I think a couple of things combine: you now have enough experience in the persistence of material objects to understand that if they don’t actively fail, they continue to define the shape of your material existence. The four stainless steel forks you randomly bought for your first place are now the forks you might, conceivably, have for the rest of your life.
You also have experience of the world around you. You realize, by comparison with your friends who like nice things, that your forks are shit. Incidentally, you also realise that despite having made choices that were defined by being broke or frugal, you do not actually get points for having shitty thin-handled forks that are annoying to use. You don’t get respect or appreciation or comfort or pleasure. After ten years of use out of $5 cutlery, you have inarguably gotten your money’s worth. You will get nothing else from them. You only get, forever, the experience of using shitty forks.
You have probably lived on your own for a few years now, perhaps even for more than a decade. Some items have fallen behind and been lost, thrown away, broken or failed; both others are still your companions. Depending on how nice they are, this is a source of comfort and frustration. Love to the hiking boots that have lasted! Affection and allegiance to the 20 year old band t-shirt! Disgust to the t-shirt bought last year that is sent to recycling for being so shit. Increasing admiration to the grand-grandmother’s mixing bowl, especially compared to the 2016 purchase of a mixing bowl that couldn’t handle the fast-paced lifestyle. Annoyance, disappointment and sorrow to smartphone case number 241, what the fuck. Smug pride in oneself for having the foresight, in an earlier house move, to splash out on a decent new mattress. As these items persist, you cannot help but notice that quality of materials/items is now obvious and visible, because you’ve spent more time with them. A 22-year old newly in possession of two knives - a cheap shitty kitchen knife and a good one they inherited - will have spent the same amount of time with both objects; when you’re 30, you’ve worked for 8 years with the good knife, while the cheap one (if you even recall ever having it) was thrown out in a fit of annoyance six years ago.
You have, at this point, in addition to using them, also handled and cleaned most of your possessions several times. You have realized, very materially and fundamentally, that you must care for these items for the rest of your lifespan, or theirs.
You are (possibly) out of the early desperate scramble to suddenly, instantly furnish an entire independent life (sheets, mattresses, winter coat, forks) with no money. This naturally led to restrictions on what you chose.
You are (possibly) out of the eaves of how you were raised. Many people spend their early twenties reconciling how they were raised with how they want to live. Perhaps you were raised to feel guilty for wanting things, such as toys or attention, which you later dutifully applied to things like education or new forks. Over time, you will have surprised yourself with how you met, identified, addressed, and reconciled these tensions from your upbringing; through conflict and resolution with parents/teachers/church/internet/social media, you have now arrived at what you have. If you had big things to confront, like coming out as queer, you may have thought this work was done. Now you suddenly find yourself confronting the weird beliefs you have that “you don’t NEED new forks” or “it’s bourgeois to want things” or “NOBODY spend £200 on HIKING BOOTS, what are you, rich?” And you might find yourself feeling like, well, actually, I’m grown-up and I hike and eat, actually.
So yes, I think that when you are 30 you are in the danger zone of getting a new couch.
