The thing is, the need for large expansive homes have substantially evaporated in younger generations as technology advances.
The desire for a massive home as a well off (not wealthy, but above peasant) person was due to:
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Needing somewhere to store all your necessary shit, your tools of your trade, etc etc.
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Needing somewhere for your servant(s) to live, because they took care of the house for you
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Somewhere to store all your books and other pleasantries
However, our servants are now tiny little robots that dont need to eat or sleep, they dont need an entire bedroom and seat at the table.
The entire knowledge of all of humanity no longer requires a library of alexandria, but instead can fit in your pocket.
Many folks have all the tools of their trade able to fit in a small laptop bag at most.
When you can largely fit all your requirements of modern life in a single cardboard box, as opposed to needing several rooms, the desire for a mansion dwindles. Entire kitchens have been replaced with a single microwave and a hotplate.
Meals that used to take an entire day and a whole kitchen staff to prepare, now take a single person hitting an on button.
We have VR, laptops, netflix, the entire internet, etc etc all at our fingertips.
And most importantly, we have cars and whatnot. A trip to the store is no longer a “wake up at 6 in the morning to get the horses saddled and hitched, then three hour ride into town, get back home just before sunset” affair.
It’s now “hop in the car and drive over to the store in 10 minutes”
And unlike horses, a car doesnt need a whole ass stable and stablehand. It can just… sit there lol
So yeah, its perfectly reasonable for us to slowly revert back to small life, everything we could possibly need to live life can fit in an extremely small square footage now, theres literally no need to have a giant mansion, it’s largely pointless.
I wish houses weren’t required by law to have a lawn. I could save so much space if I didn’t have one and all the junk to take care of it.
This thread blows my mind.
You’d prefer to just be boxed in with people all around you and concrete everywhere? That’s what developers would do if they weren’t required by law to give you space. Pack them into smaller spaces and get more money!
I’m mostly unhappy with front yards. Basically no one in my area uses them for anything. They’re just money and time sinks you have to put up with for very little benefit. I’m totally ok with having a backyard because it actually gets used.
You could look into lawn alternatives. Here the rules are no weeds and vegetation can’t be over 6 inches unless it is intentionally cultivated. So I have native plants in garden beds around my house that take up roughly 50% of the yard, and the “lawn” portion is mostly native groundcovers that are unlikely to reach above 6 inches. I rarely have to do anything to it since it’s mostly native. We go out there maybe once a month to mow the little grass that’s left (which we’re phasing out as natives spread) and pull weeds.
It was a little more work up front to make beds and plant natives, but we did it the lazy way, starting out small and expanding over the years as natives grew and spread. We did temporary borders of cardboard with rocks on top to smother grass and expand out as needed.
Is this astroturfing?
Of course I want more space! small rooms with a small number of rooms is claustrophobic and cluttered. I need space for me and all my shit!
The point is, you almost definitely have way less shit on your property, than a middle or upper class family would have in the 1800s.
You probably dont have a whole ass horse stable, and separate living quarters for your stable hand, yes? And all the “stuff” that would be involved in maintaining that horse stable, and all the stuff that the stablehand would own for their own life, right?
And you likely dont have servants, and a cook, right? And all their stuff and their living quarters?
And your computer can hold an entire library worth of books on it, an entire blockbuster worth of VHS tapes in movies, etc etc?
And you probably dont have dozens and dozens of boxes of photographs in storage, right? All of that now can fit in your pocket in a single USB stick.
No matter what your trade or craft is, even ones that involve working with your hands, its extremely likely someone 200 years ago would have required like twice as much stuff to do it. Our tools have become smaller, compact, multi-use, storable, foldable, digital, etc etc.
We’ve gone from giant machines that took up entire rooms, to extremely powerful ones that take up a fraction of the space.
Think about something as simple as just printing off some pamphlets, do you know how much stuff was involved in that process 200 years ago?
Now, you can mass produce pamphlets with just your phone or a laptop and an inkjet printer.
I would say there certainly are a small handful of hobbies and skills that have not had much change in terms of downsizing. Weightlifting / exercise, for example, is largely functionally the same. Steel is still steel and you cant really “downsize” the fact you have a certain density, and you simply just have to live with that. People have tried to come up with countless fancy ways to downsize weightlifting but at the end of the day, a barbell is a barbell.
Sewing also hasn’t changed dramatically in terms of scale either. Modern sewing machines arent that much different in size. Sure they have gotten a little bit more power in a bit smaller shape but, if you look up sewing machines from 200 years ago they, well, sorta still look the exact same not gonna lie.
But overall, most of the day to day living is just a LOT smaller and simpler. A small electric hand vacuum can do the work one handed in a few minutes that would have taken ages before. Microwaves cook food at extraordinary speeds that someone from a hundred years ago would absolutely consider borderline magic.
Servants? Stables? How rich do you think the average person is?!
I absolutely have more space and more things easily manufactured compared to a peasant with a shit ass job, even from just 100 years ago, have you seen how small the average persons house is? There’s houses around me built in the 1800s and I can barely stand up or fit a modern couch in them. They didn’t have kitchens they had a fire and a pot in the lounge.
You seem to be talking about peoples work tools, which would be at work, not in their house.
In most towns and cities, grocery store should be within walkable distance to allow people to get what they need for the next day or two, removing the necessity for large pantries or food storage rooms. Also getting benefits of eating healthier and fresher.
Also this, yeah, as farming scales and technology enables farmers to be able to manage larger and larger swathes of land with less and less labor involved, more and more people congregate in central hubs, major cities, etc, which means more and more people are within walking distance of all the needs.
