning starts with us holding the phone awkwardly in one hand and simultaneously checking our various newsfeeds while trying not to hit our nose with the phone, when we click our gadgets open unconsciously because we have two minutes to kill on the bus or are waiting for the kettle to boil, when we start to panic because we forgot our mobile at home or the charge is about to run out, when we are browsing even in the toilet... Definitely a problem of our time.  

And this constant, semi-conscious stimulation and absorption of online content obviously has an effect on our mind.  Like so many things in our environment, the majority impact is subconscious and inadvertent.  We’re getting socialised without us realising it and so, the stains on my wall, the crumbs on the counter, the little gaps in the wooden flooring, the oily oven, it all bothers me more than it should. 

The imperfections of life, the essential, inevitable imperfections of reality, become a nuisance, something to be straightened, cleaned, arranged (especially if you already have OCD tendencies!).

And it all happens in spite of my brain scoffing and trying to be attentive as I tap on hearts and flick through images of pretty homes and travelling couples.

White bed linen?

Pale gray sofas?

Do children never visit your home and is your partner really that careful with his/her plate of spaghetti? If you have fifteen cushions on the couch then how does your bum fit on it? Do you use that lovely faux fur blanket on your bed or do you use the ironed plain gray duvet? Do you toss the four differently sized matching pillows on your bed to the floor every night and then put them back on in the morning just because they look good? Is your side-table just a careful arrangement of 3 items that you don’t really use when in bed (a small potted plant, four colour-coordinated books and a sweet framed photograph)? Do you always arrange your strawberries and nuts in your bowl before breakfast and if yes, do you not have a job you’re rushing to get to? Why would you arrange your books in a pile just to put a plant on it – would it not damage the books? And would it not be difficult to pick one out because you have to lift the plant every time you want to read?

I can see the balance tip towards aesthetics, and comfort & practicality being swept into corners and under expensive rugs.

Uh-oh. 

Should we be concerned?

As a good friend of mine put it, “Most of life is offline”.  Perhaps we need to put our phones down and our feet up, shove the plants to a few corners and cut down on the cushion purchases?