Opinion: Downsizing, less is more, bigger is not always better: there’s a slew of euphemistic and smugly virtuous phrases for trying to trick humans – who are still hardwired for incipient famine – that a little deprivation is okay, really.
We are a uniquely self-deluding species, but our higher and lower brain functions tell us quite sternly that “less” often means not virtue but misery: redundancy, poverty, loneliness. “More” means abundance, choice, comfort.
Lately, however, people seem to be evolving against big-ness in small but telling and potentially useful ways.
Perhaps the most iconoclastic is room size. For decades, people have been knocking through, adding-on and opening out, shunning walls and doors, save for bathrooms and bedrooms, scornful of past generations’ insistence on discrete rooms.
Now, climate change awareness, soaring energy prices and the lingering aftershock of lockdown claustrophobia have sent demand for smaller, single-purpose rooms soaring. They’re easier and cheaper to heat and clean and the whole house need not smell like last night’s dinner.
Designers quoted in the Times have shrewdly speculated that the generations who grew up in open-plan houses are rejecting them because of childhoods spent with too little privacy. Also, compulsory shared mess. A single person’s pile of stuff, pungent reheated curry or unwashed dishes can despoil most of the house. Why not have the option of closing a door and worrying about it later?
Exhibit two: false eyelashes are on the way out. This sounds trivial, but could be the start of a ceasefire in modern humans’ vicious battle against their own biology. You can go for blocks in some cities without seeing a single pair of unafforested eyes – or a natural eyebrow, an unplumped cheek, an unsculptured jawline.
“Big” in fashion terms has driven people to want to be exaggerated cartoon caricatures of themselves. Lash extensions are probably the cheapest of these procedures, so also the most democratised.
Now that the Kardashians, pioneers of the “big” look, have blinked, it could be the start of a big downsizing. They’ve been appearing in their own, natural lashes (unmascara-ed!), as have a slew of other actors and singers.
This is not as transformative as the multi-roomed house, but it will save a lot of faffing about, not to mention allergies and infections. And if natural becomes the new affectation for faces and bodies in general, all that money saved will help pay for the restoration of walls in homes.
A final glimmer of hope for moderation: Ireland has become the latest of several countries to ban XL bully dogs. A few American breeders decided the traditional bulldog breeds were insufficiently big and muscly, so they came up with a living giant gothic gargoyle weighing up to 60kg.
Unsurprisingly, the market for such dogs skewed heavily towards people with pretensions of machismo rather than animal welfare, for whom having a conspicuously deadly security beast is a point of vanity.
Some, possibly many, of the dogs have been fine: good tempered, well trained and responsibly cared for. Others, however – well, you may as well have a rhino, a bored lion or a bull in season patrolling your home.
You’d think that sense of machismo would shrivel at the risk of imprisonment for culpable homicide. But the dogs’ continuing popularity led to such statistically significant attacks and deaths that they’re increasingly being banned.
Breed-specific bans are but a patchy deterrent to dog attacks, but at least this one sends a clear message.
Domestic dogs have evolved with us to help with many tasks, including guarding. But sheer deadly bigness – as in being massive alpha predators, including of us – has never been one of them.
