How not to buy a couch
In which I release half-read bits of psychology into the ether.
This week I’m brutally jet-lagged. It’s the second morning of waking up in Washington, DC at 3am and bouncing off walls. I’m at the start of a three-week trip, the first of several this year (but the only one involving planes).
From next week, newsletters will cover highlights from the previous week’s adventures. In this week’s newsletter, I reflect on a “why do brains work like this” mystery, or what I call small mammal problems.
Moving house - or country, or continent - is full of unexpected surprises. With each move, new habits, good and bad, appear, seemingly out of nowhere. Old routines that had once seemed unbreakable vanish. Some habit changes may be at once baffling and consequential.
Once upon a time, I had cleaned the house every week, almost without thinking and certainly without using much will power. So why is it that the very thought of the vacuum-cleaner now makes me feel anxious and even ashamed?
Other cleaning activities still happen, albeit not with thoroughness and regularity of the BeforeYears. So where the hell did hooverphobia come from, and what could I do about it?
Sometimes the thing you’re not doing isn’t the reason you’re not doing it. It turns out that if a room is too crowded with furniture, it can put you off vacuuming (who knew?!). Vacuuming is what I call a decision-magnifier - a task that forces you to reckon with past decisions. In this case, the vacuum made me reckon with choices I had made about what to vacuum around.
I should never have bought the nearly-new couch from the former owner of my apartment. Indeed, when I viewed the apartment, my first thought after “hey, this place could work!” was “that couch? Not in a million years.” The thing was mind-blowingly boring in shape and colour.
But it was one of those corner couches with a chaise longue along one side. Thanks to the corner couch in the apartment I was renting at the time, I had recently decided that these seats were fun and comfortable. Or so I thought.
Without getting into couch physics, let’s just say that every dimension of the second-hand couch I was about to buy was wrong for me in a way that the seemingly same style of couch in the rental apartment was not. So why did I buy it?!
The process of buying an apartment had triggered a season of daily avalanches of decisions. Some were less scary than others, but decision fatigue was real. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman proposed that, when faced with a difficult question, the brain sometimes chooses to answer a different, easier one.
I happened to re-start reading this book in December 2022. This was just after I had decided (three years after buying it) that I could no longer stand to live with this couch. The mountain of pandemic books required bookcase space. This uncomfortable, personality-less couch was one reason they were tottering stacks on the dining table.
Suddenly, everything seemed clear. I remembered why I had bought this couch in the first place. Not because I loved it or needed a couch in a hurry. But because it was easy.
In fall 2019, I had had visions of throwing regular dinner parties, a tradition that had fallen by the wayside during a series of moves. A couch that could seat lots of people had seemed like a good idea, even though it would take up more space.
But couches cost an arm and a leg unless one bought a a Klippan from Ikea - a (for me) terrific, albeit small couch I had enjoyed in the past before giving it away at the start of an era of wandering. “Not Ikea” seemed symbolic: a new start.
Couches were also a delivery nightmare, sometimes even requiring machines to bring them in through windows. Moreover, the former owner of my soon-to-be new apartment, who I met in said apartment after the deal went through, was very nice. He and his partner had invited me over for coffee and to measure up furniture to see what I might wish to buy. Not buying his couch suddenly seemed… very rude.
The affordability of a second-hand yet enormous couch (how many people could come and visit at once!) seemed compelling (weeks before COVID - HAHAHA cue mirthless laughter). And the couch was already there. And I was consuming so much already buying an apartment that the largest item being second-hand (in addition to my own stuff coming out of storage) felt environmentally sound.
So the question I answered when I bought this couch was not “do I love or even like this couch?” I did not consider that I was able-bodied enough to sit on a large cushion on the floor, or on a dining chair at the table - all of which I currently owned - indefinitely, and thus had no need of a couch in a hurry (if ever…).
The subconscious question I had answered was: “how can I tick COUCH off the to-do list?” That question seemed easier to answer than whether or not I’d found the right couch.
In the end, I didn’t even answer the easy question correctly. I was going to have to do the couch errand all over again, and this time, to sell or donate the old, too-large couch as well as choosing a new couch and having it delivered, with or without the dreaded motorized external lift to defenestrate the two-part behemoth.
I now possess another Klippan couch from Ikea, this time in a fabulous pale blue denim. The couch is even more comfortable than I remembered - hands down the most comfy couch ever - and quite beautiful. (The Klippan I had owned in the past was cream - pleasant but quiet, unlike its owner).
The second-hand giganto-couch is ALSO still in the house, since I’m only partway through task of finding it a new owner (getting round to advertising it would help). But, amazingly, since I can now sit on something cute and super-comfortable, and since I also bought and filled new (second-hand, delightful) bookcases, there is so much else to look at in the room that the giganto-couch has become relatively invisible.
Did I take away any notes-to-self from this continuing saga?
Don’t furnish a house around dinner parties: furnish it for the person who has to live in it all year and hoover around what you buy.
What I really need to live are bookcases, a desk and chair, and kitchen equipment. And maybe a small bed and smaller dining table. And only then might I buy the tiniest, comfiest couch I can afford. And then keep it all forever.
Thanks for reading until the end! From next week, this newsletter returns to its usual medley format of art, books, history, and culture. For a more typical newsletter and an essay on small mammal problems, click here. New readers might also enjoy the archive going back to the start of this newsletter in November 2022.
You can also find me on www.surekhadavies.org,
BlueSky (@drsurekhadavies.bsky.social),
and Instagram/Threads (@surekhadavies).