The human desire to turn life’s mundanities into something altogether more agreeable never ceases to amaze and amuse. Take our homes, for instance. Once we were content to live in caves as long as they kept us dry and were reasonably warm. Then we decided it would be more appealing to build our own caves but with the added benefit of shag-pile carpets, front doors and locks to keep the jungle at bay. This ability to cocoon ourselves from an outside world that had once housed us became something of a status symbol and so we built bigger, more elaborate caves loaded with ostentatious accoutrements such as silk wall linings and sweeping marble staircases leading to bedrooms nobody used.
To help alleviate the tedium of home life, we started travelling to faraway places in order to indulge our fantasies of what life might be like if we were truly free. Instead of clothing ourselves in animal hide, we developed a dizzying array of colourful outerwear that flattered our vanity as well as keeping us cosy.
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