Aren’t big item furniture supposed to be used and last for at least a lifetime?

I always have the notion that big furniture like beds, sofa, dining table, chairs, and desks and their likes should be kept and used for a lifetime if not passing them down to offsprings. To be precise, I will need to exclude beds; unless they were made of rare types of wood, they would be discarded right away, even before the deceased were buried. 

Whenever I saw floating  pieces of old-fashioned traditional bed in the pond of my village, I could bet that some old people in the village just died. And, I was right always, because within a few days, I could hear the sound of gongs and cries from a funeral procession. Thus, the notion that one should use one’s bed for a whole life time was deeply rooted in my mind.

Flipping forward 45 years, one day, when I got bored, I watched a Google Talk by Cait Flanders, a best seller author of  the book < The Year of Less>.  She mentioned that her spending less allowed her to save enough to get  a new bed because her old bed had been with her for more than ten years.  I thought to myself, “should we change our furniture like bed after some years, not a lifetime?”

After living in the US nearly three decades, i thought I have caught up with most Americans: I have a closet full of clothing, an entryway lined with shoes, a house with three bedrooms and a three-car garage.  It is good that I still have some old believes stuck with me. For one, furniture , especially beds, should be used  and lasted for a long long time if not a lifetime.

So when I heard from an author who advocates “shopping less” that she felt the urge to replace her bed just because it had been with her for over 10 years, I was somewhat taken aback. Thinking a bit further, then I realized I should not be surprised. There were overflown discarded furniture in the alleyway back in my house when I lived near a university starting in May, when students graduate and move away; and again in July and August, when new students coming in, there were overflown packaging boxes that once were full of furniture from Ikea or Amazon.    In affluent societies, the time that furniture treated as durable goods were long gone.

Just like fast fashion, furniture were built to last for one or at most a few seasons. And, they are treated that way.  This new species of furniture has spread to the village where I grew up; perhaps I should update my notion about furniture and disassociate them from lifetime durable goods.

When I was a student, the furniture I used were passdowns or picked from a dumpster.  After graduation, I bought my first standard set of bedroom furniture: a queen-sized bed frame, a night stand, a dresser with a mirror.  Other than the bed, I didn’t find much use of the other three pieces, given that almost all bedrooms in the US have closet, and bathrooms with a mirror. They have been with me for 16 years, I am not planning to part with them yet despite they have moved with me for six times and have bruised here and there.