"Sometimes they are. But sometimes the number on the dial is not really a calculation. It is a household rule that kept going long after the household itself disappeared. Most people assume their domestic defaults - the temperature, the lights left off, the leftovers eaten before anything new is opened - are choices they are actively making. Often, they are inheritances running quietly in the background, the way a piece of software keeps running long after you have forgotten you installed it."
"The thermostat is the cleanest example because it is so specific. 18 degrees. 19. 20. The number can stay remarkably consistent across generations, even when income, climate, house size, and actual energy costs have very little in common. The rule that ended without anyone announcing it Here is what may have happened in your parents' house."
"There was a heating bill that mattered. There was, perhaps, a specific winter when money was tight and someone - usually a father, sometimes a mother, sometimes whoever watched the bills most closely - established the rule. The thermostat goes here. You wear a jumper. You do not touch it. That rule may have made complete sense in that house, in that economic moment, with that boiler and that insulation. It was not irrational. It was a response to a real constraint."
"Then thirty years passed. The boiler was replaced. The insulation improved. The mortgage changed, or disappeared, or became someone else's problem. The children moved out. The original economic moment ended. Nobody held a meeting to announce that the rule was over. The rule just kept running, in the bodies of the children, who carried it into apartments and houses and eventually their own families, where it presented itself as a personal value: I'm just"
Frugality is often assumed to be a deliberate money-saving decision, such as keeping a thermostat low or refusing to raise heating. Sometimes these behaviors come from inherited household rules that continue after the original household and economic conditions disappear. Domestic defaults like temperature, lights, and food habits can run in the background like software that remains installed. Thermostat numbers are especially consistent across generations even when income, climate, housing, and energy costs differ. A rule may have been created during a period when heating bills mattered and someone set a specific limit. Later, changes like new boilers, better insulation, and altered mortgages can make the rule unnecessary, yet it continues without anyone formally ending it, becoming a personal value carried forward.
Read at Silicon Canals
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