Peeling back the protective blue film from a brand-new stainless steel dishwasher feels like a small birth, or perhaps a very expensive skinning. I am standing in Emily’s kitchen, and the air smells of freshly sawn plywood and that specific, sharp chemical tang of high-end sealant. Emily is glowing. She has spent $47,001 on this renovation, a figure she mentions with a mix of pride and a slight, frantic twitch in her left eyelid. She calls her style ‘modern organic,’ a term she likely harvested from a magazine that exists primarily to sell overpriced candles to people who are afraid of the color red.

There is a peculiar grief in the democratization of taste. As a hospice volunteer coordinator, my days are spent in the company of the dying, people who have reached the end of their 81 or 91 years and have very little interest in the ‘correct’ shade of brass for a kitchen faucet. They talk about the way the light hit a specific tree in 1961, or the weight of a hand. They don’t talk about their backsplashes. Yet, when I step out of that world and into the world of the living, I find us all obsessed with the curation of the mundane. We are terrified of making a mistake, so we outsource our souls to the algorithm.

I spent my morning matching socks-all 41 pairs of them finally finding their mates after a month of being lost in the dryer’s liminal space-and I realized that we treat our homes like those socks. We want them to match. We want them to fit into the pair. We are terrified of the lone, neon-patterned sock that doesn’t belong.

Emily points to her pendant lights. They are black domes with gold interiors. They are ‘industrial-chic.’ They are also everywhere. I want to ask her if she actually likes them, or if she simply recognized them. Recognition is often mistaken for preference in the 21st century. We see a thing 101 times on a screen, and the 102nd time we see it in a store, our brain fires a hit of dopamine because the unfamiliar has become familiar. We think we are choosing, but we are actually just consenting to the inevitable.

Individual expression through mass-market products is a logical impossibility. You cannot buy your way into being unique if the catalog you’re buying from has a circulation of 11 million people. The industry is built on this paradox. It promises us a ‘bespoke’ life while manufacturing the components on an assembly line that hasn’t changed its settings in 21 months. We are all living in a giant, beautiful, neutral-toned dollhouse, and we are paying a premium for the privilege of not standing out.

I find myself looking at the corners of the room. In my line of work, the corners are where the dust of a life settles. Here, in this $47,001 temple of the ‘now,’ there is no dust. There is no history. There is just the relentless pressure of the trend. Emily tells me about the ‘resale value,’ which is the most tragic phrase in the English language when applied to a home. It means we are designing our most intimate spaces for a hypothetical stranger who might buy the house 11 years from now. We are squatters in our own lives, keeping the seats clean for the next person.

I once knew a man in hospice who had a kitchen painted the color of a bruised plum. It was hideous by any objective design standard. The floor was a checked linoleum that had seen 51 years of spilled soup and 11 different dogs. But that kitchen felt like a hug. It felt like him. He didn’t care about the ‘shaker-style’ cabinet trend because he was too busy living in the space to worry about how it looked to a camera lens.

We have lost the ability to be ugly. And in losing the ability to be ugly, we have lost the ability to be real. We choose materials that are easy to clean but hard to love. We choose colors that won’t offend anyone, including ourselves. We have become experts at the aesthetic of the ‘void.’

That’s where the rebellion starts. It starts in the fabrication. It starts in the choice to let a material be what it is, rather than what the trend demands it to be. If you’re going to spend 21 months planning a renovation, why spend it recreating a showroom?

I realize I’m being a bit of a hypocrite. My own kitchen is perfectly fine, and by fine, I mean it is inoffensive. I have 11 cookbooks I never use and a set of canisters that I bought because they were on sale, not because they spoke to my soul. I am just as susceptible to the siren song of the ‘perfect’ home as Emily is. I matched my socks today because I wanted order in a world that feels increasingly chaotic. We renovate our kitchens for the same reason. We can’t fix the world, but we can certainly fix the grout.

But maybe the order we’re seeking shouldn’t be so sterile.

Emily is talking about the ‘flow’ of the room now. She uses her hands to trace invisible lines in the air. I see the fatigue in her eyes. She’s been through 171 decisions in the last week alone-knobs, pulls, hinges, switch plates. It’s a form of decision fatigue that leaves people hollow. By the time they get to the finish line, they don’t even care if they like the result; they’re just glad the contractors are gone.

In my work with the dying, I’ve noticed that the things they regret are rarely the things they didn’t buy. They regret the things they didn’t say. They regret the risks they didn’t take. Nobody on their deathbed says, ‘I wish I had gone with the waterfall edge on the island.’ They might, however, say, ‘I wish I hadn’t spent 601 hours worrying about what the neighbors thought of my backsplash.’

I watch Emily pour a glass of water from her $1,001 touch-activated faucet. It’s a marvel of engineering. It’s also completely unnecessary. But it makes her feel like she has control over her environment. And in a way, I suppose that’s what the $47,001 really buys. It’s not the cabinets or the stone or the appliances. It’s the temporary illusion that we have mastered our surroundings.

I leave Emily’s house and walk to my car. The sun is setting, casting a long, 11-foot shadow across the pavement. I think about the 41 pairs of socks sitting in my drawer, perfectly matched and perfectly boring. Tomorrow, I think I’ll go to the store and buy the loudest, ugliest pair of socks I can find. I’ll buy the ones with the neon green stripes or the tiny printed tacos.

I want to live in a world where things are allowed to be weird again. I want to walk into a kitchen and not know exactly where the homeowner bought the toaster. I want to see a countertop that looks like it was chosen because it reminded someone of a beach they visited in 1991, not because it was the top-rated choice on a design blog.

We are all so busy trying to be ‘timeless’ that we have forgotten how to be ‘timely.’ We are building shrines to a future that will only find our choices dated in 21 years anyway. So why not be dated now? Why not be loud? Why not be the person who chooses the bruised plum paint or the stone with the ‘ugly’ iron stain?

Emily’s kitchen is beautiful, truly. But as I drive away, I can’t help but feel that she’s missing something. She has the $47,001 kitchen, but she doesn’t have a story to tell about it. She only has a receipt. And in the end, when we’re all just 91-year-old souls waiting for the light to change, the stories are the only things that will have any resale value at all.

Why are we so afraid of our own fingerprints? We spend a lifetime polishing them off the stainless steel, never realizing that the fingerprints are the only proof we were ever there.