We Were Raised by Hoarders, but We're Learning to Curate.

I was back home a few months ago when my mom had some guests over, and at some point in the evening I found myself photographing the glasses. Not the food, not the guests, just these glasses she’d pulled out for the occasion- you know the beautiful stuff that always comes out for others. I posted the photo without thinking much of it, and it ended up getting more likes than almost anything else I’d shared that month.

Which was strange, because the glasses themselves weren’t new. These were the same glasses that came out every single time we had someone over, and never, not once, on an ordinary evening when it was just us. I’ve asked my mom about this before, many times actually, sometimes half jokingly, sometimes genuinely begging her to be more generous to herself, to not keep the good things away. But most times she said the same thing: we’re saving them. I’d argue, for who, and why, but in the end I’d let it go, because it felt like one of those questions with no real destination.

But sitting with it this time, staring at that photo I’d taken almost automatically, I think I finally understood what is actually underneath this behaviour. It isn’t really about the glasses, or even about my mother specifically. It’s about how an entire generation was taught to value things, and where that instinct to keep the good stuff away came from in the first place. I think it comes from a place of scarcity, an instinct they inherited rather than chose, the same way you inherit a mother tongue, without ever remembering the moment you learned it.

I’ve come to think of it less as a family quirk and more as a kind of inheritance passed down in nearly every Indian household I know, shaped by things like Partition, by decades of real, lived precarity, handed down less like a lesson and more like a reflex. One generation gives the next an anxiety, and somehow, folded in with it, the good glasses, the good china, the good everything. When you’ve actually lived through not having enough, saving everything stops feeling like a quirk and starts feeling like the only responsible way to move through the world. I don’t think that deserves judgment, not for a second, watching my mom carefully wash and dry those glasses before putting them back exactly where they came from, I felt more tenderness toward her than anything else. But habits tend to outlive the reasons they started, and what’s left, a generation or two later, is a cabinet full of beautiful things being protected from the very people who live closest to them.

So I promised myself a few years ago to treat myself better, to use the nice things, and it’s changed how I move through my own home more than I expected it to. Treat yourself the way you’d treat the guest. The good cup, the good coat, the one piece you actually love instead of the five you can sort of justify, none of that is really about spending less, even though it often ends up that way. It’s about deciding, quietly and without ceremony, that your own ordinary Tuesday is worth the good version of things, and not only the version reserved for whoever happens to visit it.

There’s a word for this that I find more honest than “minimalism”: curate, from the Latin curare, to take care of. An archive keeps everything indiscriminately, because completeness is the whole point of it, nothing considered too small to save. A curator does the opposite, looking at everything available and choosing, deliberately, what actually earns its place. My mother built an archive, out of a very real, very understandable necessity. What this generation is doing now isn’t a rejection of that instinct to take care of things. It’s the same instinct, I think, just finally allowed to point inward as often as pointed outward.

I felt this most clearly, actually, the first time I opened EKKE. I’d heard about it through a friend who described it as a platform that made her feel like she didn’t need to look anywhere else, which is a strange thing to hear about a shopping site, so I was curious. What struck me wasn’t any one brand, it was the feeling of the whole space, more like walking into a small gallery than opening a shopping site. Someone had clearly curated this with care, the kind of attention that shows up less in any single choice and more in the sum of a hundred small ones. No infinite scroll, no forty tabs open trying to compare things that all blur together by the twentieth option. Just a considered edit of Indian designers, fashion and jewellery and home objects sitting beside each other the way they actually do in a real life, instead of split into categories that make sense to a warehouse but not to a person. EKKE calls itself a considered space, to wear, to live with, to keep, and I remember thinking, on that first scroll, that this was the retail version of exactly what I’d been trying to do in my own cabinet. Curated, not collected. Someone else’s discernment, offered to you, so you don’t have to build your own from scratch every single time.

You can feel that discernment in the smallest, easiest-to-miss decisions, the kind a gallery makes about how a room is hung rather than what’s in it. Open the menu and the first thing you see isn’t “tops” or “dresses” or any of the usual scaffolding a shopping site hands you. It’s Makers A-Z, the actual designers and studios listed by name. Everything beneath that reads less like a category and more like a way of living: Second Skin, Desk to Dinner, The Evening Act, Palette, So Indian, The Quiet Luxury Edit; entirely designed around who made it, and when in your life you’d actually reach for it.

The browsing itself carries that same restraint, the way a good gallery lets the work breathe instead of crowding the walls. There’s no infinite scroll pushing you toward decision fatigue, no wall of a thousand thumbnails competing for your attention. You choose how dense the grid feels, two pieces at a time or eight, closer to deciding how close you want to stand to a painting. The filter panel is called “Sort & Refine,” not the usual clinical dropdown, a small wording choice that still manages to sound like a person talking to you, not an algorithm. Even the pagination reads like a catalogue rather than a feed, page one of many, instead of a scroll with no bottom. Every one of these is a decision that could have gone the noisier, more maximal way, the way most retail defaults to, and it didn’t.

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None of it is loud, but it says something larger about what the site believes browsing is actually for. Not finding an item. Recognising a moment in your own life, and then the maker who already understood it, the same way you’d walk into a gallery not to acquire, but to notice something you didn’t know you were looking for. So I spent one afternoon admiring the beautiful web design, art direction and, of course, the curation. And this is what I ended up with (P.S. It does have long delivery timelines, so I am still waiting on my pieces while I write this, but I’ll update you all soon on how those fit, as they say all good things take time)

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We talk about curation like it’s mostly an act of choosing, of having good enough taste to pick the right coat, the right glass, the right anything. But I think the real work in choosing is knowing ourselves, knowing what we will actually use, what will represent us, how we want to design our life, our style. Something we will reach for every day without growing tired of it, something that might even evolve with us.

I think about William Morris often when I’m going through my own things, an English textile designer from the 1800s who hated what mass production was doing to the things people filled their homes with, all that cheap, characterless abundance, and who believed something you kept should actually deserve to be kept: have nothing in your home that you don’t know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. It’s such a simple line, and also such an honest one. Every object we keep is a small, quiet claim about who we are and what we believe we’re owed. A cabinet of “good” things left untouched makes a claim none of us actually believe, that the best version of our life stays just out of reach, saved for someday. A curated one makes the opposite claim, that we’re already worth it, on an ordinary Tuesday, not only on the occasions that come along to justify it.

I went back home again a few weeks after that dinner, and before I left, I asked my mom if I could use the glasses. Just for myself, just for a regular evening, no guests, nothing to mark the occasion. She looked at me a little confused, but she got them down anyway. I don’t think it fixed anything, one evening never does. But I keep thinking about the fact that it took a photo, and a few hundred strangers liking it, for me to actually see something that had been sitting in that cabinet my entire life. Maybe that’s the real work of this whole shift, this generation’s version of curation. Not becoming people who own less, exactly, but becoming people who are finally willing to look closely enough at what we already have to notice which of it we’ve been keeping away from ourselves, and to go get it down off the shelf.

Take care of yourself the way you’d take care of a guest.