nothing is beautiful anymore

i know you see it too, and if you don't, i envy you. ignorance is bliss, isn't it?

 
the further the human race gets from God, the uglier it all gets. whether it's architecture, art, writing, or even people in general, something beautiful is few and far between these days. don't get me wrong, i could find beauty in just about anything, and i mean anything, even a corpse, if you think about it for long enough. what i'm talking about is things that are objectively beautiful, things that make you stop what you're doing, and gaze with your heart, and not your eyes.
 
if you're an american who has ever spent any time in european cities, i'm sure you know exactly what i'm talking about. the buildings that were built more than two centuries ago are completely gorgeous, and on top of that, still standing all this time later. so not only were things built more appealing, but they were built better. i mean, if you walk around a city like florence, or paris, you are just consistently in awe at the architecture. the buildings themselves are art. when i was in venice, italy, there were multiple times that i actually broke down in tears just looking at the place. every direction you pointed your eyes there was something more beautiful than the last. you could barely comprehend how places like that were made by human hands. as you drive through a city like rome your mind just goes absolutely wild picturing all the effort and energy put into every single detail and every single alley. when you are near the coliseum you could literally hear the now dead crowds roaring and feel the energy of the area in your chest, you could hear the swords clanking together and flesh being beaten and cut. the beauty is simply endless, i can't even fathom it, i don't think anyone on earth could if they really thought about it. it's like thinking about infinity, the edge of the universe, a thousand light years, our minds just aren't built to comprehend things like that. 
 
this is certainly not the case in america. in america, profit is the focus of everything, and that means using the cheapest materials that will pass an inspection, and the quickest building techniques possible, because as we all know paying someone's salary is very expensive. this leaves little room to build something worth looking at, and little room for soul. it is blatantly visible even to the dullest pair of eyes, whether they understand it or not. here in the united states, everything is one size fits all, cold, made by a machine or through cheap labor using foreigners, absent of passion, and love. no buildings are unique anymore, they're all the same, boring and flavorless.
 
one of the saddest and lesser spoken about consequences of this is that unless you are born and raised in one of these modern built places, it is nearly impossible to become attached to it. now i did not grow up in paris, i don't have a french bone in my body, and i've only been there twice. but if hypothetically some massive, evil organization bought that whole city and bulldozed the whole place, i would be genuinely upset about it for the rest of my life. why? because it would be the destruction of one of humanities most amazing achievements. for the rest of my days i would be thinking to myself that i wish i spent some more time there before it was gone. these modern cities we have now in my own home country, i wouldn't feel a thing if it was all torn down tomorrow. the only thing that would be lost is money. who would care? it's all the same here anyway, it's all dollar stores and burger kings and a dunkin donuts on every corner. there's no spirit, there's no soul to be lost here. just mile after mile of mall after mall. nobody cares and you could see it. you could see just how much people don't care here. in the major u.s. cities there's trash all over the place, graffiti on everything, nobody takes care of themselves, people leave the house in their pajamas, smelling foul, and there's rampant vandalism and crime.
 
art has especially taken a serious beating since the beginning of the industrial revolution.  and i don't mean to beat the "modern art sucks" dead horse, but how come nothing painted in the last 200 years has been as impressive as almost any painting from before 1860? just take a look at the "art" tab on this blog. these are paintings that i and just about anyone with eyes considers beautiful. have you looked at modern art anytime recently? are you telling me that all of a sudden artists across the globe lost the ability? i have a theory for why this is, and that is that people no longer have the attention span to create things like caravaggio or bosch did. there will certainly never be another da vinci or michelangelo ever again. everyone is too fat, entertained, and happy to literally go insane creating something amazing. why would they? it's even worse now with artificial intelligence, pretty soon we might not even have actors or screenwriters. it's all circling the drain.
 
for anything that wasn't created by God to be considered beautiful, it takes an extreme degree of difficulty to create. things that are a dime a dozen cannot be beautiful, because then everything could be beautiful and that would render the word meaningless. beautiful things take pain and suffering, they take sacrifice. they take long periods of time, and the creator must have a passion for what he is doing, he feels compelled to do it, his conscience won't leave him alone unless he's working on it. he's not doing it because it's his job. reluctance does not exist in beauty. beauty comes from love.

loss

so you’ve lost something, someone. or maybe, you’ve lost everything. now what?

i get it, awful shit happens, but what are you going to do? claim victimhood? of course you’re a victim. everyone is a victim, life sucks, it sucks so bad. i've thought about putting a gun in my mouth a million fucking times, if not, more. to live is to suffer, that’s what every religion since the beginning of religion has been trying to tell us. they’ve been damn near screaming it at us. “YOU WILL SUFFER!” this may seem dismal, but that terrible fact is a blessing, because to grow you must suffer first. Christ does not promise us a life void of pain, but He does promise us the strength to endure. we don’t get the luxury of becoming strong and wise without first going through things that make us want to die and make us question existence itself.

you can’t be strong and have an easy life at the same time. very few people on this planet live an “easy” life. some people are luckier than others, that's about as far as it goes. no one gets a free ride. life beats everyone down at some point. you could argue that you have suffered more than others, and maybe you have. except, here's the thing about that; nobody cares.

what makes a man is not the suffering he endures, it's what he does with that suffering. far too many of us become docile, and subordinate when faced with our failures, we are afraid of going through it again.

we fear embarrassing ourselves again, so we never try again.
we fear a broken heart, so we never love again.
we fear failure, so we don't take risks.
we fear getting rejected, so we don't ask.

imagine who we could've been, had we not let fear get in the way.