Love and Leisure at IKEA

False leisure: life as fantasy

What do people do to look for love? Or asking differently: how far are they willing to go? Well, the Chinese seems to have it all figured out: the best place to find love and some amorous excitement is at IKEA. 


The Wall Street Journal ran an article today that can only be described as bizarre. Not the article, that is. But the behavior of the people described. (Granted, the description of this questionable behavior is in WSJ’s daily “strange” section. But still). Apparently, Chinese senior citizens are in a habit of swarming to places like IKEA and use the space to find senior citizen romance. Perhaps it is the “home aesthetic” that the Swedish store exudes or something else, but people are making themselves at home in IKEA, perhaps taking the whole experience a bit too literally. “They [senior citizens] sit for hours in cafeteria, leaving behind orange peels and egg shells they have picked off boiled eggs brought from home.”

The writer of this article goes a little further and observes that it is not just the senior citizens that are posing what has become a social problem mixed in with the warped sense of consumerism. Young people too engage in parking themselves on the couch or bed, taking their shoes off and playing games or watching videos on their smart phones. This problem went as far that the IKEA management had to actually issue warnings and employ more security guards in order to curb the crowds (crowds, which are, by the way, not spending money on any of the IKEA products).

I hope, that you if you read this article, you too will find this social behavior rather strange. What indeed can one account for such perverse understanding of not only human relationships but also consumerism? This type of behavior has received a name as well: “retailtainment” but my comment is that just because something has been sociologically and psychologically identified (and perhaps even defined) does not mean that the phenomenon has received a green light to unleash and wreak havoc on a few remains of civilization. Perhaps a more significant question is whether China, at this point in time, even can be called a civilization? 

We are aware by this point in history (or at least, we should be) that Communism breeds fear in people, and once it moves from fear to limp resignation, its “inhabitants” become users. Users without purpose, whose fast acting desires must be fulfilled immediately. In this case, communism and consumerism offer a strange intersection of “values”: one clearly driven by selfish appetites (consumerism), other, which turns people into numbers that are part of the grand system.

Obviously, there is no such thing as a “pure form” of Communism. It has never existed and it never will. This impossibility gives rise to a development of emotionally stunted people, with no interest in relational quality of human behavior. But perhaps I should not be so quick in blaming Communism for such phenomenon. I have witnessed (as I am sure many of us have) people who live in democratic societies and have every right as a citizen behaving very poorly. It would appear that we all have the potential to become “users” who are not interested in contributing anything to society, no matter what political system we live in.

Drawing further from the behavior of freeloaders, it seems to be what is missing is not only individuality, but also a uniqueness and mission of each individual. They are seeking relationality to be sure, but is this the way to go about it? Imagine going to IKEA every day, peeling eggs that you made in the early morning, or maybe even the night before, seeking another human being to love you, to accept you, to respect you? Quite an empty existence. People are living only automatically with no reference to past, present or future in an existential void, a room of hollow sounds; a room, which is never one’s own but rather a collectivist space.

And how can love flourish in such a space?