My sister got married in June and has since been living in a town roughly two hours away from our parents’ place.
I was on a call with her a couple of weeks ago, and she admitted something to me.
After about four months of living in her brand-new house with her brand-new husband, she came back to visit our parents, and for the first time, she noticed how old everything seemed.
“Have we really been living here like this, this whole time?” she asked me. “With this old fridge and this worn-out gas cooker?”
She wondered if this is something the people currently living in the house have noticed. And why hadn’t she noticed it before?
That same day we had the call, I happened to be having a yard sale at my apartment in KL. I was trying to sell off all that I could to help fund furniture for my new place in Berlin.
As I stood over all the items in my living room trying to come up with a price for each of them, I teleported myself into the shoes of a potential buyer. Someone who wasn’t me. And just like that — I started seeing all the imperfections.
Would I pay this much for a cabinet where part of the coating is gone and the wood is exposed? How much would I give for a metal shelf that’s rusted on the bottom? What about this chair that creaks every time you swivel on it?
These are all things I never paid attention to because I had adapted to them. And when I do notice them as problems, they were my problems. But as soon as I started thinking of someone else paying for them, I began to question the price of my adaptation.
Like, if a buyer would offer to pay RM 100 less for the creaky chair, does that mean the price of my adaptation is RM 100? Or is that just the endowment effect in action—the tendency to overvalue something simply because it’s mine?
Often, we need to change our physical space to see things more clearly. Or at the very least, differently.
But it of course doesn’t always require literally moving to a new environment, although that certainly helps — as it did for my sister. Sometimes, it’s as simple as stepping into another role — mentally switching from a seller to a buyer.
But you can’t really feel the change if it’s merely theoretical. I had to sell my things — that was not in question. The only question was the price. So seeing my belongings through the eyes of someone who might buy them made me see them differently. Those flaws—or quirks, if we can call them that—that were invisible to me were all of a sudden very apparent.
Then again, maybe they were never invisible. Maybe they just meant something different to me than they would a stranger.
In the four months that my sister had been away from our parents’ place, nothing had changed in the house. The fridge and the cooker didn’t get any older. Or at least no older than four months.
What changed was my sister. Or rather her perception.
She went from seeing the old fridge and gas cooker as her’s — because she also lived in that house, and thus oblivious to their flaws — to someone else’s. And because they’re no longer hers, she could see them more clearly.
Is that maybe why we often only see our former partners more clearly after the relationship ends?
I think I managed to get fair prices for most of the things I sold in KL. But when I arrived in Berlin, I found myself paying for things on Kleinanzeigen (eBay) that, in hindsight, feel overpriced.
But — who knows — maybe somewhere out there, there’s a German dude who feels strongly that his pieces are fairly priced, and that anyone who thinks otherwise just doesn’t know what they’re looking at.
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