I have been a bit obsessed with picking back over noughties culture recently. WHAT. A TIME. Good god. Those are core coming of age / entering young womanhood years for me, and as I take a retrospective peek back at the values, conversations and judgements it’s of no surprise to me as I tackle my midlife healing that I keep stumbling on way too many unresolved issues which I now see have help me back in areas of my life. But this is not so much a post about all that (yet), but this little slice of ponderings I wanted to share a few lightbulbs that have been going off in my mind about something that has been bothering me for a while that I haven’t been able to articulate until, perhaps now. That thing is the beige-ing of creativity and culture.
Recently I went to see Poor Things and the week before that I watched the much talked about Saltburn (that willy-wanging will leave it’s mark for some time, lol). Watching these two movies in close succession gave me a real kick and some delicious creative stimulation. I felt joy to be watching something new that felt original with more than a touch of weird. It felt like risks had been taken, crazy ideas had been pursued and decision makers had concluded, ‘this is weird, let’s make it’. I realised that (excluding books which continue to be the most powerful at arousing my imagination), it had been a while since I’d felt that. It was freeing in a way and I wondered why I felt that; did it feel like a sidestep from the zombie march of consumerist culture? These were both commercially driven movies, I wasn’t viewing some guerrilla art, but I did yes feel like that. Commercial culture can afterall still be wildly creatively joyful if it gets through the red tape of focus groups and no people.
At some point we entered an age where creativity and the innovation it seeks to produce, became overly reliant on looking through the lens of internet trends and responding to numbers. Hashtags, likes, follows, polls have spurred a creativity by numbers approach where everything feels and looks the same. I know this because I have a career in consumer insight and have peeked behind the curtain enough to know that these numbers have great power. Mainstream is the target. Mass market. Everybody. Global. Strategies which must appease everybody and be tied back to evidence somewhere in culture; some tentacle like grip on what people are already interested in and talking about. And this is what has led us to beigeification. Literally actually; dressing head to toe in beige, has been trending for some time. It’s not only businesses intent on targeting the masses, it’s also budgets and the fast-turn around everything. You only need to look at how things like buses, bollards or shop signage used to look versus now to witness the whittling away of design details, quirks and character. Of course design changes and seeks to reflect what’s relevant and desired by the people it affects, but trends have become the new character. Trends are what define most people’s taste these days, not core interests led by desire and an inner connection but fast moving trends which arrive with no meaning and leave with nothing else but (non-sustainable) waste in their dust.
Nowhere is this more evident than on social media. It is strange to write this because I could also sit here typing away about how creativity has been unleashed, about how we’ve never had so many tools to explore and share our creativity with the world. And this is true. When I consider the pros and cons of social media, I always come back to the power it can give people to tell their story, share their imagination with the world and shortcut age old paths to ‘success’ by connecting directly with their audience, something I myself have found great joy and inspiration in doing. But in the process I have often become creatively-vacuous. Spending a lot of time, yes too much I confess, on Instagram. Instagram began life as a photo sharing app, a place for creativity to be indulged and shared. A place for visual interests to be effortlessly explored by the power of technology and over the years evolved into a samey-samey set of templates and formulas.
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It’s become another formula. And there are more than enough people willing to follow the formula to extract what they want and need from the platform to get what they’re after rather than explore their own creatively and lean deeper into self-expression. There are of course incredible creative voices and neither should you have to be in some kind of creative elite to hold your own there, it’s just no matter how hard I try and curate my feed I feel stuck in a algorithmic loop that it’s exactly depressing, or joyless, or non interesting, it’s just…fine. Like a pleasant wallpaper with the same print over and over and over.
The tools we have access to are truly incredible. I have a lot of love for technology, even though we are still in the infancy of learning how to live harmoniously with it, I think we can over romanticise how brilliant life was before. Today if we know what we like, we can go deep and explore that. That is both an opportunity and a threat of course depending on what that is, but I think many of us, surrounded by fast moving trends, a beige-ing of all kinds of content and likely not a lot of time, end up scrolling through life; literally and metaphorically. Choice paralysis is real. Overstimulation is real. We don’t know our own tastes anymore and it’s harder to find them. It’s like our tongues are out all the time, lolling around for our taste and an endless round the world buffet is being lobbed at it consistently (and we all know that if you want the best cuisine from a certain place, you’re not going to find it at the round the world buffet).
Taste. This is a topic I’ve landed on as something I am curiously digging into. I think it’s more important than we realise and I can’t find much being said about it. Given our paradox of living in a world with both endless creativity and the mass production of it, I think taste plays a more significant role in our ability to not exist in a state of fast trend consumption and to know how to tap into new sources of creative output that will surprise and delight us. A bit like becoming efficient sniffer dogs to things we need to stimulate our imagination and make us feel good and allow us to break free of the mass consumer zombie march which doesn’t let us explore and express who we are from the inside out. If you want to start diving into this topic too I recommend giving this podcast a listen, it hits a lot of key beats I am interested in. I wonder also about the development of taste in kids, not something I’ve ever heard spoken about (please let me know if you have seen this anywhere). Despite no one probably having the same dress style as their 15 year old self, it’s curious how a lot people do seem to head back there a little bit once they’ve passed through the ‘seriousitus’ stage of adulthood and are looking to reconnect with them and live more playfully. Perhaps there’s something more fixed about taste than we give credit to in our obsession with moving on from all things juvenile. I am aware that my own kids are being force fed so much stimulus and I am really committed to helping them understand the idea of being led and pulled in every direction versus marching in the one they choose. I would like them not to join every zombie trend march for a couple of reasons. The first is that fast moving trends are creating terrible consumer behaviour habits and the second is, it’s just more fun and satisfying to really know your own tastes and be driven by. I’m not entirely sure how and if I will achieve this, but I’m giving it a bloody good go - to be continued!
Yes to this! Its something I think a lot about, how to prevent my kids purely being influenced by external and focus on what they actually enjoy and what makes them happy x