Something Beautiful Would Be Nice in anticlimatic

I feel like you can kind of look around in three directions:

You can look towards the past, to different eras and degrees.
You can look around at the present, to different specific physical places.
And you can look towards the future, to different potential outcomes.

Aging seems to adjust the relevance of each. Tuning one out, while tuning one up. Like a process. Oddly enough, I felt like I had more personal historical lore when I was 19 years old than I do now- more than double that lifespan. It’s not that I lost it all, exactly, I just kind of forgot about it- or demoted it in relevance.

Relevance demotions are an accelerating problem, I have noticed. Aging is the process of watching the entire world you knew dissolve like a 3 day old sandcastle at the beach. The feed and farm supply store might have been a hub the working class in the world I remember best, but now it’s a shuttered ruin next to the only business left in the area- a brand new hard cider and winery, freshly gentrified from an empty warehouse.

Different. Better than nothing. Honestly kind of cool?
But it’s not the feed and farm supply world. The relevance of that place has been demoted.

…

I enjoy the present, at least to the best of my ability. The future is grim any way I slice it. Not just for me as I leave the better half of life behind for the sub-par bonus half, but for everyone. The past remains the most charming and intoxicating and fascinating direction for me to peer, but I can force the present to be charming if I have to- at least in small doses in my own life on my own steam.

But it seems as though someone killed Art, and the respect for it, at some point recently. Maybe around the pandemic? Maybe prior. Art seems to be gone: bravery, audacity, honesty, brutality, savagery, singular visions, personal triumphs- all scrubbed from the zeitgeist. Either it’s replaced with this creepy “content” crafted by committee and algorithm and globalist moral homogeneity, or eliminated and ignored completely.

The present is better than the future, but I wish more people were working to make it the kind of present I sadly have to call the past now.