Fake It

Fake it, till you make it, they say and honestly, it's not a totally bad thing, but it has its limits and should have its limits, if you want a healthy and happy conscience. Don't worry, I'm not going to preach about ethics, I'll let that to those who want to look clever and have nothing better to do, but I'll share something that it's a bit no in my book.

When I was younger and stupid enough to watch reality shows, there was one about renovations, made in the United States. This is a big business, which is why I bet there are still several aired today.

Photo by Emil Widlund on Unsplash

The main idea in the show was for the team to renovate a room in the house on a very limited budget and show everyone that it's possible to get visually excellent results with little money.

One of the tricks was to use cardboard rolls, glued together and then covered with curtain textile and use it instead of blinds as the rolls (they said) looked like the blinds when you roll them aside. You can imagine how much this trick costed, compared to real blinds/curtains, so huge saving there, but the shock I felt when seeing can't really be described.

Photo by detait on Unsplash

Then they moved on to interior decoration, among which, shelves, obviously. Shelves are made to store different items, among which, the most obvious and logical is books. So they went book shopping to a second-hand bookshop and you would think they looked for used, but still good books at a cheaper price, which they did indeed, but not the way you think. The books they bought were old indeed and lovely editions, but the content counted for nothing in this case as all they needed was the cover. Once they got home, the designer cut off the part of the cover you see when you look at the books on a shelf, glued them on a wooden board and placed the board on the shelf.

I think there should be a limit to everything, stupidity included but they contradicted me on this. I don't know about you, but I would die of shame to know someone could try to take a book off the shelf to check it out and discover those are fakes, not even books.

Photo by Shunya Koide on Unsplash

Why I am writing about this now? Well, as I said, I think there should be a limit to everything, stupidity included and this case is not the only one as I saw even worse last week.

Yes, this is another Vinted story and shocking too. Someone listed a ceramics decoration that had the shape of three or four books together. It was white, nicely designed and the size of real books. I read the description to see if it has function, like a vase or a storage space, like a box, but it didn't have any.

Most likely I'm not clever enough to understand what makes people buy such a useless object that takes up the place of three or four books and serves for nothing, other than collecting dust. I admit, it's my shortcoming to understand this.

Photo by Olya Mn on Unsplash

Seeing this, made me think there were times when people were judged by how many books they read and I'm not talking just about the numbers, but the knowledge they gathered from reading those books. Then came the time when it was enough to have the books on your shelves, the more the merrier and people thought you're clever. Today not many people have books as digitalization took over and electronic copied are not stored on shelves, thus not visible, so shelves are no longer needed you may say and even if you have some, you can fill them with useless things.

Photo by Intricate Explorer on Unsplash

As I said, they say fake it till you make it, but this type of faking is not going to lead to success. I'm not judging anyone for not reading or having books, but I do judge those who throw away a perfectly fine book, to use the cover to fake it.

Life is full of surprises, but this is not the kind of surprise you want to be part of :)

Have you seen such tricks? Is this a common thing?

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