holy shit i’m not complaining about people who can’t afford furniture and throw blankets, everyone is broke right now. this is me specifically complaining about minimalism as a mindset. teenagers in the early 2000s were broke and we still knew to use:
cheap fandom posters from walmart or whatever
shit we (or our friends) doodled, taped to the fucking wall
literal pages torn out of magazines, like i said in my tags
corkboard & collages & random photos we liked
decals & stickers, glow-in-the-dark stars, $7 fairy lights
blankets/tapestries/scarves nailed to the wall (this is iffy bc cultural appropriation, but some of the designs were chill)
“art prints” aka illustrated pages cut out from books (i defaced a few library books in my time for this purpose, sorry)
tiny fucking cacti with those stupid straw flowers glued on
photos of your favorite boy band printed off the school printer, i literally don’t care
vinyl records. we literally taped our parents old records to the wall. anything to avoid blank space.
hats. we got nail/adhesive clips and used our walls as a fucking hat rack. we should NOT have been wearing that many fedoras but damn they made nice decor
i don’t care if it looks cheap or whatever, add some COLOR to your space. the minimalist aesthetic of the 2010s has fucking infected us to the point if we can’t afford fancy shit, we just leave space empty, rather than heaven forbid fill it with affordable fun stuff we like.
21st century decorating is basically 19th cent British cuisine–once the lower classes could afford spices (aka the culinary equivalent of color & razzmatazz), the upper/middle classes stopped using them. better be bland and tasteless than be *shudders* accessible to the masses.
minimalism is fucking boring. TAPE STUFF TO WALLS AGAIN