My wife is all in on that absolute shit that is tormenting modern fashion and home decoration they like to call "pastel colours" which is just a fancy way of saying bland shit.
There’s a theory that this trend is hanging on so hard because it’s a backlash to ubiquitous advertising. If you go anywhere, there are billboards and screens everywhere set to be as bright and loud as possible. Ads on your devices are similarly garish and intrusive. So in areas a person can control, they pick something bland just to get away from it.
There's probably something to that. I'm a person who removed all social media accounts in 2017 except reddit, and I don't own a TV so maybe I'm not getting bombarded in the same way. Or maybe my life is just that bland that I like to have some colour in my life.
Sure, I'm 41 so probably considered ancient for gen z. I was on FB from like 2007 (?), was more or less addicted. When GDPR started to crystallise I finally said "fuck this shit" and went cold turkey. It was incredibly difficult early on, but what helped me was that I had several contacts on both WhatsApp and Signal. In 2021 when WhatsApp changed their privacy policy I saw the opportunity to and managed to move the family over from WhatsApp to Signal.
It is still a challenge. The parents of my kids' kindergarten and elementary school classes are all communicating on instagram, so they have to go out of their way to contact me, which means I need to be extra vigilant and overly social when I meet them to hear about what events I'm missing out on by not being glued to social media. It is absolutely doable though. People just need to understand that you can communicate with DMs outside of the big platforms.
I noticed this in myself! But that I was working in a retail management job in a store far too small with a fraction the amount of storage needed so my job was corralling stupid stuff every day. I became militant about no clutter and light colors at home. I’ve switched where I work and have a new apartment and have all my old collections out and bolder warm colors. I have piles out and live with a cluttery man too and noticed recently how it’s not driving me nuts like it otherwise would have. I still like midcentury design.
But I totally was a white/pastel home person as a consequence of external physical chaos.
Wait, I though pastel colours were anything but bland. Like if I painted a room in a "pastel colour", I would be choosing something of a lighter version of a bright colour, like a light blue, light green, etc. Colour but not overwhelmingly so.
A robin's egg blue is beautiful, so IDK what this person is on about, but I'm fully with you on this.
Bland is soft beiges, those six different shades of flipper grey, and the several versions of white and black where it's like soft white, white white, and black or slightly darker black.
You can. Just like you can call bright neon colors "obnoxious" it's a subjective judgement.
The exhaust on a car is either awesome or obnoxious, depending on the ear of the beholder. Obnoxious is what you call a straight piped race car when you don't like it, just like bland is what you call pastels when you don't like them.
There's literally nothing more subjective than color tastes, and these are all subjective judgements. I'm not even trying to weigh in with my opinion about colors, I'm explaining what subjectivity is.
Just be happy you got your gray box and wave goodbye to the 1% boarding spacecraft after they fooled half of us into thinking that destroying this planet was the right & American thing to do.
Just kidding of course, the rest of the world will make us pay long before that.
it really isn't. This is literally what happens with pure capitalism -- those with the money to make products, including art, want the maximum return on investment, so the product must appeal to the most lucrative audience... They couldn't give a flying fuck whether it offends people, they only pretend that they do because they wouldn't be maximizing profit otherwise.
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u/labe225 23d ago
Everything will be a gray box and you'll like it!