WHY IS EVERYTHING SO UGLY NOW?

What Jameela Jamil’s “I Don’t Want Kids” Essay Reveals About Cynicism, Beauty, and Meaning

I recently watched a podcast episode between Alain de Botton and Alex O’Connor in which they discussed “Why Is Everything So Ugly Now?”

They were primarily focused on the bleak aesthetic of modern architecture, and, in their opinion, the main reason for this occurrence is due to society not being actively conscious of its surroundings, coupled with the postmodernism embraced by elite artists, always wanting to do something NEW, no matter how ugly and undigestible it is for the rest of us.

Instead of preparing us home-cooked nutritious meals to feed our essence, their ego insists we eat a salad with a piece of leather in it because… what an out of the box idea!

I agree with this analysis, but I’d push it even further…

Everything is ugly now…because WE have become so ugly.

The culture, the globalised everything, is, as my mother would say, a hodgepodge of ideas and values, and everything is a muddy-brown, having us all feel a little like pigs rolling around in a sty.

And as many in the West struggle with a sense of shared identity, good mental health, meaning, and cohesion, the environment around us has become a block of concrete here and disappearing trees over there.

I believe our exterior landscape and architecture are simply a reflection of our inner psyche: plastic square shapes and red brick. We are cheap, functional, and ready to be torn down for something cheaper and more efficient.

I came to this conclusion when analysing the degradation of our natural environment. Why on earth are we doing this to our only home? I wondered. It’s madness!

But then surveys show that nearly 46% of people in the EU reported symptoms of depression or anxiety in the past 12 months — we are not well, so why would we be motivated to clean up our room?

We don’t know what we are doing here…and it is, I believe, manifesting into a very bleak hoarder’s house. Maggots in the carpet, but still wondering why “I just don’t feel good.”

There are many factors to our collective depression and anxiety; loss of human connection, housing crisis, social media addiction, cost of living crisis…but we in the West are notably resource-rich. We have the basics. But we have lost a sense of community, social belonging, and being a part of a group. People have even started cancelling their family and friends who don’t align with them 100%.

Relationships are disposable in, dare I say it, our ugly, modern woke worldview.

Our spirits are not beautiful. We do not tend to them as required. We are not generous souls ready to forgive. We are reactive, impatient, performing virtue for followers instead of walking out the front door and lending a helping hand to our neighbours who might actually need the very support we claim to offer in abundance. Our demands for diversity come from a need to control and judge, not from anything remotely saintly.

It comes from a wounded child that has not been healed.

We are not beautiful.

Why are we so ugly now? That is the question.

At the highest in the hierarchy of needs, Maslow puts…

Moral development, purpose, and meaning.

We have none of these things. Not shared. Not sacred. We are not allowed to love our country; the culture our ancestors passed on to us is only ever allowed to be called “colonialism,” while we embrace Islamic culture, which never colonised anything ever. No, Sir! We are constantly taunted with our whiteness while we are told to be colour blind. We are bullying ourselves black and blue all day, every day…and wondering why we feel so sore and tender. We wonder why we can’t get anything done. We wonder why half the women in the West will be childless by 2030, but no one asks why a woman would be inspired to continue her bloodline when it’s so toxic.

The faith tradition, the Christian culture that we have traditionally passed on to us, has been thrashed within an inch of its life. What once sat at the top of the pecking order, the beauty we were all told to behold in awe and wonder - mother and child…has now become something to look down on. The continuation of human life itself has become naff, homely, icky, patriarchal…problematic, but two lesbian women buying sperm they carefully selected while complaining about capitalism is progress, is logical, is ethical.

And by embracing this anything goes worldview that is the opposite of our ancestors’ attempt to collectively move forward with truth, beauty, and meaning…I believe we have become quite…unseemly on the outside, unable to identify true beauty when we see it.

To the point we even have mainstream actresses like Cynthia Enrivo look like the grand antagonist from Roald Dahl’s Witches - bald head, pierced face, skeletal, drug-induced frame, and fingernails so long and sharp you could kill a small dog with them.

This, we are told, is beautiful.

Even though we instinctively feel repelled by such aesthetics, we have a culture telling us it’s just lovely.

When everything is beautiful, nothing is beautiful.

We applaud Cythnia, this they/them nonbinary human, when they stand in front of a mic and tell us they are oppressed for being “simply more,” while a woman at home loving her husband and three kids is completely ignored or bashed as a trad wife. At worst, she is enabling our patriarchal enemy…at best, she is just living out a lifestyle choice, remember…not ensuring the continuation of life itself.

A pet dog is as beautiful as a newborn baby.

The concept of concocting a child whose eye colour is selected and paid for is as beautiful as a child born from the expression of wild yet committed love between a man and a woman.

A man leaving his wife and newborn child to embark on an affair with Ariana Grande is as meaningful as building a solid family foundation.

An OnlyFans model is as respected as a nurse or a man who builds a company that actually provides a positive community service.

I was pushed to write this piece after reading Jameela Jamil’s article I DON’T WANT KIDS. I found it deeply disturbing, not the fact that this middle-aged woman didn’t want kids, but the fact that she felt so excited to share why.

All of her reasons were bleak and selfish.

• Children are snotty.

• I just care too much. The kind of “I’m a perfectionist” line a person uses in a job interview. It’s meant to make them sound fantastic, but we all see a gigantic red flag.

• OnlyFans.

• Patriarchy.

• “I can’t wait for all of us to be forgotten.

  It was this last one that really caught my attention. The nihilism and cynicism that are so prevalent and accepted nowadays.

This article, of course, got a lot of social media backlash to which Jamil responded with, and I’m paraphrasing here, “I was just having a laugh.”

Now, look, I understand this article by Jamil. This could have been written by me had I not become a mother. I had no maternal instinct, but as I explore here in Why I Won’t Shut Up About Motherhood…Even If It Annoys You….I believe a lot of women don’t have the instinct screaming loud and clear. Traditionally and biologically, motherhood is something nature decided. We found ourselves in the throes of love and lust, and then nine months later, we would open our eyes and be forced to grow up.

In my mid-20s, I once posted on social media that children were like “a disease.”

I was Jameela Jamil’s grumpier, uglier sister.

Just as I finished writing the above sentence, my six-year-old walked in and kissed me on the cheek and said, “Good morning, sunshine!”

So I feel a million times worse remembering that social media comment now.

How did I change? Why? I was the queen of cynicism and having a dark laugh. But having a child will crack open your cold, dead heart and give space for something new to grow through. But it wasn’t all natural. I had to work at it. I had to quit being ugly.

I got rid of a lot of my cynical “I’m just joking” because I realised these just jokes were just plain ugly and were leading me to have ugly thoughts, ugly actions, ugly manifestations in the world.

The words we speak and type have power.

The word creates the world, I discovered.

So, even though it was a huge part of my identity and something I was praised and applauded for when I got little praise or applause for much else, I quit.

I quit the same way I quit drinking. It was quite a hard addiction to give up, my hardest to date, because I LOVED a good roasting, and there is nothing easier in the world than criticizing and scoffing. And as I said, I was so darn good at it.

But I realised these burns I’d think and say and feel…were burning me. I was burning myself alive with ugly ideas because I thought they were cool - The shaved head and razor sharp fingernails equivalent of funny.

My sharpness was clever; it cut people and made them take notice of me and my pain and plight. No one would notice me if I started being sweet and childlike and warm and welcoming and loving my enemy. In a culture that acclaims the clever and holds up the “oppressed”…No one would notice little old me if I were jolly and grateful.

But I knew deep down that it was the most beautiful thing.

It was the more beautiful choice, so I started to take it even though I knew it would make people wince…I would go there.

As Ram Dass so wisely states, “The game is not about becoming somebody…it’s about becoming nobody.”

Right now, we have billions of people desperate to become somebodies who refuse to melt into their essence and create a cohesive and harmonious culture of nobodies.

A few years ago, walking through Madrid, a friend stopped me outside of a cathedral and said, “Isn’t this remarkable. This small section here…that was someone’s entire life’s work.” The beauty in the building before us took belief, community, dedication, sacrifice… and faith.

The work that went into that piece of architecture that made the city a sight to see centuries later was about becoming nobody instead of becoming somebody.

So, if we are wondering why everything is so ugly now…perhaps we should consider WHO is making everything so ugly now.

Who are these people? What do they believe? What are they here for?

And if we look to the past and pine over the epic art of our ancestors, perhaps we can learn from what guided these tired spirits to cobble together such splendor that stands the test of time.

And perhaps, just maybe…things will start to be a little prettier.

Watch your thoughts, they become your words.
Watch your words, they become your actions.
Watch your actions, they become your habits.
Watch your habits, they become your character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.

- Lao Tzu

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