The article is from the 09/2022 issue of A&B
As Bill Bryson points out in his book "At Home," the concept of comfort or convenience, to use a term of Latin origin, which we find in various derived versions in European languages, is relatively recent.
It was originally associated with comforting (English: to comfort someone) the afflicted, especially widows and orphans. It was not without reason that, until the end of the 20th century, massage devices, such as those sold by the jolly cousin in Hrabal's "Posthumous," were called "widow comforters."
Comfort in the context of our surroundings, especially our home environment, supposedly appeared only with the end of the 18th century, when comfort began to be combined with respite. No wonder: most of us rest in an environment that positively affects many senses at once. From the ergonomics of the position we remain in, to temperature, air movement, sound and smell, and usually touch. After all, it's hard to relax in even the most comfortable chair in front of a window with the most beautiful view possible, when the room is flooded with umpa-umpa from a beach bar, and the irritating smell of sewage is coming from the bathroom. Such a "mix" of sensations is often offered even in not bad hotels on the Mediterranean, where builders seem not to believe in the necessity of venting sewage risers, effectively destroying the efforts of hoteliers who, after all, want to provide guests with the best conditions for relaxation. In a word, comfort is a peculiar package consisting of a series of interacting comforts hitting all our senses.
However, man (Mrs., Mr., me) is a perverse creature. On the one hand, he gets easily accustomed to successive levels of comfort, like a princess on a pea, to whom the presumably helpful hands of courtiers slipped successive pillows and feathers. On the other hand, he adapts with more or less ease to his surroundings, which sometimes impose on him various restrictions that affect the impression of discomfort. Moreover, the price of this adjustment is not always complaints and a sense of unhappiness. How so, readers will ask, after all, all our lives we have been fighting for higher social status and higher wages precisely in order to live more comfortably. To make our homes and our cars, not to mention jets, as big as possible. That more and better things would be on our plates and in our glasses. So that we would continue to fly on vacation in better class, and therefore in a wider and more comfortable seat upholstered with better fabric encasing better upholstery sponge. Because comfort is not only scale, but also quality! And the latter is the space of sublimation on which luxury goods manufacturers spin their margins, and which allows us to retrain ourselves in the types of wines, cigars, technical details of our car, our household appliances and our terribly smart home. And, in turn, this re-training is, after all, education, yes, culture, because, after all, a mere ignoramus won't buy a proper painting in Des or appreciate Danish classic wooden furniture from the 1960s.
And it's true! Even those who don't have a chance to have their own yacht (at least a 40-foot, full-sea yacht with a decent sundeck), or a Fangor (preferably from 1961-1970, before the Guggenheim exhibition), sublimate, making up for their lack of money with education and cleverness. You don't need a yacht, all you need is a sailing patent and the drop of a group of tried-and-true bachelors to cruise together on a rented yacht. Instead of Fangor's op-art circle (after all, anyone with dailies can have it), we can have unique batik landscapes from Gabriela Prokop or an exlibris from Maurycy Gomulicki. Cornflower pattern clothes from Marimekko too expensive? No problem: thanks to sleepless nights with the green glow of a smartphone on our faces, we know that price-wearable Uniqlo and Adidas have beautiful leggings, dresses and blouses created in collaboration with the iconic Finnish brand for a quarter of the price. Only you have to hurry, because they are going down fast. Are we too thin for fine wine? Go ahead: Jerónimo Martins has thought of us too, providing quality Portuguese delicacies in its chain of stores. Cigars too expensive? Ha, we read abbreviated medical research reports that clearly state that one must lack the instinct for self-preservation to smoke tobacco, even if it was rolled on the thigh of a friendly Cuban matron. In this way, not only do we further educate ourselves by studying the Internet and analyzing labels, but we also tighten our social contacts, as we learn about a profile on Amazon, where one can find the ends of a series of textiles from such a Marimekko, from a group formed by familiar mothers on Whatsapp. And so on.
Clever beasts we are! So we settle our nests, juggling between affordability and aesthetic requirements, or functional as to necessities and anecdotal/artistic additions. This is measured by flexibility in choices and tolerance of not-quite-ideal solutions, as well as criticism in the reception of consumption patterns offered by advertising. Because we know that we will not be doomed to live forever with a scabby Lack table, nor that our apartment or house will be our abodes forever. We can change things, replace things, tweak things. Smaller inconveniences we will get used to, bigger ones motivate us to make future changes and reach new levels of creativity. We follow the same rules when it comes to commuting ("Milk has the fastest transportation"), our children's extracurricular activities, hobbies and vacations. With pushing the boundary of convenience, we stand still for several years, or slowly push it, as brave representatives of the middle class who have no illusion of becoming Jeff Bezos in this life, but know that they will manage to climb a few more rungs before....
Well, just before what? Before our health sours, even though we have the couch of our dreams and avoid cigars? Here's where an interesting theme emerges: my impression is that the rapid or slow escalation in seeking and achieving the next rung of comfort doesn't have to last forever. And it's not because some cataclysmic event (virus, war, economic crisis, relationship breakdown) will hit us, or as a result of consumer pressure we will crack and start drinking ourselves to death. Well, interestingly enough, for a variety of reasons, we may suddenly find that temporarily or for a longer period of time we can live less comfortably, and, moreover, this will not mean a sense of loss in the race for a better (read: more comfortable) tomorrow. Why? Because our needs, and by extension our very definition of convenience and attachment to it in general, change both ways. This is especially true when we are fortunate enough to make our own limiting or life-changing choices about our surroundings and lifestyle. Often, however, it turns out that we, extremely flexible animals, find satisfaction and new comfort in a situation where it is life that has imposed restrictions on us, depriving us of our previous comforts.
Here's the first example, on a small scale: taking a too-small tent out of the compartment at Decathlon (while I was buying there), a few days later I condemned myself to sleeping outdoors so that my partner and two sons could sleep in said tent. And what did it turn out? A: I wasn't eaten by bugs and, to say the least, I survived; B: it was very pleasant to live outdoors, even with a slight morning drizzle; C: I had never slept like that in my life; D: my partner got a good night's sleep, too, because the snoring partner slept at a sufficient distance from her tent... Conclusion: Jakub Szczęsny "experienced" the comfort of a Latvian campsite, sleeping on a 50-by-190-centimeter carrimat for two zlotys, admittedly in a good quality sleeping bag and with a beautiful view of the treetops.
Example two, on a larger scale and more dramatic: after Russia's aggression against Ukraine, I met four Ukrainian ladies, aged 75, 45, 15 and 7, respectively. A grandmother, mother and two daughters. As part of a nationwide spurt of solidarity, I provided them with a 38-square-meter apartment, in Warsaw's Saska Kepa district, next to my own apartment. Before the war, my mother lived with her husband and daughters in an eighty-square-meter new apartment in the Kiev equivalent of Tarchomin, and my grandmother in a sixty-square-meter apartment in the center. The women saw each other infrequently, and the lonely life of the semi-retired grandmother was causing premature symptoms of dementia. The mother worked like crazy, as did her husband, to make a decent living, pedaling, as we also pedal, toward the Western notion of a better life. After those few months in Poland, I asked this mother, there a co-owner of a production house shooting commercials, here a producer of business TV shows, how she was coping with the inconvenience of living with four of us on 38 meters. After all, despite the renovation of the bathroom and the insertion of new furniture, such a situation can hardly be called comfortable. And here our Ukrainian neighbor surprised me. "But we are quite comfortable!" she replied and began to enumerate. The children got into good schools, including the younger daughter to a nearby elementary school, where she immediately gained a circle of classmates, including neighbors from the floor above. Thanks to our help, the grandmother got a job in a position analogous to the one she held at the Kyiv National Library, only that it was at the National Library in Warsaw. She herself walks to work, and when it rains she takes one bus just a few stops. Saska Kępa was designed so that the entire infrastructure is within walking distance: from stores to the clinic and post office. "Well, ok, I don't have a dacha here on the Dnieper River, but I have a stone's throw to a playground and pubs on the Vistula River," he said. Adding to the list was praise for the efficient public transportation system, and new social relationships, which she had practically none of in Kiev, because everyone worked like crazy there. "I no longer remembered what it meant to go to a pastry shop for donuts, because I had my day spread out every quarter of an hour," she said.
And here's where an interesting theme emerges: a sense of convenience is relative. Some things may work worse, like sleeping four people in 38 square meters, but are compensated for by others, like living in a cool neighborhood, not having to spend hours in acar, like green manicured public spaces, a lower-paying but much less responsible job, and (still) not bad public schools that mean you don't necessarily have to "nastarate" to pay for private schools. As Matt Kaminski, a journalist at Politico, who moved from New York to Brussels with his wife and children, told me: "Suddenly we found that to have a comfortable life, we didn't have to work as much or earn as much as we did in NYC. That's what a good quality of life is all about!" The feeling of comfort is fundamentally individual, and therefore unpredictable: we never know what will be considered a point that builds it up, what will be ignored, and what will become a downside that is difficult to tolerate. I will consider the purchase of a designer stool made of air-pumped steel a luxury nonsense, because it is impossible to sit on it, and someone else will say that it is great, because the coldness of the seat and its bulges are less important than beauty and prestige, because, after all, just any chump can't afford this stool!
It would seem that the algorithms of comfort and how it feels can be traced, classified, and turned into guidelines to more easily target people with specific services and goods. Things, however, turn out to be more difficult than they may seem, because comfort is the sum of sensory sensations, physical limitations due to the health of individuals, taste, habits, psychological practices (displacement, acceptance) and, finally, culture. Even such optimized patents as the modern kitchen or the TV recliner (an angle-changing chair for watching TV and snoozing) may prove uncomfortable for someone. And that's a good thing. Why? Because it means there will always be work for architects, interior designers, landscape architects, designers, service designers and all those who, like me, are stuck somewhere in between, or on the edge of the logic of repetition and extreme individualization created and tailored to specific users. In a word, neither AI, nor digital mechanization, nor the massification of products will make us the victims of commodification. We will always be different to some degree, even if marketing departments or politicians, especially those "wearing only two right shoes" (to quote the lyrics of a song by the group Pid¿ama Porno), decide that it would be easier and better to want the same things and live the same way.
In a word: let's enjoy this otherness!
