Living with imperfection

Last season, I shared four reasons why vintage is better than new. What I didn't tell you is there's a fifth reason – and it might be the most important of all.

It has to do with the ubiquity of screens in our lives. We so easily slip through days where almost every waking moment is spent engrossed in one digital interface or another. It's no surprise that I'm writing this on a screen and you're reading it that way as well.

In her landmark essay The Age of Instagram Face, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino defines one of the alarming features of this era. The convergence of three phenomena – social media, apps like FaceTune that can subtly tweak your selfies, and less invasive alternatives to cosmetic surgery like Botox – is resulting in "the gradual emergence, among professionally beautiful women, of a single, cyborgian face."

Tolentino traces the scary implications:

For those born with assets—natural assets, capital assets, or both—it can seem sensible, even automatic, to think of your body the way that a McKinsey consultant would think about a corporation: identify underperforming sectors and remake them, discard whatever doesn’t increase profits and reorient the business toward whatever does.

The allure of this false state of perfection is something all of us probably feel. Digital artifacts have a changelessness that can tempt us into a distorted sense of what's normal. Unlike a postcard or a letter – remember those? – an email sent twenty years ago looks exactly the same today.

That's why acquiring vintage objects is a way of moving in the opposite direction, declaring to yourself and the world that things are inescapably flawed – and that Bob Dylan was right when he raspily lamented: Everything Is Broken.

Look at this chair:

I snapped the photo late last year at inabstracto, one of my favourite vintage shops. It's a moulded plywood dining chair, designed in 1946 by Waclaw Czerwinski and Hilary Stykolt for the Canadian Wooden Aircraft Company – a company that went into furniture design after World War II.

It's clear at a glance that this well-worn household object has travelled decades to meet us in the present. The scuffed edges of the plywood are evidence of all the times it's been picked up and repositioned. The backrest and seat have a ghostly glow that tells of the strangers who enjoyed sitting in it. All of its quirks and irregularities give it the warmth and life of a fellow human being.

Inviting an object like this into your home is a quiet act of rebellion against digital conformity. It's a way of saying yes to who you are right now, unaltered, in this time and this space.

Affectionately,