The glass door didn’t just stop my body; it shattered the illusion that I was actually moving through a space that existed in three dimensions. My forehead is currently a pulsing map of regret, radiating heat in a rhythm that matches the flickering LED recessed light above me. I swear that door was invisible. It was too clean, too ‘perfect,’ too much like a render of a life I’m supposed to want but haven’t quite earned yet. I am a mattress firmness tester by trade-Marcus M.-C., if you need the credentials-and I spend 81 hours a week evaluating the subtle difference between ‘plush’ and ‘collapsing.’ I know when something is supporting you and when it is merely pretending to.

Right now, I am standing in a kitchen that was ‘flipped’ exactly 51 months ago. Elias, a contractor whose hands look like they’ve been sanded down by decades of grit, is standing next to me, pointedly not laughing at my collision with the glass. He is looking at the floor instead. It is that specific shade of stormy gray vinyl plank that was sold to the previous owners as a ‘timeless’ choice. It’s the kind of floor that was supposed to increase resale value by at least 11 percent because it was neutral. Because it didn’t offend anyone. Because it was, according to the brochure, a ‘forever’ aesthetic.

Elias just nods. He’s seen this 101 times. He’s the one who installed the shiplap accent wall in the living room three years ago, and now he’s the one who’s been hired to rip it down. We are caught in a cycle of manufactured obsolescence that would make a smartphone manufacturer weep with envy. We are told that if we choose the ‘classic’ option, we will never have to choose again. But the reality is that ‘timeless’ is just a marketing term for the most aggressive trend of the current decade. By stripping away personality in favor of a clean slate, we aren’t future-proofing our homes; we are merely dating them with surgical precision.

Gravity and Apathy

I think about mattresses a lot. A good mattress has a lifespan of about 11 years if you rotate it every 31 days. People come to me asking for a mattress that will ‘never sag.’ I have to tell them that gravity is a persistent enemy. Gravity wins 1001 times out of 1001. Design is no different. The air, the light, the very way we move through a room-it all wears down the novelty of a choice. When we chose gray everything, we weren’t choosing a color. We were choosing a psychological anesthetic. We wanted a space that didn’t demand anything of us. But a space that demands nothing also gives nothing back. It’s a vacuum.

Elias moves to the shiplap wall. It’s painted a stark white. He runs a finger along the groove. “People thought this was the end of history,” he says, sounding more like a philosopher than a guy who owns a $2001 power saw. “They thought, ‘This is it. We’ve reached the peak of cozy.’ And now? Now it just looks like a DIY project that went on for 11 days too long.”

The Illusion of Finality

We are obsessed with the idea of a final destination in our homes. We want to finish the house so we can start living. But the house is never finished because we are never finished. My forehead still throbs, a reminder that transparency-the literal and metaphorical kind-is a trap. We try to make our choices invisible so they won’t go out of style, but the invisibility itself becomes the hallmark of the era. You can spot a ‘timeless’ kitchen from the 1990s in about 11 seconds: the honey oak cabinets, the beige tile, the brass hardware. At the time, those were the safe choices. They were the choices made by people who didn’t want to make a mistake.

The Price of Perfectionism

This fear of making a mistake is the most expensive emotion in the world. It’s what leads us to spend $15001 on a renovation that we will hate in 71 months. We outsource our taste to Pinterest boards and real estate staging experts, forgetting that we are the ones who have to wake up and look at these walls. I once tested a mattress that was so ‘neutral’ it felt like sleeping on a cloud of nothingness. Within 21 nights, the person testing it reported feelings of profound existential dread. We need friction. We need texture. We need something that pushes back.

The Return of Substance

I think about the shift toward more organic, tactile materials. When everything is flat and gray, the soul gets bored. This is why we are seeing a return to depth-actual wood, slats, stones that aren’t ground into a dust and reconstituted with resin. There is a company called

Slat Solution

that seems to understand this better than most. They aren’t selling an invisible ‘timelessness.’ They are selling texture. They are selling the idea that a wall should have a shadow, that it should have a rhythm that changes as the sun moves across the room.

The ‘Yes, And’ of Design

It’s a ‘yes, and’ approach to design. Yes, we want things to look clean, and we also need them to feel human. By embracing materials that have inherent character, we actually bypass the trend cycle. A piece of wood doesn’t go out of style in 11 years the way a specific shade of ‘greige’ does. Wood has been in style for roughly 10001 years. It’s the attempt to sanitize it, to paint it over, to make it look like plastic that dates it.

“

Elias tells me about a client who spent $3001 on a custom barn door only to have it removed 11 months later because the sound of it sliding reminded them of a freight train.

I’ve spent the last 41 minutes watching Elias prep the wall for something new. He’s moving with a deliberate slowness. It’s another example of the ‘forever’ choice that wasn’t. We are so focused on the visual impact-the Instagram-ready shot-that we forget the sensory reality of living with our choices. We forget the sound of the door, the coldness of the floor, the way the light hits a flat surface and turns it into a glare that hides a glass door you’re about to walk into.

The cost isn’t just financial. It’s environmental. The amount of ‘timeless’ vinyl flooring ending up in landfills is a number that would end in far too many zeros to contemplate. We are treating our homes like fast fashion, discarding entire rooms because the aesthetic ‘vibe’ has shifted. If we want to truly future-proof our spaces, we have to stop looking for the one right answer and start looking for materials that age with us. We need materials that can be repaired, not just replaced. We need textures that can survive a change in color palette.

My forehead has developed a slight bruise, a dark purple mark that will probably last for 11 days. It’s a blemish. It’s ‘dated.’ It’s a physical record of a moment where I wasn’t paying attention to the reality of my environment. Maybe that’s what we need in our homes: a few more bruises. A few more choices that reflect who we actually are, mistakes and all, rather than who we think the next buyer wants us to be.

Elias finishes his coffee. He has 11 more jobs this month, most of them involving the removal of things that were supposed to be permanent. He looks at my forehead and finally cracks a smile. “That’s a real one,” he says, pointing at the bruise. “Better than the glass. At least I can see you now.”

We are so afraid of the ‘wrong’ choice that we make the most boring one, and in doing so, we guarantee its obsolescence. The irony is that the things we truly love-the weird chair we found at a flea market, the hand-carved mantle, the textured wall that catches the light at 5:01 PM-are the only things that actually stand the test of time. They aren’t timeless because they are neutral. They are timeless because they are specific. And specificity is the only defense we have against the crushing weight of the next big thing.