The Two Lies That Made Our World Beige

Two lies, fake music, and our path to redemption.

We all live with a great lie, but for the longest time, I lived with two.

My lies weren’t secrets, white lies, or tall tales. They were deceptions that resisted inspection and light. They touched on the nature of the world itself. Some might have called these deceptions mistakes, but I did not. And although they were not lies that I had created, they were, nevertheless, lies I was charged with perpetuating. Lies of the intellectual status quo.

The first lie: As time marches on, everything improves. That our society is destined to be more free, fair, and beautiful than the generations preceding it. That those who live in beige, will one day be raised up to technicolor. That was the first lie.

The second lie: Our choices are what drive this upward motion. That progress is a byproduct of willful selection. That each time we choose where to eat, what to read, what to buy, where to go to school, and where to live—we are participating in the discovery of a new Eden. That was the second lie.

II.

For the longest time, I believed that if people were allowed to act freely and fairly, whatever was best would emerge as a result of their choices. The best restaurants would thrive, and the worst restaurants would perish. The best cars would sell, and the worst cars would rust. With enough time, I believed, people would choose their way to paradise.

But the more I looked around, the murkier this lens became. If we’re always choosing what is best for us, then that which proliferates is better, and that which disappears is worse. So IKEA particle-board tables are better, and handmade wooden tables are worse. Virtual lecture halls are better, and in-person classrooms are worse. Taylor Swift is better, Ford F-150’s are better, online dating is better, and Facebook is better.

When something is better, it’s more profitable, spreads faster, and is more widely consumed. This is, after all, the meritocratic utopian premise of Capitalism. But if we’re always choosing the best, and discarding the rest, why is there an absolute shitification of damn nearly everything?

Why has my $1,200 phone become literal junk after five years? Why has food become simultaneously more expensive and less nutritious? Why have all cars become mid-sized and egg-shaped? Why do we live like sardines, six-hundred people deep in apartment complexes, and not know a single one of our neighbors? And while we’re talking about apartment complexes—why do they all perpetrate the same dead design aesthetic? Why does the average marriage only last 8 years, and why—if everything is only supposed to get better—is our life expectancy getting worse?

III.

I recently read a piece of investigative journalism, where the author discovered that Spotify has been stuffing our playlists with fake music. Playlists like Calming Classical, Smooth Jazz, and Ambient Essentials are mired with these songs. Most surprisingly, Spotify has been doing this for years.

What’s a fake song? It’s a piece of music, designed by a production studio, for passive consumption. They’re recorded, in bulk, to be inoffensive, unopinionated, and slip right under our conscious level of listening. It’s a soulless type of music meant to be listened to, but never heard. Unloved, but unhated. A fake song is apathy set to tune.

What’s the point of that? Fake songs improve Spotify’s bottom line. By signing special deals for this type of music, they’re able to pay significantly less in royalties each time you listen. This siphons streams away from musicians—who are working in earnest to bring authentic, original, and meaningful art into the world—and towards big lifeless production houses.

IV.

The most convincing lies always start out as truths. And the notion that our choices drive the upward motion of society, is one such fallen truth. It held meaning not too long ago, when you could walk down Main Street and compare apples to apples. When, with a reasonable amount of mental effort, you could hold all the relevant information in mind to make educated decisions. But that method of consideration is no longer possible.

Nothing is straight forward anymore, and everything is engineered to be incomprehensible. One music streaming service charges per month, another charges per song, another has exclusive artists, and another has higher audio quality. You’re no longer comparing apples to apples. You’re comparing apples, to oranges, to mangos, to cottage cheese.

It’s the intention of those who create and then commercialize the world, to overwhelm our senses. It’s their job to hand us plate after plate of attentional fine china. Until eventually we’re frozen in place, holding a clattering tower of white porcelain. If we can’t process all the information we are given, we are primed for passivity.

Which means that we’ve actually transcended distraction and information triage. We’ve transcended Tweets, tipping culture, SHEIN, and spam calls—and moved clearly, and wholly into a state of apathy.

We’ve given up, and therefore elected the status quo. We’ve listened to hundreds of hours of fake songs, and raised no objection. Inaction is now the expectation. And figuring out where else to get our music from, has become just one herculean task amongst a deluge of herculean tasks. It’s too much of a pain in the ass to choose anything anymore.

V.

Look around. Look at how beige, and cheap, and acceptable things have become. It really crept up on us, didn’t it?

It’s spread to all corners of our personal and professional lives. All of our meetings now follow the same format. All of our emails are now written in the same apologetic, neutral, and acquiescent tone—and that was before they were written by AI. All of our AirBnbs, from San Francisco to Singapore, look exactly the same. It’s not hyperbolic to suggest that our generation can be defined by normality, and predictability. The tall poppies have been cut, and my fear is they will never be allowed to grow back.

And this, right here, is the crux of the problem. This is the implication of carrying around my twin lies.

If we’re too flummoxed, or tired, or distracted to consider an alternative to Spotify—we’ll just keep paying month after month for something that’s getting qualitatively worse. Spotify takes our inaction as a signal that we don’t actually care about real artists, or real music. So they cut costs, and stuff our ears with even more fake tracks.

When we resign to apathy, the vibrancy of options we have grown accustomed to, starts to diminish. Everything is pulled towards the center. Until finally, we’re face to face with a beige canvas. Inoffensive, unopinionated; loved by no one—but more importantly hated by no one.

The world becomes dull when you stop demanding vibrance.

VI.

Reviving the vibrancy of our world will be no small task. But the alternative is so disastrous, and so dystopian, that I believe we have no other choice.

The way we start sowing the next Cambrian Explosion, or Italian Renaissance, is not through passive acceptance of what we are given—but by nurturing a single seed. It’s by recognizing that my first lie, was indeed a lie. The world does not get better by default, and progress is not guaranteed.

It’s also by realizing that my second lie, is really just a half-truth. We can choose what is better and what is worse. But our senses have been so muddied by the sheer quantity of misdirection, that lately we’ve forfeit our responsibility to do so. The unspoken half of this half-truth, is that inaction is still a choice.

So how do we undo so much? How do we nurture the single seed that I’m suggesting? First, it’s imperative to choose to care. We need to find and fight for great quality, great art, and great work—this much is certain. But we can’t choose to care about everything. Which means that we need to drop the swaying tower of fine china. We need to let it all crash to the ground. Only with empty hands, can we choose—willfully and in earnest—one single thing to pick up in its stead.

With our single selection—whether that’s aesthetics, film, communication, fashion, software, transportation, textiles, agriculture, community, design, etc.—we must then devote ourselves to its cultivation and elevation. We need to become stewards of vibrance.

Then we need to make it our responsibility to develop a rich, contextual taste for our chosen domain. But the domain we choose should not be taken lightly. If we select something at random, we won’t have the endurance required to be lifelong shepherds of its betterment. By not taking this seriously, we risk undermining the very nature of our responsibility, slipping back into our apathetic malaise.

I’ll make this more concrete. If you love film, then pay for film. Go to the movies. Write about cinema. Produce a podcast about Hollywood. When you see a movie that’s great, tell everyone about it. When you see one that’s bad—or even average—drag it through the dirt. Take no prisoners. Develop an informed, thoughtful, and cultivated opinion on everything film-related. And it doesn’t have to stop there. You can be a participant, not just a spectator.

It is only through apathy that the world has been allowed to become so beige, so lifeless, and so cold. It is only by us not giving a shit about music, that Spotify has been able to seed our playlists with songs that no one actually likes.

The way back is paved with The Bricks of Taste and The Mortar of Sincerity. With these two, we can construct and curate the world we live in. We can curve the trajectory of human experience ever so slightly upwards.

—Zac

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