IKEA and death

    In this blog post I will not remonstrate with IKEA for being a provider of cheap furniture and interior accessories for the great masses. On the contrary, I think it is a rather honourable project  - at least at first glance - and it is one that should be encouraged by the standard bearers of common sense (but we must not forget that common sense is continuously reformed by the course of History). Nor will I be critical of IKEA for being a job creator for thousands of people who, through free will or necessity, can imagine dressing in blue, yellow and sometimes striped uniforms. I endorse this enterprise as long as the management can offer decent wages to their workers.

Furthermore, I will not in this space belittle the fact that IKEA has an importance for the self-image of my homeland, and the transaction swings both ways I suppose, IKEA is unabashedly using Swedish culture as a part of its marketing strategy (by the way, is it an accident that IKEA's colours are the same as the Swedish flag?). The company is probably also an inevitable part of the spreading of rumors about Sweden and its inhabitants abroad... one wonders if they talk about Swedes in the same way as one can do about certain IKEA products "He is cheap, functional and without elegant frills"?
  The Danish literary critic Georg Brandes once gave a great speech for the Swedish writer Hjalmar Söderberg on the latter's fiftieth birthday - this must have been in 1919 which was some 34 years before IKEA was born - and Georg said that Hjalmar was a "Swedish genius, without pathos and superlatives". Something similar might be said of IKEA, there is a terse, middle-of-the-road, simplicity emanating from those chairs and tables and designs. 
    My case here, however, is not about any of the above, but instead my focus is on the experience of "death by boredom" and extinction of singularity and individuality that I perceive as I wander through the store's vast temple aisles of generic household furnishings. These interiors are simulations of life that are so devoid of spirit that I end up becoming a part of it, I become a mute dull consumer, a grey sheep deprived of all inspiration that is herded through the aisles of the intensely lacklustre...something shuts down inside of me in a very undramatic way. I am the living dead but I sense there is a path to resurrection if I play my cards right. The tour through arranged pretend living rooms and kitchens and bedrooms resets me somehow - it is as if I caught a glimpse of the inside of the matrix and realized that its innermost code is boredom itself. But I learn an important lesson: I tell myself - like a person affected by illness - that if I ever get out of here, I will cherish and appreciate life to the fullest... I will not take anything for granted.

    It's not that I feel this way because I'm a hopelessly elitist aesthete who also happens to hate furniture, no it's more the case that the lifeless and the non-genuine takes possession of me like some kind of demon, robbing me of life's vigour in the process. Sorry Ingvar Kamprad, I don't know what to make of your stores, it's as if they have tried to hide the boring predictable assembly line under homey initiatives and cuddlyness, and the signs from a soul-crushing factory is shining through. But the question is, could such a successful furniture company have been something other than that?

    At their size, IKEA can only give the appearance of the personal, only create a watered-down illusion of the intimate....moreover, it is up to IKEA's customers to be personal and intimate once they get home with their purchased products. Therein lies the hope for me, once I get out through the portals of IKEA I will try to reinvent my life, rediscover the personal and the particular but for a moment I will find myself wandering through these decorated corridors and I blend together with everything and everyone, we become one, a shopping herd inside the intestinals of IKEA, and I'm stripped of any idea of being special in a ceremony of the generic - it is like a universal phenomenon, as universal as dying, being born or becoming a parent. 
   I finally make it out of the tunnel system and pass through the checkout counters and I approach the exit. Sunlight flows in through huge windows and the evolving doors spin sluggishly like a vital cogwheel of existence or something. I saunter out into the parking lot where people are loading their goods into various vehicles. IKEA flags flutter on big flagpoles. Something rises up from inside me, I think it is hope and gratitude.