You Are What You See!

Welcome to the wasteland!

Quick post this week. not a whole lot to say, but this subject has been interesting me. It's one I wrote on years ago, but one that remains relevant: aesthetics.

That's right, we're going to go into that strangely controversial area. I just wanted to write a bit about aesthetics in the modern age to close out summer since it always seems to be more obvious in colder weather. Though the question is more like: where have aesthetics gone altogether? We're not jut talking about bad aesthetics, but any at all!

It matters how things look, it gives people inspiration and motivation when they see pleasant and visually pleasing things to want to do better, and to make things better. Good inspires good and creativity inspires creativity. A dead sense of aesthetics produces nothing but death, which is how things are these days.

This is why it matters how things look, even if we're continually being sold on how it doesn't. Plenty of people excuse to decline and defend the people engaging in it.

For instance, you've probably come across a lot of talk recently about the failure of McDonalds to adapt to the modern market, but let's all be real: McDonalds has looked like garbage for nearly two decades at this point. It hasn't had a single aesthetic improvement in all that time, sure, but it was also terrible to start with the second they decided to stop aiming at families. The first step in the decline was throwing away its purpose and making up a new one that, clearly, doesn't exist.

Of course none of this goes into the cost issues or deteriorating food quality of the establishment, but at this point it's more like the current aesthetic matches the state of its soul. Vapid, empty, and without any identity or direction in a world just the same. They could have renamed it Food Store #3 and no one would bat an eye.

I've spoken before about how ugly a decade the '00s were, and I stand by that, but it did start out at least a little interesting with carryovers from the '90s to keep it afloat. Everyone remembers the see-through tech fad that was aesthetically pleasing among the masses and then never came back again, but few talk about how much better the internet itself looked back then compared to how ugly it is today. That is the clearest example.

But it also changed as the '00s itself got philosophically and spiritually uglier before morphing into the nadir that was the 2010s. If you can think of a single good trend the 2010s brought about in aesthetics that was pleasant and uplifting, I'd love to hear it, but from what I saw the world merely uglified more and more and more until minimalism became nothing for no one, and identity shrank to be makeshift personalities and brand loyalty over anything interesting or new.

The 2020 has not been an improvement in that area, either. We're over halfway into the decade and it's just been more of the same decay. Nothing creative, nothing inspiring.

A lot of the reason for this is that the same philosophy of the first decade of the 21st century is still there. The same crowd with the same vapid, snarky, hyper-ironic slogans from people who hate you, are still in charge. We still say stupid things like "adulting" for instance: a term that tells you maturity and ambition is a switch to flip off. We don't take anything serious and therefore nothing serious can change, and hasn't.

This, ironically, is also the same reason we lack a sense of whimsy. That's right, we're such an unserious people that we can't understand whimsy anymore. Weird how that works, but it's true. If you can't take life seriously, then you also can't take it lightly.

This dichotomy is the trap we currently find ourselves in. We didn't know how to take anything light or heavy. We can't take anything but as a joke at a distance we can detach ourselves from to not get hurt. We can't believe in anything but slogans for philosophy and insults to protect the ingroup. We can't look outwards or inwards, so we look nowhere. We loop indefinitely as everything decays. We're still in 2008.

Our sense of aesthetics, or lake thereof, effects everything and is a large part of why we are the way we are. We don't dream so we don't grow. We threw all that away long ago for safeness and predictability, because that way we won't get hurt.

But that means in the process we've lost things we don't even have a reason for losing! They're just gone and forgotten.

Why don't we have wallpaper anymore? Because our grandparents had it. Why don't we have wood paneling anymore? Because our parents had it. Why is everything sterile like a doctor's office with one note white and black walls and furniture coloring everywhere? Because we're boring. We have nothing to say or believe in, and our homes reflect that reality. That's all there really is to any of it. We can't have anything unique, for fear we might stand out and inspire.

Because we might get laughed at.

Well, why does that matter? Why do we care about the opinions on people who don't even hate us, but wouldn't even blink twice if they saw us dying in a ditch? What is to be gained cowering to that? Not a whole lot.

So let's do it ourselves and stop waiting for other people to do it or come up with solutions for us. Stop using slogans and ingroup signaling to speak at other people. Start having aesthetics again. Believe in something.

And eventually, maybe others will even believe in you.

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