A lightbulb burned out in my living room last week. I went to find a replacement and opened the drawer where we keep the extras (the drawer that every household seems to have, where bulbs go to wait indefinitely) and found four bulbs that were definitely not the right fit, two that might be, and one that I was pretty sure was for the bathroom but couldn't confirm without taking it out and holding it up to the lamp. That felt like more commitment than I was ready to make on a Tuesday night.

So I stood there for a moment and did the very reasonable thing, which was to start mentally calculating whether we're going to renovate the place or move entirely…because if we renovate, we might change the light fixtures, and if we change the fixtures I should probably wait and buy everything at once. If we're moving there's no point buying anything for a house we won't be in, which means for now the answer is to leave the drawer as it is and live with a lamp that's got one bulb in a different colour.

My husband, for the record, has been thinking about the move or renovate debate for three months. I have been thinking about it for three years. We are very much in the same place.

I looked up something to do with lightbulbs, as one does when a drawer full of incompatible bulbs sends you into an existential spiral. 

In 1924, the major lightbulb companies - Osram, Philips, General Electric - met in Geneva and formed a cartel called Phoebus. Their problem was that bulbs were lasting too long. Some were running 2,500 hours or more, which meant people weren't buying new ones often enough. 

They engineered a shorter lifespan. 

They standardized it at 1,000 hours, set up a testing lab in Switzerland, and fined any factory that produced a bulb that lasted longer than that. Fines were calculated based on a 1929 table using Swiss francs, where the amount increased for every hour a bulb lasted beyond the 1,000-hour mark.

As predicted, incandescent bulbs from then on burned out right on schedule. 

I find this both infuriating and oddly clarifying. Someone decided in 1924 what the right interval was, got it baked into the product, and here we are a hundred years later with me standing in my living room holding a bulb that may or may not fit a lamp I may or may not keep.

The lightbulb is a small example of a larger thing in my house.

When my husband and I moved in together, we each had our own place and our own furniture. We were saving for a wedding, figuring out how two people share a space, and honestly both too practical to throw out things that were, for all intents and purposes, working just fine. 

So we consolidated. His stuff and my stuff (which I will say diplomatically, do not share a design aesthetic) all got arranged into something that functions as a home. A few years later we had a daughter and bought the things you buy when you have a small child, which are chosen for durability and height considerations, not always aesthetic coherence. 

We have a house that tells the full story of every chapter we've moved through, which is interesting as a documentation and less interesting as a place to live.

The bulb was designed for a market that needed to keep selling bulbs. Our furniture came together out of practicality, shared savings account and the particular logic of two people merging their lives. Most of what our home looks like was decided under conditions that no longer exist. 

The Phoebus cartel dissolved in 1940. The 1,000-hour standard mostly didn't. A lot of what surrounds us gets decided once, under specific circumstances, and then just keeps going - mostly because nothing interrupted it. 

I'm still figuring out which of my own standards are like that.