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Comment by juggertao | Hacker News Reader

The current advice is when you buy something to already think about the resale value of the item.

So this excludes all colors for everything. Black, white, gray everything.

I think luxury goods, and the privilege of living within your means, is to be able to buy goods and instantly depreciate them.

I buy electronics equipment, computers, furniture, clothes, and cars with the mindset I will be the last owner of them, and they will have no resale value.

“I bought this, and I will assume it’s instantly worthless”

It keeps me from buying the same thing twice and causes me to save up for the thing I really want, and keep it for as long as possible. It also lets me be picky about my preferences and really scope out exactly what I want on a relaxed timeframe.

Perhaps it’s a side effect of growing up with hand me downs, and knowing anything our family owned was one step to junk, but it does keep spending in check now that I am doing okay in my career.

I don’t know about that, gray in houses exudes a feel of cheapness. If I see gray and especially gray vinyl it screams budget build and corner cutting. If one looks at rental housing, like half of them have gray floors and those ones are always cheaply renovated.

Call it capitalism, call it competition, call it an optimization process or w/e but this is a common phenomenon. Whenever you have people trying to maximize some value they'll copy the strategy they view as most successful and other factors take a back seat.

Maximizing the resale value of a home involves making it appeal to the largest number of people. Adding character risks lowering demand by appealing to niche markets. So you end up with lots of white and grey.

You see similar things all over the place. Want to maximize your career? Better suppress your individuality in favor of copying how successful people speak, act, and dress.

If you've ever heard the term "TikTok Beat" that's a similar phenomenon where the most popular music on TikTok gets copied like a meme by wannabe famous music producers.

It's a process that ends up with bland results as variety is reduced over time. It's also dehumanizing as humanity is slowly stripped away due to inefficiency.

To piggyback off of this with a call-to-action against the realities you point out, I think it's absolutely valuable and worth it to go after the aesthetic things that you like even for subjective reasons, and even if prevailing trends say otherwise, at the expense of falling outside the confines of conformity for the sake of pseudo-safety.

Safety in numbers is a thing, but when it comes to art & design & aesthetics, it utterly kills courage, and things are done out of fear of rejection or disapproval, which makes the end product feel bland, uninspired, forgettable, and will be dated in a few years. Might as well just explore what is interesting to you and not worry about public reception. But then that's tied into many other things like fear of rejection, fear of sticking out, fear of failure, etc., that may need to be unearthed and explored in oneself – which is utterly worthwhile and necessary to do, and by staving it off you only do yourself and others a massive disservice and continue to operate in fear.

But yeah I'm making blanket statements that needs context, etc.

I don't think this is the only issue.

People have always copied each other throughout history. In the past before the industrial age it was much more difficult though as you had to use local materials and labor. Now we have global corporations and many of them are near monopolies in many industries. Add to this that making a billion of one thing massively drops the costs over something you make a million of, so you're far more apt to see the billion item unit on cost factors alone.

Also we see lots of wildly different looking products when looking back at the past, but this is likely a lot of survivorship bias. Because they were different people kept them and tossed the common thing without regard.

Lastly, I'd add in a question of how things are financed. If you're asking for a huge pile of money to make a product, it's going to be a lot easier to get it when you choose the safe and proven option then one that is riskier.

There is also the question of new mass media.

I would hazard a guess and say if you look at AirBnB throughout major cities in the world, the aesthetic will largely be the same. Trends existed before but were often adapted to local taste, yet now everywhere has the same overpriced coffee shop with rustic wood/metal tables and edison bulbs.

There's also a boiling the frog element.

I see it as an “iphonification” of industrial design and architecture. White cars became trendy in the early 2010s, after the white iPhone 4. Every item that wants to be perceived as a quality one is targeting that minimalistic, uncluttered, quirk-free look.

Beige computer cases with lots of details falling out of the way for black boxes, and then black boxes with LEDs, will always be the bane of my aesthetic existence.

I hate beige but miss it for computers.

On espresso-colored desks, great, but if your office doesn't have the color scheme of a vampire bordello, black cases and monitors are ugly as hell. Aside from SOCs and law offices, it's so conspicuous it's not really a good fit anywhere.

My desks at work and home are both light wood and thanks to all the black boxes and black cables everywhere, even with cable management my desk surface forever looks like two Minecraft squids tentacle-raping each other on the deck of a ship.

I'm not really sure that's the issue... Even by 2000 color car popularity had began its drop with silver and black with the growing market. White did gain a lot of popularity then, but a lot of this was recovery from what it had lost in the early 90s.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car...

>You see similar things all over the place.

It's called society. If most people didn't follow other people (or demand it!) we would not have societies at all. We'd be individualistic animals, or at best small tribes.

>It's also dehumanizing

You're completely wrong. People copying and following the path of others is one of the reasons we've dominated earth. Only a very small portion of us are risk takers that make new trends that others follow.

Humans are messy and sub-optimal. Optimization processes will always favor robotic adherence to optimal characteristics which means, unless constrained, our humanity is on the chopping block.

There’s a reason phrases like “worker bee” have become common, it’s because people feel like they’re expected to be drones at work instead of humans.

I make a show of disrespecting people who follow that advice instead of buying what makes them happy.

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