How Did The Modern World Get So Ugly? - Sheehan Quirke - #1022

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What is beauty?

**Sheehan Quirke** (0:03)
Some hell of a question. I think the word is overused, misunderstood. The best way to think about beauty, the most helpful way, is to think of it as synonymous with the word love. Once you do that, all the complications kind of fade away. I think beauty is basically love manifest in the physical world. But anyway, so that's how I think of beauty, because I think-

**Chris Williamson** (0:29)
Because you're a hopeless romantic.

**Sheehan Quirke** (0:31)
Oh, I'm a hopeless romantic. Well, I'm a hopeful romantic, let's say. But I think the problem is, once you start talking about beauty, what is beauty? It's kind of like asking what is art? But it's a very, very interesting question. But you can end up talking, we could spend the whole two hours of how long we're going to be here, just talking about, well, maybe beauty is this, maybe beauty is that, but what are this? Same with art. I think it's very helpful to agree on a pretty simple definition and then move on to the more important stuff. So taking beauty, I think people, obsess too much over the idea of beauty, like is the modern world beautiful? Is architecture beautiful? Is design beautiful? Is this room beautiful? I don't think it's helpful. I think more helpful words are interesting, charming and meaningful. They're the words I prefer to use.

**Chris Williamson** (1:14)
Delineate those for me.

**Sheehan Quirke** (1:16)
So, well, I think interesting is the opposite of boring. And I think, you know, a lot of what I write about online and what generates an awful lot of interest is when you talk about the ugliness of the modern world. But I think boringness is a much more important and powerful word. Because again, ugly and beautiful, they feel very subjective. When you say boring, it's a lot easier to agree on what is boring. And I think something being boring is a bigger problem. I've often said to my friends, the one thing human beings cannot stand is being bored. We can put up with a lot of stuff. We can put up with suffering and misery.

**Chris Williamson** (1:53)
And ugliness.

**Sheehan Quirke** (1:54)
And ugliness, we can put up with that. But being bored is the worst thing. And I think actually being bored has driven a lot of events and movements in human history. I often think a lot of revolutionaries end up being revolutionaries just because they're bored. And a revolution is exciting. It's the chance to be part of something. And anyway, yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (2:13)
Okay. So we've got interesting, which is the opposite of boring. Presumably sort of engaging, captures attention, maybe memorable.

**Sheehan Quirke** (2:21)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then charming. Now, I love the word charming. It's probably my favorite word. It's my word of the year. You know charm when you see it. And charm, I think, is a kind of playfulness. It's not too serious. And it also respects the person looking at something or viewing something. When you make it charming, there's no obvious use to charm. There's not really a profit margin.
Yeah, exactly. But when it's charming, it's like, oh wow, the person who made this thing, has thought about me. They wanted to give me something to look at, something to make me smile. I think that's charm. Charmingness is kind of like playfulness, I guess.

**Chris Williamson** (3:03)
Whimsy in the experience.

**Sheehan Quirke** (3:04)
Yeah. And it doesn't have to be like, you know, Wes Anderson level of whimsy. But it just has to show that there's something about this object that isn't just interesting in the straight sense of like having something to it other than what is basically necessary.
But also, yeah, makes you smile and kind of reminds you. In a way, anyway, charm what it does. It gets you out of your thoughts, you know, walking around and, you know, miserable thinking about, got to email this man. I think it's all the time. I hate email. So I've got to email this person. I've got to read Chris Williamson's text or whatever. And then, you know, then I see something charming and I smile and, you know what you don't...

**Chris Williamson** (3:38)
Which is also Chris Williamson's text.

**Sheehan Quirke** (3:41)
Indeed. And then you think, well, isn't so bad. And then finally, meaningful, which I guess, I mean, this conversation is more about the physical world than anything else. And meaningful basically can mean a few different things. But a good example is when you walk around a town and you find that the way things have been designed reflects something about that town, its people and its history. I think that's what meaning is. And it kind of brings you out of this generic, standardized, convenient, hyper-optimized, online modern world. And it brings you back into the reality we're living in, the one that we have been since the dawn of civilization. So meaningful, charming and interesting are much more useful words than beauty. And I think also they're much less inflammatory. Like if I put out on X or something about the modern world is so ugly or look at this palace of Asai so beautiful, people start getting angry about it. But you say it's interesting, you say it's charming or you take a sort of a modern building and say, well, this is boring. People say, yeah, actually, you know what? You have a point, it is boring. It's funny how quickly you can take the charge out of these conversations by using better words.