Transcript:
Does life feel more oppressive lately, aside from living in a failed state that is actively collapsing around us? I mean physically and aesthetically oppressive: gray and lifeless like... Does just walking around outside feel different than it did when you were a kid? Well a kid who was born before the year 2000?
Everything from new buildings, industrial design, cars, guard rails and The Branding of consumer packaged Goods is uglier now. Things like park benches went from being ornate rot iron resting places to torture devices for the unhoused that are so unwelcoming not even people with houses want to sit on them. And sometimes they're not just ugly, they're non-existent and removed altogether. "Sorry pregnant people and basically anyone with a disability, pull yourselves up by your bootstraps! What do you mean, you don't have legs?"
Railings had a similar design to rot iron benches, and are now something straight out of an episode of Andor's (1) dystopian cyber hell. Company rebrands are sleek and forgettable, footwear brands make nondescript facsimiles of what only resembles a shoe, and architecture used to be an inspiring thing to behold; now everything is a five over one housing complex that drives anyone with even the slightest OCD (obsessive–compulsive disorder) in saying, what the hell is this?
Artistry and character have slowly been supplanted by efficiency and function over the last, I don't know, decade or so, when minimalism had a Renaissance thanks in no small part to the hegemony of Steve Jobs's apple and people like Joshua Fields Milburn and Ryan Nicodemus, prophetising the wondrous benefits of living a minimalist lifestyle.
You may recognize them as the minimalist guys who wrote the first of four books in 2011, and then made a documentary for Netflix in 2016 that was the most pretentious idiotic sh*t on the planet. And that was the year Trump first got elected...
I'm not saying they or Jobs single-handedly influenced the cold sterile design of everyday objects we see today, but they certainly popularized it as a movement and brought it into people's homes.
And then there were people like James Altucher, a wealthy serial entrepreneur who said he gave up his permanent home life goals and negative emotions, threw away his college diploma and said, “I don't hold on to all the things Society tells me to hold on to”. Now he carries nothing but a bag of clothes and a backpack containing a computer, an iPad and a smartphone. “I have zero other possessions”.
How obnoxiously pretentious; a decade later, and we're stuck with this bastardized version of minimalism being applied to everything. Somewhere along the line someone misinterpreted minimalism as mid-century modern, but get rid of any color and make everything out of aluminum and concrete.
Minimalism has been a design philosophy since the mid 20th century, so it's not new and as far as I understand it was about reducing a subject down to only the most basic elements out of necessity or artistic intent.
In the context of post-war era industrial design it's a good philosophy to live by because materials are scarce and minimalism functions best when working within constraints: it forces you to think outside the box sometimes and apply more creative problem solving techniques that you normally wouldn't have to worry about with abundance. Applying the philosophy more broadly today also makes sense to a degree due to the cost of materials and labour to actually make something more intricate and detailed. But in exchange, we've gotten soulless Ikea furniture masquerading as minimalism using cheap materials in order to increase profit margins and the dreaded millennial gray void interior design trend that every house flipper applies, because they only need to buy one color of paint. For many, living a minimalist lifestyle it's not really a choice because 66 percent of the U.S. population is living paycheck to paycheck, and they're not intentionally living in a studio apartment furnished with nothing but a bed and a TV, but because they're broke.
On the flip side, when it is a choice it comes across as elitist and unattainable. Minimalism became a populist movement by the wealthy as a way to reject past norms of rich folks flaunting a garish lifestyle on MTV cribs, so the pendulum swung the other way where people like Kim Kardashian now live in monochromatic temples of nothingness.
Curb (2) senior story producer Diana Bud says these homes are impossible: they have no signs of life; there is something psychologically soothing about them, there's a lot of order and calming colors, I just don't think that most people can live like that.
Minimalism might also be a bit racist too: modernist architects like Adolf Loose often defined everything else as uncivilized, where ornamentation was a kind of savagery, posing the reductive modernism of white Europeans as the ultimate answer to all aesthetic problems.
During its resurgence in the 2010s every design major and tech bro creamed their jeans over a minimalist lifestyle who were suspiciously also the same people you'd hear complain about having to see unhoused people during their commute and use racist dog whistles when talking about local crime rates. They had the means to decorate their homes like the interior of an Apple store with expensive furniture made out of aluminum and rare wood - it was probably sourced from an illegal lumber operation in the Amazonian rainforest - and now you can't walk down the street without being confronted with hostile minimalist architecture and design.
This is ultra minimalism that isn't just an aesthetic preference but a larger societal issue with real consequences for culture community and our mental health.
It's the small-M minimalism that's infiltrating everything and stripping public spaces and everyday objects of detail and character.
Phone booths... phone booths, public benches, doorbells, logos, everything is reduced to its most basic form regardless if the reduction makes the thing better, leaving it devoid of cultural significance or unique identity.
Design, even when talking about something like a bollard isn't just about function: it can represent the identity and culture of the place in which it exists.
Take the iconic red English phone booth: its design made it an iconic cultural artifact that people associate with British identity; painting it red wasn't just an aesthetic choice but a functional and creative way to make the public service stand out in a busy city.
Pay phones are basically obsolete now but when they did still exist in the US, instead of blending function and creativity to create something significant they were made in a way that favored efficiency over adding anything of value beyond simple functionality.
Opportunities to enrich culture don't come in big displays alone like a skyscraper or a sculpture in a park, they can be as small as something like a pay phone.
The US didn't have awesome Tardis phone booth (3) - I know the Tardis was blue, get out of the comments - but we did have our own version that became synonymous with Bill and Ted's time machine that added to the culture of the80s.
By the end of the 2000s they were bland, forgettable and culturally meaningless, and something you actively avoided because they were always sticky for some reason. I guess in that way their cultural significance was to just avoid them because you were probably in a pretty rough neighborhood.
When everything is stripped of its identity in favour of clean or neutral designs it creates a world that feels inhumane. This type of minimalism has broader cultural implications because it intentionally erases detail and character and history, often justified by cost cutting measures mandated by public works and government entities that don't value creativity or design anymore. It's why most government buildings look like prisons even when they're not prisons. How is this is not a prison!
We end up slowly homogenizing public spaces and contributing to a lack of appreciation for craftsmanship. Some people argue that minimalism is actually more inclusive because it avoids divisive details or disagreements about taste; "if you like ornate details put them in your own home!" As if that's not eraser or that the cultural landscape we live in should be reduced to neutral sterile spaces because someone might find the filigree and window molding difficult to clean or the Gargoyles on buildings too scary... or too horny.
I swear if you showed these people the interior of a maximum security prison cell and told them it's a million dooll minimalist home they wouldn't be able to tell the difference!
Minimalism prioritizes a dull contemptuous functionality, stripping away any spark of joy or creativity that would be a step too far, even for Marie Kondo (4).
Minimalism is only inclusive in the sense that it alienates people from culture, and insist that everyone look and think the same. It doesn't account for class, religion, tradition or race, and it often ends up serving only a few select demographics: those damn coastal elites...
The idea that neutral or clean design is somehow more inclusive is an illusion. It's a design philosophy that is all too often weaponized to erase the rich diversity of society. These decisions, though often defended as economic or pragmatic, start to reflect the very roots of fascism.
... Bet you didn't think you'd uh... get a lesson about fascism in a video on minimalism did you?
Fascism doesn't always appear as violence or people getting rounded up in the streets and put in internment camps: it can start with seemingly innocent decisions that favour uniformity over diversity, eraser over expression; it creeps into everyday life stripping away character and turning our environments into controlled spaces without any sense of belonging or history, until we're all wearing gray jumpsuits working in an orwellian labor camp after committing thought crime!
Le Corbusier was an extremely influential architect, product designer and town planner. He was also a proven fascist; he stated that the house was a machine for living, and compared them to industrial ships and automobiles. He was also fond of a theory called purism which rejected adornment and loved the colour white; is it any surprise that he promoted an aesthetic style that called for cultural eraser? Particularly culture from the global South. He loved ancient Greek columns: is it any surprise that an aesthetic that calls for simple, clean lines was embraced by capitalists, as it's perfect for mass production?
This clean slate becomes an authoritarian mandate to eradicate anything that doesn't conform to an imposed ideal of functionality or impossibly efficient perfection.
Ultra minimal brutalist design can lead to social decay as well, which is actually not very efficient!
Studies show that this kind of architecture leads to more vandalism, less appreciation, and an overall colder, less community-oriented society. People are less likely to treat their environment with care when the space they occupy feels devoid of meaning and is itself neglected, left to deteriorate. Why do you think every one of those old pay phones were sticky, and also tagged with graffiti, or had the actual phone ripped out of the cord? This kind of minimalist design signals to the user that there was no care put into its creation, so what incentive is there that we care about its existence?
The continued embrace of minimalism risks creating a world that's not only visually sterile but emotionally detached, where culture stagnates.
The responsibility to embrace more thoughtful design falls on us all as individuals pushing for change, and resisting the temptation to let soulless functionality dominate.
There's a reductio ad absurdum of beautiful comfortable organic spaces like this to sad beige TickTock-influencer-mom homes like this.
And this kind of thinking is how you end up bulldozing a beautiful glade to make room for a parking lot or a Walmart Super Center.
We can all agree nature is beautiful not because it's clean and grows in perfectly straight lines, but because it's messy and alive and vibrant. Nature is the original maximalist designer and it's actually more organized than it appears, or what a minimalist could ever come up with. Not everything that looks disorganized actually is.
Look, I'm not saying everything should be a maximalist Cracker Barrel (5) of random junk nailed to the walls, or distracting overdesigned telephone poles, or anything, just like, add a little bit of character!
Maximalism is often dismissed as being chaotic or busy, but there's a fundamental truth about maximalist design that makes it compelling at least: you might be overwhelmed walking into a maximalist space, but you might also feel like you've stepped into a world that has something, anything, to say, as opposed to entering what feels like Patrick Bateman's (6) kill room - even he had pictures hanging on his walls for God's sake!
Living like this isn't even practical! Calling minimalism practical is just an excuse for poor design by people without taste. How is it any more practical than being a hoarder who can't find their pots and pans under all their old newspapers they've collected? At least they own pots and pans! They might be mismatched but they have them.
Minimalist designs are touted as being easier to clean, cheaper and more functional - which may be true in some cases but, again, at what cost?
In the case of minimalist car design like the Cyber Truck (7) - a monument to minimalist overcompensation - it could mean getting you and your whole family killed because sometimes minimalism isn't actually the better option! You see, Elon thought it was a good idea to daisy chain every electronic control together on what is essentially the same wire in the car: he saved a lot in copper wiring, in exchange for the entire car losing power when you blow a speaker! On normal cars, everything has a separate bus or switch, so when the windshield wipers lose power you can still at least turn on your emergency lights and drive the fu**ing thing home.
So the argument that minimalism is somehow more efficient is scientifically inaccurate!
Even when cars don't have the resolution of a PS1 video game, they all look like a robot's chad! I'm not a car guy by any means, but cars used to be bad fu**ing ass, or at the very least unique. The Dodge Challenger, the Lincoln Continental, the AMC Pacer and the Ford fu**ing Bronco!
Modern cars all look AI generated, were the only design suggestions were that they must include the necessary components required to legally be able to call them a car. These boring uninspired electric razors on wheels line our streets now against a brutalist cityscape populated with even more ugly gray totalitarian utilities and buildings devoid of any depth of character, and it drives me fu**ing crazy!
To extend an olive branch, thoughtful minimalism can be beautiful, but it's the ultra minimalism that turns environments into creepy corporate spaces.
You know those towns that have such a weird unsettling vibe, because they're super corporate and it's nothing but like apartment buildings, and then a bunch of like random generic restaurants, like a random salad store inside of an apartment building, an orange theory a random French fish and like a random Mexican restaurant, and then there's just like nothing but buildings that all look the same.
Compare a beautifully crafted lamp post that was still probably able to be mass-produced and relatively affordable to a uniform steel pole: the former invites at least some level of admiration or contemplation while the latter just exists.
The real danger lies in overapplying minimalism to everything, especially in public spaces where people frequent: these things shape our experience of the world even subconsciously, and when they become mere functional objects they take away from the vibrancy of daily life.
And for those defending minimalism: you're defending capitalist driven design whose banality bolsters authoritarianism. Beauty comes from time, energy and intention, and when artists and architects and designers are given the space to create beauty and meaning, even in simple things like lamp posts and benches or street signs, it encourages not just creativity but a deeper appreciation in everyone who interacts with those objects even passively.
The time and care put into creating such objects, rather than them simply being extruded by a machine, have a ripple effect on society and culture: it encourages us to value craftsmanship, and slows people down to appreciate their surroundings rather than rush through a world designed purely for functionality that assumes an individual's value is not in their ability to also create something unique or appreciate art and design, but by how much labour they can produce. "You don't have time to stop and smell the roses or admire that architecture! You have to maximize shareholder value from a concrete box for a company that pays you 1500th of what the CEO makes! Now get back to work you Cog!"
When in vacation we visit places with ancient history or deep cultural identity to experience that culture of a different society and the craftsmanship of other peoples; you don't go to Iowa to behold the majesty of the aluminum sighting on a strip mall. We want to marvel at the beauty of antiquity and art made by thoughtful and provocative artists and designers. These structures act as sparks of divinity, reminding us what Humanity can achieve when inspired, and how unique a species we are, even if it's applied to something as simple and mundane as a doorbell.
We're often told that happiness comes from appreciating the small things, but in a minimalist world where everything is underwhelming and mundane, what is there to appreciate? Take a look at the right angles on that doorbell: woo wee!
Minimalist designs that prioritize function over beauty strip away these moments of awe and presence, making it harder to feel connected to the world around us. A society that favours ultra minimalism may save money, but in doing so loses its connection to creativity, history and culture.
Unfortunately, convincing the department of lamp post and bollards to redesign their lamp post and bollards is not really a priority nowadays, and eventually every new neighborhood is going to be a bunch of uneven cube apartment buildings stacked on top of a whole foods. The charm of premodern cathedrals and opera houses and cars and packaging and products is being eroded by efficient functional minimalist design, and it bums me out every time I go outside to run errands in one of these corporate plazas.
I really wish there was a better ending to this video than everything is ugly and I hate it here... I guess a call to action is, if you can afford to buy something like a house, please for the love of God, don't strip the character out of it, and definitely don't take design tips from two guys who decorated their homes like a hospital waiting room.
There's enough fascism in the world already so let's not allow it to invade our public and private spaces either in the name of efficient and practical design.
That's the video thanks so much for sticking around if you made it this far that means you're special.
Footnotes:
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andor_(TV_series)
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_Your_Enthusiasm
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TARDIS
4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Kondo
5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracker_Barrel
6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Bateman
7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Cybertruck