The mid in fake midcentury modern

In real life, most men are nowhere near as good looking outside of some enclaves in SoCal and NYC. Perhaps the look still sells on TikTok and Instagram because that is people’s escape.

To latch on to this great post there are a couple of other worthwhile discussion points:

We're still in a nuclear war mental model. We can't build beautiful things if we think they'll be destroyed in a war. We still have a societal level PTSD from World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and other things.

World War I veterans came back with horrific problems. That's why architects like Frank Lloyd Wright built bunkers that blended in with nature. As they entered into professions like architecture they avoided symmetry, and this was cargo-culted into the present day where we build very weird, stressful objects like Boston City Hall [1], suburban homes that are incoherent and have hidden front entrances (although the car is very prominent) or throw a bunch of scrap metal together and call it art.

I'm not religious at all but right now we face a crisis of what we are building for (as opposed to constructing buildings and temples to the glory of some god or gods). I'm hopeful that either the environmental movement or our desire to become a space faring civilization will reinvigorate the passion of our species.

There's also no point in building a very beautiful building that will last a long time while you are living in Austin, TX if you think in a few years you'll move to Seattle or maybe Washington DC before finally settling down in Kansas. I have been encouraged to see that remote work has caused people to change their location priorities and invest in their current homes instead. Major headwind is just that most homes that were constructed are either in isolated, car-dependent suburbs and/or they are built using the cheapest materials possible. But you can see that people are willing and want to invest via new offices, garage gyms, etc.

I'm really disappointed in our financial overlords who haven't built a single beautiful building for society anywhere in the US. Even their own houses typically look like architectural garbage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall

This feels less like it tells us anything about the world but more about how small the author's conception of it is. Reminds me of people who complain about how music is "bad these days" but they're only talking about what they hear on the radio and aren't really exploring what the landscape has to offer

A lot of what gets created is for functional purposes, and it has always been that way. As time goes on, the functional stuff gets torn down and replaced and anything that's appealing or well-built gets to stay. This gives the impression that the past was full of ornate, well-constructed wonders. But is and always has been an illusion

There were probably people 200, 300, 1000 years ago who thought "Everything is so ugly these days" or didn't care. It's not about what buildings look like, it's about how we live our lives

> But otherwise, the answer to most of the rest of the essay is: economics.

Correct proportions cost nothing. And that's just for starters.

And also, is there a movie named "Army Soldier II" with Ryan Reynolds in it, or was I just supposed to understand an oblique reference to something else?