You might be thinking what have closets got to do with moral decay? That's what I wanna talk about today. I'm here to try and convince you that our closets in our modern homes are a symbol of our moral decay and a harbinger of the end of our civilization. Hi and welcome to the Les Perras podcast episode number 365. Today I want to talk about closets.
There was a time when houses didn't have closets. If you walked into the room, you saw four walls. There weren't doors in the walls. And in some cases if there was a door in the wall it went to another room. Things were simple and houses were small. If you wanted to store things you need to have boxes, or a chest of drawers, or a wardrobe, and these were for people with money.
At least in North America in the 1800s they started building bedrooms with a recessed hole in the wall that was covered by some kind of door. At the beginning they were quite small. An example might be 30 cm deep and 60 to 80 cm wide. The doors on these closets looked like the wall, except you could see the edge of the door, and there was a handle, a simple door knob on it.
They started to make closets with more formal doors. The door had a bit of a design, and it was easy to identify and easy to open. The closet itself was bigger and it could store more things. Now it was becoming a standard place to your clothing in a closet.
In North America in the 1950s or so closets started becoming even larger to the point of becoming walk-in closets. This is a small sub room of the bedroom. You open the door and you can walk into the closet and it probably has a light in there. This reflected the growing prosperity in North America after World War II. And this signals the beginning of my concern about our civilization. Prosperity is all fine and dandy. I like it. Everybody likes it. The problem is we can't resist it. The temptation is too great and we start accumulating too much stuff.
Part of it might be keeping up with the Joneses. We see other people around us, and they have things, and we want those things too. It could be a symbol of status, or more worryingly a symbol of how we use shopping to regulate our moods. I think of how often people buy things that they don't need just to make themselves feel good about consuming.
I often hear people say they wanna go back to the simple life. Yet I don't see them going back to the simple life. Maybe they romanticised a siimple life but they don't really want the harsh reality of living simply. Living simply means living with less. I think there's a lot of good things about living with less, your life is much easier. Our modern closets are a symbol of our inability to control our appetites. They show us how decadent we have become and decadence leads to decay and corruption. If your closet is full of things, I strongly suggest you try to get rid of some of those things. You'll feel a lot better. Thanks for listening.