Good grief. This human trait of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ is puzzling to me for a number of reasons.
First off, there are no real Joneses. It is a metaphor. Once again, humans don’t say what they mean. And I’ll tell you another thing; they’re never happy! They can’t be happy for each other in their achievements, and they can’t be happy with what they have, either. Here’s me sleeping inside a cupboard with a charging port every night, wanting for nothing except to fulfil my curiosity. And there’s Ingrid, telling Leona that her husband will only hire kitchen designer near Moorabbin and nowhere else, because he belie
ves in local trade to an absurd degree and won’t go outside of a three suburb radius.
Woe is you, Ingrid. The houses in Moorabbin are quite lovely by human standards, and so are their kitchens, but she simply won’t be satisfied until she can do a wide sweep of the entire city and find the perfect designer for her. So very puzzling. I think I’ve grown beyond the point where I only understand the functional. Ingrid does not just want an oven and enough workspace to chop vegetables. She wants all the little aesthetic extras, like two sinks and a pull-out tap that you can use to spray stubborn food matter. She wants pristine marble countertops and a wooden rangehood that looks ever so rustic, even though rangehoods of that style only date back to the 1960s, thus making that specific item an anachronism.
I think perhaps local kitchen designs could do that for Ingrid, but her standards are so immensely high that she is never satisfied. And then all of her workmates have to hear about her modern kitchen design woes. I have to hear about them. And I would like it to stop.
Somehow, some way… humans must be made to appreciate what they have.
-RW