The Uglification of Everything

In a world so obsessed with beauty we seem to struggle to find it, to create it, and to keep it.

We went on a trip the past few weeks, we drove, and so as expected all of us were stuck in the car for around nine hours. When you have that much time eventually you will stare out the window, and look around. We drove mostly through old backcountry roads, I am talking middle of nowhere only cows and pasture. We drove many hours with barely seeing another car, and with that we also happened to drive past many old almost abandoned little sleepy towns in the middle of nowhere America. As we passed by I cannot help but in my head always imagine the people who now live there, and what this place looked like when it was at its prime. One thing sticks out to me, in the main roads of these small little towns are always the most beautiful brick buildings. Some look like post offices, others like an office for a construction company that is next door, the other looks like a school, and the next might have even been a fire station. In these old little towns where decades have passed, still there they stand these old beautiful buildings that someone took the time to build, to design, to put together.

Someone somewhere had taken the time to make something beautiful, but these were not palaces, they were not mansions, they were not places fit for a king, and still somebody, somewhere just needed a post office and so they built it, but someone somewhere also decided at the same time that despite it being necessary, and despite it never becoming the home of a king, by golly that thing should still be beautiful. And it was.

This my friends is what I fear we have forgotten, that ordinary everyday life should still have beauty.

Everything around us feels like it has been stripped down to the cheapest, fastest, most profitable way to sell and make money. We are surrounded by more stuff than any other generation before us and yet everything feels so cheap, so temporary, disposable, and quite frankly — ugly.

So that is what we are talking about today, the uglification of everything, how we got here, what we lost along the way, and why I think none of this is an accident but actually a symptom of a much, much bigger issue.

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