5 Things That Used to Be Normal and Are Now a Luxury — Alberto Gallego

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A few days ago I was sitting in a café in Sofia, thinking about things that were normal when I was a kid, or even when my parents were, and that now take real effort to get.

It’s not that they’re out of reach. It’s that you have to go hunting for them.

1. Being offline

The world has gone digital to the point where everything happens online. That brought plenty of good things, but it stripped away something simple: the right to disconnect.

Half the time you can’t leave the house without your phone, because certain places need you to carry a small computer in your pocket to do anything at all. My least favorite: reading a restaurant menu off a screen.

2. Silence

For a while, traveling around, I went looking for places where I could sit in silence (absolute silence doesn’t exist, but you know what I mean). It was much harder to find than I expected.

And the worst part is that something that should be possible almost anywhere has turned into a business. Countryside houses that cost more than a downtown apartment. Meditation and silence retreats. All of it selling something that used to come included.

3. One-ingredient food

One of my favorite things about being in Sofia is that the small food shops are still standing. There are supermarkets, but most of your shopping happens across 1 to 3 different places: the greengrocer, the butcher, the fishmonger.

And it’s exactly there, in the shops selling local and seasonal produce, where the bill comes out higher. Across the street sits the supermarket, stocked with things flown in from the other side of the world and ingredients you couldn’t pronounce, closer to a chemical compound than to food.

That’s the cheap option.

4. Being served by a person

Most shopping happens online now, and with big companies it’s basically impossible to reach a human (Amazon being one of the few where it still works).

But it isn’t just that nobody picks up. The whole act of talking to someone has turned into a chore.

When I was a kid I’d walk into a shop, ask the woman behind the counter, and she’d tell me what to buy. You built a relationship, she knew you, and that was worth a lot to me.

5. Clothes made of natural fibers

For a while now I’ve been buying almost only natural fibers. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find something fairly priced, well made, and that doesn’t fall apart in 3 to 6 months.

It’s a miserable process. Hundreds of brands, nearly all online, nothing you can try on, no way to know if it’ll last.

I bought a merino t-shirt from a French brand with glowing reviews and it lasted less than shirts I’ve paid 5€ for. 60€ in the bin. That’s the part that wears me down: not the price, but that you can read, compare, choose carefully, and still get it wrong.

Looking at the list together, the price isn’t what bothers me most. It’s the time. Reading, testing, researching, comparing.

All that searching gets paid for in attention, which is the first thing on the list.

I get that this is a problem of scale, and that cheap goods have let a lot of people live better. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But when the floor drops that far, what used to be ordinary can be sold as premium. That’s how a wool t-shirt ends up with a luxury tag and a seasonal apple costs 3 times as much.

None of this is exotic. These are ordinary things. What’s strange is that getting hold of them has turned into a project.

A forest outside Sofia. We call this luxury nowadays.

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If you liked this, you might also enjoy Notes From Five Months of Building, Why Not Live?, and What happens when everything is perfect?.

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