Overcoming the "Age of Average"
Over the last four years, I’ve been schooling myself in interior design. It’s actually a personal growth journey, pushing me past my comfort zone. It’s a spiritual practice of trusting my intuition and making expensive decisions. Interior design made me get clearer on who I am and how to physically manifest my identity into the walls of my space.
Recently, I discovered Alex Murrell’s essay, “The Age of Average,”that I think everyone should read, whether or not you are interested in design.
Murrell makes a harrowing case describing how everything looks the same: interior design is all beige and neutral-toned, book covers feature high-contrast, bold colors, cars are 80% black, white and grey in predominantly a sedan shape, trendy coffee shops look the same if you are in San Francisco or the Philippines, multi-unit new housing looks the same whether you are in Los Angeles or Milwaukee. Even faces of Instagram influencers look the same - some variation of Kardashian overly plump, poreless filler face.
Murrell argues that this is the result of both the internet where we take inspiration and of capitalism where everything is market tested to death.
Personality, location, context, history is stripped away so that we get an average that most people like.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with these trends; they're just devoid of soul.
“Distinctiveness has died,” declares Alex Murrell.
The Age of Average is more pronounced with AI. Last year, DALL-E's generated images blew me away with their detail and vividness. Now, I quickly scroll past these AI-generated blog images, which are a blur of sameness - too literal and artsy. My email inbox is a sea of catchy subject lines that sound AI-generated and A/B tested. But when it's all homogenous click-bait, it’s easy to ignore.
I stopped going on Twitter last year when I realized my newsfeed all sounded the same, “Here is what is wrong with X and I’ll show you how to Y in 48 hours.” Not bad, but not interesting.
Murrell writes about creative fields, but I can’t stop thinking about how this applies to our thinking. It doesn’t matter if my car looks like everyone else’s (except when I forget where I parked). The real concern is our diminishing capacity for independent thought.
Algorithms are feeding our worldview. In our age of cancel culture for a bad take, I’m afraid to have an opinion without seeing what others I respect are saying about an issue. Julia Cameron’s observation in The Artist Way, “Any original thought can look pretty dangerous,” now manifests to a physical threat in the age of internet warriors.
Are we currently plugged into the matrix, living in a Brave New World where we are so happy with our one-click Amazon, convenience culture, that we can’t even see our own demise as a species?
But I thrive off hope and radical imagination for our future.
So then, How do we overcome the Age of Average?
I’m currently exploring this question.
What I am discovering as I dive into interior design and writing more, is that overcoming the Age of Average I have to tune into what I want, versus what is practical, what is recommended, etc. When it comes to interior design, people will say things like, “stick with neutral colors for expensive purchases.” I had to bust out Diva Lauren to say, “Fuck that I want a bright teal couch and pink walls.”