I worry about things... A lot
When I say things, I mean literally things: I worry about the way a stack of books sits in a corner. I worry about whether a knife should rest on the edge of a plate. I worry about one orange in a bowl. This does not make me neurotic or a ‘neat freak’, in fact, my friends will tell you it’s the opposite. I think books are better with coffee stains; sheets are better mussed than not, and flowers more perfect without all their petals.
No one would call me an aesthete; I’m way too lowbrow, but I’m in the ballpark, I’m aesthetical.
It’s not something I’m proud of; in fact, I know it makes me harder to be around, less content, and more likely to make a fuss.
To be clear, it’s not just that I sweat the small stuff like whether eggs are brown or spiderwebs are appropriately dewy, but I worry as much about the big things. I’m personally ashamed of our government and find the compelling slickness of AI distasteful because it is so strangely compelling. “Just another round of saying please accept substitute,” as I recently heard Rebecca Solnit say.
I’m writing this as a way of admitting that with all this worrying, I sometimes wonder how I navigate a future that seems to be giving me so much more to worry about. I’m also writing this to see if I can channel this worry about all things aesthetical into something more useful to me, and maybe to you.
On Muchness
Recently, I came across a piece in the New York Times about the rise of “slop,” a broad category of things that are characterized by what I might call muchness. Think one-pound bowls of salad from Sweet Green. Think fast fashion. Think AI-generated boyfriends. Think too much, given too easily. “Slop” degrades the ability to tune in to what matters because we are consumed instead by the ease and muchness of it. A bowl full of yummy things is mainly about the bowl full of part of that sentence, not the yummy things part.
I loved the idea, I laughed at the idea, and felt relieved to think of it as something other people were falling for. Until I didn’t, until I realized that I was living an accidental “slopful” life.
In part, this was because as we emerged into post-pandemic life, we realized that we were living in a world based on pandemic-era decisions that no longer held logic. Our farm upstate, which had been initially intended as a way to experiment with simplicity, had become our full-time home, and with that, there came the burden of more.
One morning, my husband and I sat looking at plans to build a new addition to the farm, renovate the very rustic kitchen, and add modern bathrooms, and we just…paused. We realized we were caught up in the momentum of muchness and, as such, were choosing more, essentially choosing “slop.” I looked up and couldn’t find myself in what was presenting itself as my life. It didn’t look like our life, it didn’t feel like our life; in short, the aesthetic was off.
Starting from scratch:
I have a friend who was raised speaking French, and when she’s faced with “Slop,” she’ll dismiss it, saying, “C’est trop,” which literally means “it’s too much.” It turns out that she is well supported by aesthetic theory, which suggests that we can actually hold four or five things in mind at once. It’s not just a theory of aesthetics; it’s a well-supported scientific theory. Anything more than four is just too much.
It is with that attitude that we put away plans for renovations, all plans for adding things into our lives, and reversed course with a plan to remove the muchness out of our lives and refocus our attention. The plan was multi-faceted, but the most important component was picking up and leaving our life behind, resettling into a Spartan apartment in a foreign city, and gradually reintroducing what mattered into our lives. In essence, rebuilding ourselves, the way we live, and the world around us by resetting the aesthetics of our lives.
As we’ve been doing that work, I’ve taken the opportunity to reflect, research, and read about the surprisingly significant role aesthetics play in our understandings of ourselves, how we live, and how we understand others. Aesthetics isn’t beauty, it’s not taste, and there is no right or wrong aesthetic—though there are things that are anti-aesthetics—but aesthetics can affect how connected we are to the world, it can help us make a home and feel at home.
We have it in us to build worlds, and in turn, the worlds we make make us.
Starting Now:
What follows is a set of posts examining all things aesthetic. I purposefully chose the word ‘aesthetical’ by the way, because it just sounds so wrong, so inexpert, that it captures the purely exploratory goal of these posts. I want to use this writing to explore what’s on our collective aesthetic minds. What are we finding aesthetically challenging, and what might give us an aesthetic recharge?
These posts are not about answers or, for that matter, actions; they’re mostly the reflections of someone who worries about things a lot…but maybe in a good way?