When I worked at Refinery29, one of our top-performing video series was a home tour show called Sweet Digs. The series mirrors the format of MTV’s Cribs, except instead of multimillion-dollar Hollywood mansions, it's 400-square-foot apartments in New York, and instead of celebrity homeowners, it's women in their 20s (usually working in media or fashion) paying more in rent than most people would deem reasonable.
During the particular era of digital media when Sweet Digs launched, the most valuable videos were the ones that you could produce at the speed and scale needed to game the Facebook algorithm. Which is to say, the ones that generated views and engagement at a pace blistering enough to quickly pay off its own production costs in ad revenue - and hopefully then some. Sweet Digs is all of these things: cheap, quick, and relatively easy to produce given R29’s employee network of young, camera-ready women. The comments section of each video is a blueprint of the show’s success — each one a museum of the kind primary-color emotions that make a video go viral: delight to jealousy, irritation to outright ire.
People watch Sweet Digs for the voyeurism, but also, apparently, to affirm—and often explicitly express—something about themselves. Many of the comments are of the generic judgmental variety (“Bathroom beside the kitchen...that's interesting”), others are sexist gripes about how a particular woman presented herself (“Vocal fry annoys me to no end. Speak or do not speak. There is no try.”) Occasionally there are genuine reflections on gentrification or the deranged economics of living in a city like New York (“People like you calling that ‘a steal’ is the reason I can’t afford rent”). But mostly, the comments show people's intense desire to be seen and envied for their lives, for their cheaper rents, or greater number of bedrooms, or big back yards, or peaceful vistas.
The comments reveal the kind of deep cultural and economic divide that has been invoked over and over again since the 2016 election between so-called coastal elites and everyone else. “So did you go to Applebee’s or Chili’s on a Friday night?” one urban-dweller responds to a woman who shares that she pays $425 in rent for a four-bedroom two-bathroom house.“But she also lives in Manhattan…obviously far superior to the Midwest,” another commenter says. “Arguably superior 😒” the Midwesterner retorts, “Careful, your snob is showing.” Two people can pay the same in monthly rent, but one derides the other for not valuing her cosmopolitan ideals, while the other balks at the choice to prioritize those ideals at the expense of her material conditions. The country-dweller posts a photo of her gorgeous wooden home just to show so.
What possesses someone to share a photo of their house in the comments section of a Facebook video home tour? The built-in rewards system of social media is one part of it; the more you share, the more validation you get. But a part of it is also specific to a generation’s relationship with money, and in particular, a generation of women’s relationship with money. For the New Yorker, Carrie Battan wrote about the comments section of another confessional-style R29 series in an article titled, "Money Diaries, Where Millennial Women Go to Judge One Another’s Spending Habits.” She sees the chorus of moralizing commenters as an example of millennial women’s anxiety created by the brackish waters of cultural 'liberation' and economic oppression:
"Millennial women have experienced a minor cultural revolution and a major economic panic within their young life spans. We’re now, in theory, encouraged to dress how we please, sleep with whomever we want, choose to have children or not, wear makeup or go barefaced, demand raises and take maternity leave, and speak out about sexual harassment and assault. At the same time, we are products of the Great Recession, instilled with deep-seated financial panic and also acutely attuned to notions of privilege. Money—the “last taboo facing modern working women,” as Refinery29 puts it, and a locus of profound pressure and anxiety—may be the last arena in which we’re allowed to judge one another openly."
These anxieties also exist in the comments section of Sweet Digs, but instead of women commenting on the weekly expenditure logs of Money Diaries, their scrutiny focuses on the image of the dream home.
In just a couple of minutes spent browsing titles on Netflix, you can find more than a half dozen shows centered on the pursuit of finding and creating your dream home: Dream Home Makeover, The World’s Most Extraordinary Homes, Amazing Interiors, The Home Edit with Reese Witherspoon, Million Dollar Beach House, Tiny House Nation, Grand Designs.
Importantly, the fantasy of the homes in these shows is that they often look like no one has lived in them, except for, maybe, an artisanal bundle of cooking utensils or the medium-format photography books opened gracefully on a coffee table. In the bathroom, there are a few sparse sprigs of eucalyptus but not a product in sight. Even in the shows where the house is just one part of the larger life-improvement plan, like in Queer Eye, the house makeover ‘reveal’ must be shown before the friends and family arrive. After the makeover is celebrated and life begins again, the mid-century modern glass table will be smudged and the West Elm cushions flattened like sad pancakes.
In her essay, “Inside Out, Or Interior Space” Rebecca Solnit writes about the godmother of all lifestyle influencers, Martha Stewart, who popularized and made beautiful the idea that the labor of maintaining a home is to akin leisure. “Stewart’s greatest contribution was to make the setting of the stage into the drama itself...In Stewart’s world, the bride is always getting dressed, the hostess is always setting the table for guests who have not yet arrived.”
The dream home precedes any signs of life, it cleanses us of the messiness of bodies and relationships and the mundanities involved in the business of actually living. A slate wiped clean, the dream home’s visual power sets the stage for the better, cleaner, more satisfying life we hope to live. Solnit writes, “Thus the hankering for houses is often a desire for life, and the fervency with which we pursue them is the hope that everything will be all right, that we will be loved, that we will not be alone, that we will stop quarreling or needing to run away, that our lives will be measured, gracious, ordered, coherent, safe. Houses are vessels of desire, but so much of that desire is not for the physical artifact itself.”
The American obsession with homeownership always underpinned the worship of dream homes, but the pandemic has crystallized the image of home through more sustained pressures. Our homes are now sites of romantic and familial achievements, culinary panache, physical fitness, and professional success. As we sit in front of our laptop’s camera all day, we concern ourselves with how we present our interior space as a matter of self-expression, more than with how we might place the desk in order to get a better look at the view outside our window.
Living in quarantine under the spell of Instagram has made me aware of all the ways I can be at home better. See: 'eco-friendly’ metal straws for iced coffee that will both protect my teeth from staining and save the oceans. Also: 5-lb weights to be stored alongside my yoga mat for at-home workouts that will save me money and time in pursuit of a better body. The perpetual project of self-optimization that Jia Tolentino writes about in her book “Trick Mirror" is now possible without stepping outside the front door. I have invested in plush slippers, a portable keyboard, a laptop stand, more aesthetically-pleasing coasters to prevent ring stains, sweatpants that don’t look like sweatpants but are comfortable like sweatpants so that when I sit in front of my laptop for hours at a time, half-reclining, like a gremlin covered in blankets, these pants might somehow flatter me? Solnit could have predicted. “It often seems that the house is an extension of the female body and the car, the male body, for thus go the finicky and exacting arenas of self-improvement, the space that represents the eroticized self.” The task of constant self-improvement was always a lonely one, but now is made all the more lonely by the fact that you don’t even need to go to an overpriced group barre class to do it.
The real-estate and design site Curbed has a Money Diaries-like column called, My Week in Zillow Saves, a clever meta-content-construction in which you, the reader, oggle at people oggling at homes they don’t own or live in, but dream about. It’s a nesting doll of voyeurism and desire, which stands to reason it will do very well on social media. My former colleague at Refinery29, Angela Lashbrook wrote about millennials’ obsession with Zillow, describing the escapist role real-estate apps provide a cohort of young people less likely to own homes compared with previous generations at their age:
“In the face of economic instability and personal financial insecurity, what are the things that most young people still have control over? What we click on. What we look at. What we daydream about. And so Zillow or Instagram step in, where fantasies about more stable lives are more possible than actually achieving them.”
Of course, the great affordability crisis is not just a story about millennials. Pre-pandemic, even when the economy was in good standing by all formal metrics (low unemployment, healthy stock market, rising wages) low-and-middle-income Americans could barely afford the conventional staples of a stable life due to spiraling student debt, mounting hospital bills, and surging housing costs. A study from George Washington University found that in 2018, more than a third of American households could not afford to cover the cost of a midsize budget shock like a hospital bill or car repair within a month.
That type of economic fragility will pale in comparison to the freefall already in motion from this recession. There are families today whose only buffer from imminent homelessness hinges on the government’s politicized decision to renew unemployment benefits, which will expire on Christmas Day, or not. Among the 12 million jobless Americans, some may be forced to leave their homes, sell their belongings, or take out loans designed to newly crush them as we ring in a new year.
One of the worst parts of the pandemic is its individualizing force. Public policy experts expound on the importance of personal responsibility and we retreat to our homes and busy ourselves with the work of living better. Solnit’s writing on the dismantling of social welfare programs during the Reagan era is prescient: “The people sleeping under cardboard in doorways and the people having a more expansive master suite built shared a common fate not in material goods but in the atomization, of one against the world.”
As this devastation unfolds, we watch shows about dream houses; how to find them, how to decorate them. We condescend each other’s homes and financial decisions in the comments section of a Facebook video just to show that we can. In a cultural moment governed by the nebulous but powerful idea of ‘lifestyle’ and an economic environment that makes its achievement utterly out of reach, to share an image of a house that’s yours, at least for now, maybe feels like something close to power.
🌙 Some Bookmarks
*Millennials Love Zillow Because They’ll Never Own a Home
*The Great Modern Affordability Crisis Breaking America
*What is Lifestyle? A stunning (independently produced) multimedia project on the roots of "lifestyle" and its contemporary contents
*How Dakota Johnson’s House Built a Queer Cult Following (come for the home tour, stay for the parody TikToks)
*My wonderful friend Mira made a playlist in the spirit of my last newsletter, Hope In The Age of Cynicism and it’s so good)
* A Family Cookbook A delicious new project from my fellow Tufts Observer alum Sahar Roodehchi sharing recipes from friends and family and all their associated delights
*Resources for people interested in volunteering in Georgia’s Senate races (& some more)