There is arguably no better way to irk modern experts than to forcibly expose them to the pop culture version of their respective areas of expertise. Bad science, bad cooking, bad singing and many other forms of bad abound in our contemporary media landscape, all of which undoubtedly do all kinds of dangerous things for people’s blood pressure. I can only imagine the rage real chefs must feel when Rachael Ray makes some Riceroni knockoff and then calls it “wild mushroom risotto.” Luckily, I’m not an expert in science, cooking or singing, so I can usually watch TV without digging my nails into my legs. The one exception to this is the Home and Garden Network, whose never-ending lineup of crappy home improvement programming drives me unreasonably insane.

I know I should just let people have their fun. It’s really no harm done to me if middle-aged suburbanites try to spruce up their houses with cheap spray paint and imitation tile. But it’s no use — I cannot get past the fact that these chipper TV personalities are perpetuating not only inexcusably bad taste, but also, more critically, the myth that it’s easy to establish an authentic sense of home.

A home is exactly what most modern people lack, and there’s certainly no easy way to get it back. We are like fragile flowers ripped out of our nurturing, earthy abodes, our newly exposed roots shivering in the brisk modern air. In some ways, it’s wonderful to be uprooted: we are no longer held back by stagnant traditions and outdated expectations. But it’s impossible to gain mobility without giving up the undeniable comfort of familiarity. Now that we have virtually limitless geographic and intellectual wiggle room, we have lost the sense that there is one special place where we belong.

Humans, however, have an amazing capacity for imagination, and we often use this power of pretending to make believe that the modern problem of psychological homelessness simply doesn’t exist. We cling to empty symbols of geographic affiliation, like sports franchises, to validate our connections to the places we live — becoming a true Bostonian is as simple as buying a Red Sox cap. We build new buildings to look as if they’re old, in order to lend them a reassuring, albeit false, sense of establishment. We convince contestants on home makeover TV shows that a freshly painted red accent wall will alleviate their yearning for an old-fashioned sense of home, one which new paint will never create.

This sort of eager self-deception is especially rampant in the United States, as almost everyone in this melting pot of immigrants is originally from somewhere else. This country was made because people left their homes and moved, and it flourished because people continue to do so. But today, we have an inferiority complex about our relative newness — we are insecure about our lack of extensive history and tradition. We are hopelessly homesick for well-established origins that simply don’t exist.

We must therefore cope with a desperation that Europeans will never know. While they effortlessly acknowledge their pasts but focus on progress forward, we are distracted, jealously lusting after their medieval city walls and impressive graveyards. We struggle to compete, and so alongside the classic American ideal of the new, an antithetical, and ultimately hopeless emphasis on the old has emerged. Some of us tell ourselves that the culture of Small Town USA will make us happy — home is the suburb in which we have lived all of our lives, where things have never changed and certainly never should. This explains the vigor with which some Americans defend what they consider to be traditional values — they’re defending their sense of home.

But this is a false sense, and we’ll never be satisfied if we don’t acknowledge that the old-fashioned concept of home is impossible to achieve. Small Town USA is more than a few hundred years old, and the newness of its inception, is far more remarkable than the fact that it has been around for a little while. The pioneers and immigrants of early America understood this far better than we do now. Conquering the modern wilderness requires the same fearlessness they championed. Abandoning our hopeless homesickness is crucial — we may never find home again, but we’ll finally be free to embark on our adventures forward.

If you share Caitlin’s hatred for interior decorating TV shows, she’d love to discuss further. Rant away to niltiac "at" stanford.edu.