There is a certain interior I encounter again and again, and think about often. Sometimes it is openly luxurious: an extravagant stone countertop in the kitchen, coloured-metal taps, oak parquet. Everything perfectly finished. Sometimes it is the opposite — minimalist and clean: natural materials, a soft Scandinavian palette, clean lines, everything safely neutral. A tasteful interior, one that could not offend anyone or provoke a negative reaction. And also, slightly, a faceless one. Not a single sign that the people who made it took even one decision someone might sharply criticise.

Most often, though, this interior is simply current and popular. The shapes and solutions that live on social media, the hottest wood tone and stone pattern of the year, the soft wall colours the paint companies announced this season. Trends, reproduced carefully, professionally, tastefully.

And yet something is missing. There is no art on the walls, no furniture with a history, none of the objects that would take specific knowledge to understand and value. The budget went to the interior architecture, the finishes, the fitted joinery — and it ran out along with the product catalogues and the supplier orders.

Different budgets, different aesthetics, and still, in essence, the same interior. An interior in which almost every decision was made to be safe. And the popular decision is the safest of them all — no one will mock or criticise what the majority is choosing right now. A fashionable interior asks for no connoisseur’s discernment: it is already certified as tasteful, it photographs beautifully, and in three years it reads, like an old receipt, as a record of the date it was bought. A space that many people could have designed — and that looks exactly like a thousand others.

This is not the difference between the rare and the popular. A single person and a crowd can fall for the same chair or the same shade, and often do. The difference is whether the space was made by a selective, knowing eye — whether each decision had a reason of its own, deeper than „this is what everyone does.” In one case, experience and conviction sit behind the choice; in the other, only the fact that it is currently done. And that, in the end, is what separates a living interior from an empty one.

A functional, tasteful interior can be bought — a competent designer and an adequate budget usually guarantee it. But a connoisseur’s discernment cannot be bought: formed by time and experience, passed down from one generation to the next, from person to person. It grows out of works of art that touched us before we thought about where they would hang; out of furniture that was hard to find; out of objects with a history; out of lighting that builds atmosphere rather than merely illuminating. None of this is found in a catalogue, none of it appears as a line in a budget, and none of it is obviously „correct” or popular. It is born of knowing how an expensive thing differs from a beautiful one — and of choosing what we want to be surrounded by, rather than what we are supposed to want. And this is what is so often missing: not money, not effort, not style, but a discernment formed by real, personal experience.

This critique is not about money or taste — the empty interiors have plenty of both. It is about the fear of choosing, and of being mocked for one’s choices. About the discomfort of choosing something old rather than new. About inherited furniture in a new home, and how much anxiety that choice can cause — because someone might read it as a lack of money.

I notice this fear often, and I do not think it is an accident. In part it is a global phenomenon: you would find these empty interiors in Seoul and in Stockholm, everywhere money meets social media and the mass catalogues of finishes and furniture. A global emptiness, and hundreds of authors producing the same image. I will not pretend it belongs to us alone. But in Lithuania it has its own root — a severed tradition.

A connoisseur’s discernment is not innate. It is cultivated — by growing up among furniture and objects that carry a history, among art you see every day, among a quality you learn to recognise by touch. The Soviet years cut that chain. They did not only take away objects; they broke the passing-down from one generation to the next, and installed a suspicion of beauty itself: elegance became suspect, good taste pretentious, and the person who filled their home with art and singular pieces was marked — watched, mistrusted, kept at a distance.

And so a real gap opened. Many of us simply never had the chance to live among such things, to know them, to learn their language. There is nothing shameful in that — it is not a failure of taste, and not a personal fault, but the consequence of an interrupted tradition. That knowledge can be recovered; it can be learned, the way one learns a language that was never spoken at home.

But alongside the gap, something deeper and more damaging remained — the conviction that these things are simply not for us. That we are not „those people.” That the beautiful, the refined, the singular belong to someone else, and that we are left to choose safely. This conviction is a lie. Not because the gap does not exist, but because it is neither permanent nor deserved. What we have not yet learned does not mean we are unworthy of it.

Out of that conviction grows the fear — the fear of looking foolish, of being mocked for the effort, of being criticised for wanting to live in a heightened way. It is easier to choose nothing that could be judged. Easier to hide — behind expensive stone, or behind cosy neutrality. And so the safe, popular, faceless interior is born.

I think often about this feeling of shame, so common in our society, that makes us uneasy in the presence of beauty, elegance, culture. The feeling that to strive is slightly shameful, that to care about one’s surroundings and appearance is superficial. That a person who dresses for the occasion, hangs art on the walls, tells price apart from beauty — thinks themselves better than others. Is trying too hard. Is showing off.

This shame is not a trait of our character, nor an expression of taste or modesty. It is the residue of a system that wanted us diminished. And unlike the occupation itself, it never fully withdrew from our lives.

The home is our most private space — where the performance ends and we can take off our masks. A space made consciously, in which the objects carry meaning and speak of the person who lives there, is not a design direction or a statement. It is a true expression of self-worth.

How, then, do we set this shame down? Not by persuasion. It does not answer to argument — we cannot simply decide to stop feeling it. But there are two things it cannot survive: an eye that is learning, and evidence.

The eye comes first — because discernment is not trusting your instinct. The person following the trend is also moved by what he chooses; the hottest oak tone of the season genuinely pleases him. Feeling alone is no compass. Discernment is a feeling that has been taught — by long contact with the real. 

I know this can be done with nothing, because it was done in my own family. During the war, part of my family fled Lithuania and ended up in a labour camp in Germany. They had left everything behind — the house, the furniture, the objects, the whole material world of their former life. They had, in the most literal sense, nothing. And my grandfather’s aunt would take the children to the fine china shops. Not to buy — there was no money to buy. To look. She made them stand in front of the porcelain and see it, study it, understand what made it fine. We may have lost everything, she told them, but you will not forget what quality looks like. What it feels like. That, she could still give them.

This was always how it was passed on: the child who grew up among good furniture inherited no opinions, only years of touching, seeing, living beside quality, until her „I like this” had become worth trusting. That is the part we can give ourselves. Before choosing — look. Long, and at real things, not at the feed: in museums, at auctions, in the antique dealer’s back room, in the houses of people who know. Hold things. Learn how a good chair feels under the hand, how real materials age, why one object survives fifty years while another dates in three. Looking costs almost nothing — and it is the entire education. The feed can only show you what is current. Only the real thing can teach you what is good.

Then — one object. Not the first thing that stirs us, but the thing that still moves us after we have looked long: chosen slowly, for a reason we could name, with no other justification. Not because it is fashionable, not because it is safe, not because it is what everyone is doing. The waiting itself is the test — the trend evaporates under long looking; the real thing survives it. We bring it into the house and live beside it. The sky does not fall. No one laughs — and if they do, it no longer matters. This is the evidence the shame cannot argue with.

Then another. This is how the gap closes: not overnight, and not from a catalogue, but by looking, touching, choosing — one real thing at a time. It is exactly how discernment was always handed down — only now we hand it to ourselves. And it is not too late. The tradition was not destroyed, only interrupted, and a thread that was cut can be tied again. I see it happening already, quietly, without any manifestos: people bringing an inherited chair back into the house, hanging the thing that moved them, daring to choose what is theirs.

Because the brave choice is neither rebellion nor showing off. It is a return — giving back what was taken, to ourselves and to those who come after us.

To live without fear or shame of your own choices is the boldest and most radical decision we can make in our own homes.