Or: Why beige is not the answer 😉 Last night, I had an idea. One of those ideas that only come at night, when the brain is almost switched off and the world seems a bit deeper than in the morning. Ideas that arrive with drum rolls and fanfares in your head, only to be crushed by reality. “Didn't you want to do...” my conscience asked with a raised eyebrow, and zap – the idea fell into a black hole of coffee, to-do lists and existential questions.
Oh well. So the idea got stuck somewhere between my pillow and my coffee cup, and now I'm sitting here trying to recapture it.
It was about beauty. And about truth in language. Now I'm sitting here trying to reconstruct the idea, while realizing that beauty as a concept is perhaps just as fleeting as my yesterday's genius.
How is that possible?
Beauty is not truth
Do you know this? These texts that are so incredibly beautifully written that you think you have just found the holy grail of language – only to realize after three paragraphs that there is absolutely nothing in them?
It's like a cake made of cream and sprinkles that tastes sensational at first bite – and then you realize: there's nothing underneath. No cake. No content. Just more cream. And eventually you're left on the floor with a sugar shock, wondering why you were so easily deceived.
A sentence can be beautiful. A paragraph can be breathtaking. But beauty doesn't make a statement truer.
I could describe the scene of a double murder in the purest language gold – the blood drips in elegant drops, the moonlight casts artful shadows, the silence is permeated with an almost poetic heaviness. It almost sounds romantic. But it's still a double murder.
THE PANCAKE-RICE-PUDING THEORY (beige, right? 😉 )
Beauty is not absolute. It is always tied to something – a face, a flower, a sentence. But it never exists on its own.
And yet we often act as if beauty were a self-contained concept. And what happens then?
Exactly: it becomes uniform.
Take ballet. An individual ballerina has to be perfect – every movement, every jump. But in a whole ballet group, it is not individual beauty that counts, but uniformity. If one dancer is a little worse than the others, it is hardly noticeable. Here, beauty is created not by individuality but by synchronization.
The same applies to language. A novel needs a consistent style, otherwise it seems unfinished. But if consistency is the only quality – then it is no longer of any value.
A poem that is only beautiful is like a ballerina who can dance perfectly, but only in a dark room without an audience. Well-intentioned, but somehow meaningless.
Beauty without contrast is nothing.
Don't you believe it?
Try eating nothing but pancakes and rice pudding for seven days in a row. Sounds cozy, doesn't it? By day three, you'll want to punch a hole through the wall. By day four, you'll be kneeling in front of a piece of stale bread, weeping.
Beauty needs imperfection. The dissonant. The break. Without that, it's just beige. And we know where beige has brought us.
Why is everything suddenly beige?
Websites, branding, Instagram feeds. Beige. Pastel. Soft and harmless. Visual valerian drops for the eyes.
It's as if the world has decided that beauty is the complete absence of individuality, of rough edges. That aesthetics are only good if they iron out everything.
But if everything is beautiful, nothing is beautiful anymore. That's the hell of the Better Homes and Gardens catalog of existence.
Because if every style is smooth, “clean” and flawless – then there are no more contrasts. No corners. No edges. No surprises.
And that is precisely the problem.
Because real beauty arises precisely where there are bumps. Where there are cracks. Where things don't fit together, but that's what makes them look alive.
THE CONSISTENCY OF THE AESTHETIC SOUP
Now someone might object: “But beauty enhances everything!”
Sure. Like glitter on a garbage bag.
Or imagine an unappetizing soup. Really disgusting. But it is described in the highest, most poetic terms – as a “colorful feast for the senses”, a “well-tempered symphony of flavors”.
Do you expect it to taste better now?
Or we take a parking lot. A boring, crumbling, gray-concrete parking lot. And then someone comes along and describes it as “an urban landscape full of lived history”.
Sounds fancy. But it remains a parking lot – anyone who has ever browsed real estate agents' ads looking for a house knows what I'm talking about.
That's the problem with beauty: it's a tool. It can amplify, emphasize, emotionalize – but it doesn't carry anything. And yet it is overpowering.
It influences how we perceive things, what value we give them. It makes us believe that what is beautiful is also true.
Although beauty is not to blame, since it does not even exist. It is not real, and its definition changes with each generation.
So, what to do? Banish beauty forever? Wallow in chaos and in deliberately ugly things just to escape aesthetics?
No.
But we could start to see through it. To question it. And to accept that true beauty lies not in perfection, but in the cracks.
So let's go – we need more ruffles. More corners. More resistance.
More soup that is just allowed to be soup.
And above all, maybe we should all use less beige together.
Beige is the aesthetic equivalent of instant mashed potatoes. It serves a purpose, but you shouldn't live on it alone. Beige is not the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything, and it will never be 😉
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