Why everything looks the same now
We are getting richer and the world is getting uglier
A few months ago, I was driving through a major city in the Western US. Nothing was wrong with it. And yet, little felt right. It was quite underwhelming. Everything looked the same. The suburbs—one blob of subdivision after subdivision.
It made me wonder: Why?
Why do we make everything look so boring and similar, when our communities are a wonderful place to express human artistry and individuality?
When did we collectively agree to tolerate soulless mediocrity as the norm?
We’ve objectively gotten uglier on the inside—a quick news search will expose the underbelly of our collective shadow in seconds—but we’re also losing visible beauty.
Which may appear superficial to the modern person.
It is not.
Ancient civilizations revered beauty. For Aristotle, beauty revealed essence. Plato believed beauty awoke eros—a longing that draws the soul upward toward the eternal. I once experienced this directly when I dissolved my ego and melted into a unified field of consciousness that consisted of nothing but beauty.
When we speak about observable beauty, we thus don’t speak about the material thing itself, but the sensation it evokes in the immaterial.
Throughout history, humans seized opportunities to evoke reverence not only through ancient temples but entire cities built around craftsmanship and artistry. My hometown Vienna is a beautiful example of this.
Beauty seeped through the arts. Composers like Beethoven explored the “sublime”, the space of awe that certain unlimited, immense, or incomprehensible phenomena seem to provoke in us. Experiences of the sublime help us remember that “we are in possession of ideas that can never be satisfied in human experience”, Kant argued.
The fact that we can experience the sublime is evidence that we are non-material, transcendent beings.
Evidence we desperately need in this age of materialism—and increasingly lack.
Now, we don’t listen to Beethoven much anymore.
We listen to music that was composed not to evoke the sublime, but to stop the scroll. Artists are now “content creators” forced to optimize the representation of their art for our dopamine addictions in their own fight for survival. It’s no longer just about expression, it’s about engagement. In the process, we’ve gone from 40-minute symphonies to 15-second viral clips.
And to no surprise, all these modern hits sound kind of… the same?
Social media platforms notoriously favor formats proven to maximize watch time. More watch time equals more ad revenues. Algorithms thus don’t reward individuality but familiarity. Which is why everything on social media… also looks kind of the same?
In the US, we’ve taken it a step further and replaced artistry almost entirely with efficiency. Unique, architect-designed homes are history, now all we build are uniform subdivisions, which spread through metro-areas nationwide.
The country is covered in strip malls that have no resemblance with the bustling markets that once enchanted ancient citizens. In the US, we need to get prices low so we can sell more. Cheaper buildings equal cheaper rent equal cheaper prices equal more sales.
It is not only our homes and shopping centers that lack beauty but also our modern-day temples, such as the Apple headquarters: a minimalist ring that couldn’t be more boring to look at. (I haven’t been inside but can imagine.)
The Applefication has also infiltrated coffeeshops. Do they look sleek? Sure. But also—boring. Gone are the bookshelves, the art from local artists, the mismatched chairs. There is nothing to look at but white walls and chairs and tables, and maybe a cryptic menu. No awe or wonder evoked here. No human touch. No character. It’s all the same. These spaces could have been designed by robots (and if they aren’t already, they soon will be).
We’ve not only stopped decorating our gathering places but also our bodies.
Women used to wear intricate dresses and colorful patterns and hats and hair up-dos and now… we’re wearing denim and Lululemon.
This is not about feminism. Of course women can and should wear pants. But as a European, I find the American dress code—to which I’ve fallen victim myself—sad. It is not a vain kind of sadness. I’ve reflected on this: is my passion for fashion vain? I’ve decided it is not. It is a form of self-expression.
There is also something about dressing up that signals appreciation of the now. It’s a celebration of life. Every moment is special. And so in Europe, we dress up for it. Not all the time, but often enough.
All the while, we’ve replaced natural beauty with artificial glamour.
Which comes with a bigger price tag (of course). The greedy claws of capitalism have turned beauty into a self-serving vehicle—every year, we spend billions on cosmetics, weight loss, and plastic surgery. When I was using TikTok, I was buying so many beauty products. They promised prettiness in the future and delievered a satisfying dopamine hit in the now. A win-win. Now, they are sitting stale in my cabinets.
In the US, acrylic nails and fake lashes are the minimum, lip filler and botox normalized. I was shocked to learn how many girls are now getting “tox” in their early twenties, “for prevention”. Invasive surgeries that alter body shape and facial structures are modeled by our A-list celebrities.
To what end?
The algorithms push the same old aesthetic to everyone on the internet, eroding the self-esteem of millions of young girls, eating disorders in the US have doubled.
This has nothing to do with beauty.
The whole point of beauty is that it is unique, surprising, uncommon. If we all look the same (even if pretty), if all our cities look the same (even if fine), we get so used to what we look at, we don’t appreciate it anymore.
Beauty is not of the mind and thus not binary or absolute. It’s not definable. The mind cannot understand or judge beauty.
It can only be experienced.
Beauty is an experience of the heart.
The most dramatic erosion of beauty is, of course, the destruction of our natural habitat. We deforest our beautiful land so we can eat more meat and build plants and plantations to grow industrial crops that become fillers for our processed foods. But guess what, the products will be cheaper and thus more competitive.
Satellite analysis on deforestation reveals that an area equal to 50 football pitches has been destroyed since 2000—every minute.
I want to cry.
Beauty was once a shared portal into truth. Now, truth is reduced to what can be measured, and beauty has become a vehicle to fuel profits.
The even greater problem might be that it’s not just visible beauty that’s vanishing, but also our capacities to observe all the beauty that is still here, waiting in the backdrop of our ever-glowing screens.
Mary Oliver writes that attention is the beginning of devotion. But our attention is under siege, held captive by the same three to five billion-dollar companies that have engineered technologies to keep us hooked. Bless all those ad dollars flowing in. What a brilliant advancement. If there’s one thing we are devoted to these days, it’s our screens.
Screens that distract us from the Beautiful and trick us into searching for it in the future, or in other people’s lives.
When it is always right here. Beauty requires attention to notice and attention requires slowness. But as a culture we are always on, always moving, always distracted.
As a result, we miss the beauty that hides in plain sight, in the unrushed moment.
The way the sun hits the room, the tiny squirrel paws holding up a snack, the mother’s loving gaze at her newborn, the wisdom painted across the faces of our elders, the sound of a violin that wants to linger in the silence of your heart.
The loss of beauty is not a matter of aesthetics. It is a matter of spiritual poverty.
Beauty is not a nice to have, it is why we are here.
Just take a look at birds.
There is absolutely no reason that we would need over 10,000 different bird species that look like this.
Or like any of these.
There is no point.
Unless, of course, that is the point.
Whatever created the birds intended to surround us with uncontainable beauty.
Whatever created the bird is whatever created us.
And yet, we’ve convinced ourselves we need needles.
John O’Donohue wrote that “beauty is not something we encounter—it is something that happens to us”. For the late Irish poet and philosopher, beauty was not decoration but a moment where the soul feels suddenly at home in the world.
Beauty, he believed, awakes a forgotten belonging.
It reminds us that we are not strangers here. That we are all part of this creation called life that will never explain itself.
Our collective thinning of presence is costing us intimacy with life. It is costing us our felt sense of belonging to the family of living things. And our pursuit of profits is costing us natural beauty and the expression of our individual souls.
And yet—beauty has not left us.
To live beautifully is to recover a way of seeing the world as it appears.
Look not with your mind which seeks to understand, but with your heart which seeks to experience. If you really look, you will find that despite all the ugliness, our world is still unbelievably beautiful.
Things will likely get uglier. As a species, we’re not on a promising trajectory. But you choose what you focus on. Your attention is your greatest resource. Guard it.
Infuse beauty into the every day in your own unique way. Make things look pretty for no reason whatsoever. Slow down. Get curious about the natural world. Let nature hold you in your loneliness. Visit places that evoke awe. Get off your phone. Capture not with your camera but with your heart. Create more. Express more. Create for the sake of creating, not to build your brand or business or portfolio. Decorate your body. Decorate your home. Take the extra minute to arrange your meal in a special way. Every once in a while, close your eyes and just listen to beautiful music.
It’s not about making your life look beautiful to the world—it’s about letting yourself feel the world as beautiful.
In a world optimized for efficiency, choosing beauty is a radical act of resistance.
But at this point, beauty might be the only thing that can save us.
Grab some headphones, close your eyes, and gift yourself a 5-minute musical journey into the heart of beauty.
(For more like this, you can check out our new music-wellness app Atoon.)
“Nature is the appendix of the human soul.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
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This is a great, well written piece, about Beauty and it mirrors many of the themes I've explored around beauty on my own Subtack (while being better about sticking to the point, lol.). Needless to say, I agree wholeheartedly.
Some of us still find Beethoven of consummate and unique beauty. May we all pause and take a deep breath and at least momentarily feel grateful.