The Greyscale Revolution
Refinement culture and the death of enchantment
Write & Lift is an ethos of personal and spiritual development through conscious physical exertion and practice of the writing craft. Through this effort to strengthen our bodies and minds, we become anti-fragile and self-respecting sovereign individuals. Through this effort, we may stand against untruth and evil and create a new culture of vitality, strength, and virtue.
The Greyscale Revolution
Pull up any listing on Zillow in a “modernized” suburban housing development and here’s what you’ll find. Five hundred thousand dollars for grey vinyl flooring and white walls. The realtor calls it a “modern farmhouse” (no farms for twenty miles). A cemetery of color masquerading as a neighborhood. Cheap materials. Refined to death. Soulless and empty. BORING. Some will call it a “timeless aesthetic” and they aren’t wrong. In places like this, time doesn’t exist. There is no past. No future. With a canvas so uninspired, you can’t blame someone for imagining a grey Wayfair couch, white shelves, and a careful arrangements of beige pillows and black coffee table books. Even the vocabulary we use to praise these spaces betrays our spirit: clean, minimal, neutral, inoffensive. As if life were meant to be lived in monochromatic greyscale. It’s the same story playing out in every suburb and city, a quiet apocalypse of color, coziness, and craftsmanship that we’ve accepted as a new normal. This is what we’ve agreed to call good taste.
This shift isn’t limited to new homes. We’re turning our world into a kind of visual cemetery. Clean. Efficient. Dead. It didn’t happen by accident. Another symptom of cultural cowardice masquerading as sophistication. A fear of life itself, dressed up as “minimalism.”
To understand how we got here—and why it matters—we need to look at what color means to the human soul. And what happens when we decide to live without it.
The Death of the Image
I don’t watch new movies often, but when I do I feel like I’m seeing through the eyes of fence-sitting corporate drones. Safety. Profit. Continuity. Cliches. Standardization. Marvel has spent, on average, $250 million on their last five superhero “blockbusters” and it looks like they were filmed through a dirty car window. Oppenheimer drained the New Mexico desert of its blood-red sunsets. Even the new Dune films, a story about a planet the color of fire, comes to us in shades of concrete and dust and sand. Lots of sand. Did I mention sand? The justification is always “realism.” As if reality itself comes pre-filtered. As if the human eye sees in sepia Instagram filters. As if life itself were meant to be muted.
Every frame is processed through the same digital meat grinder. Every shadow crushed into the same muddy grey. Every highlight forced to submit to the pre-approved pallete. Television shows copy the formula, turning even comedies into exercises in chromatic restraint. The desaturation on shows like Succession makes the half-finished office I’m writing this in look like the Gardens of Babylon. Even nature documentaries get “the treatment” now.
Compare this to films from just thirty years ago. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive with its deep reds and blues and yellows—each color subtely reminding the audience of the mystery, allure, and false glamour of the Hollywood underbelly. The Neverending Story with it’s dreamlike painted backgrounds. Even Jurassic Park, a movie about killer dinosaurs, wasn't afraid to saturate the screen with life. These weren’t just aesthetic choices. They were declarations that color is necessary to speak to something deeper than trend or taste. Color isn’t just decoration or “vibes”. It’s language. It’s life.
Something changed around 2010. The richness bled out. The saturation faded. Digital color grading made it possible. But culture made it inevitable. We started making films that looked like videogames trying to look like films. Call of Duty’s desaturated browns becoming the template for war movies, which influenced more games, which influenced more movies etc…
Christopher Nolan bears some responsibility. After The Dark Knight proved you could drain a comic book movie of its comic book-ness and still make a billion dollars, everyone followed suit. We decided serious art couldn't have serious color; our media became so “realistic” it bore no resemblance to real life at all.
The Grey World
In 1927, Modernist architect Le Corbusier declared that “a house is a machine for living in.” Not a home. A machine. With those words, he catalyzed an aesthetic revolution aimed to revise and “reimagine” our sense of collective responsbility to maintain, build, and breathe unique life to our spaces, materials, and technology.
The death of color, like the death of grand architecture, lays at the feet of three converging forces: technological standardization, philosophical materialism, and what sociologist Max Weber called “the disenchantment of the world.”
Standardization and the Assembly Line
Henry Ford famously offered the Model T in “any color so long as it's black.” It wasn't an aesthetic choice. Black paint dried faster on the assembly line. Efficiency trumped beauty, personalisty, or character. It’s about what Silicon Valley calls scalability. Color is personal. Color is cultural. Color is hard to standardize. But grey? Grey scales. Grey transfers. Grey can be replicated perfectly across a thousand factories in a dozen countries. It's the color of globalism and it blends in; the shade of maximum returns.