The third hiccup caught me right as I was trying to explain the atmospheric perspective of the proposed mural’s canopy. It was a sharp, involuntary ‘hic’ that echoed in the glass-walled conference room, a sound that felt entirely too human for a space that smelled exclusively of industrial-grade carpet cleaner and $47-per-pound espresso beans. Stan, the facilities manager whose tie was knotted with a precision that suggested he viewed spontaneity as a form of structural failure, didn’t even look up from the spreadsheet. He was staring at cell G27, a number that represented the projected maintenance cost of a wall that wasn’t, as he put it, ‘doing anything for us.’ He didn’t care about the depth of the greens or the way the light would filter through the painted leaves to calm the 137 employees who walked through that lobby every morning. He just saw a beige wall that currently cost $0.00 to maintain, and he intended to keep it that way. I tried to swallow the fourth hiccup, but it just turned into a sort of strangled wheeze.

We are living in the era of the Great Beige-ing. It is a slow, quiet catastrophe where every decision is run through the sieve of ROI, and beauty is the first thing to be strained out because it doesn’t have a standardized metric. If you can’t measure how much more productive a person is when they look at a piece of art versus a blank slab of drywall, then the art is discarded as a luxury. Or worse, a ‘distraction.’ I sat there, my diaphragm spasming, watching a man calculate the death of joy in a 27-page report. I’m an archaeological illustrator by trade-Arjun Y., at your service-and I spend most of my life looking at things that people made thousands of years ago.

It’s a contradiction I live with every day. I criticize the relentless pursuit of utility, and yet here I am, meticulously organizing my drafting pens by the thickness of their nibs, down to the 0.07mm difference, because I crave the order I claim is killing our souls. I want the world to be messy and artistic, but I want my desk to look like a surgical tray. I suppose that’s the human condition: wanting the freedom of the mural while clinging to the safety of the beige wall. But the beige wall is a lie. It’s a placeholder for a life we’re too tired to actually lead. We’ve convinced ourselves that if a thing doesn’t have a clear, immediate function, it is ‘useless.’ And in a world obsessed with ‘optimization,’ being useless is the greatest sin you can commit.

I remember a dig I worked on about 17 years ago. We found these small, ceramic figurines-mostly animals, some stylized people. They weren’t religious icons. they weren’t tools. They were just… things. Someone had spent hours, maybe days, molding the clay, firing it in a kiln, and painting tiny, useless spots on the back of a ceramic leopard. That leopard didn’t help them hunt. It didn’t store grain. It didn’t provide 7% more warmth in the winter. It just existed to be looked at, to be held, to exist in a space and make that space slightly less empty.

If Stan had been the village elder back then, he would have smashed the leopard because it didn’t contribute to the tribe’s caloric intake. But 2007 years later, the leopard is the only thing we care about. We don’t care about the grain that was stored in the functional, undecorated pots; that grain is gone. We care about the leopard. The beauty survived because the beauty was the point.

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being surrounded by things that are only ‘functional.’ It’s a thin, grey film that settles over the brain. You see it in the eyes of people working in those offices with the ‘optimized’ lighting and the ‘ergonomic’ grey chairs. Everything is designed to make them work better, but nothing is designed to make them feel better. We are engineering the humanity out of our environments in exchange for a 0.37% bump in efficiency. I’ve seen projects where the budget for ‘signage’ was ten times the budget for ‘art.’ Because a sign tells you where to go, and that is ‘useful.’ A painting just tells you where you are, and apparently, we don’t think that’s worth the investment.

It’s why I find myself drawn to companies like Canned Pineapple lately. They seem to understand this weird, oscillating tension between the things we need and the things we simply want to exist. They make signs, sure-the functional stuff-but they also advocate for the art, the visual textures that don’t necessarily show up on a balance sheet but keep the walls from closing in on us. It’s that rare intersection where someone admits that a sign can be a tool, but a mural is a heartbeat.

The Signature Left Behind

I think about the soil samples sometimes. When you’re excavating, you’re looking for the anomalies. The things that don’t belong. A shard of glass that reflects the light in a way the dirt doesn’t. A bead made of lapis lazuli that was carried 777 miles just to be worn around someone’s neck. These things are the ‘waste’ of ancient civilizations. They are the expensive, difficult, time-consuming extras that didn’t help anyone survive. And yet, they are the only reason we remember they were there at all.

If we only left behind our ‘useful’ things, history would just be a pile of rusted hammers and broken bricks. We leave beauty behind because beauty is our signature. It’s the way we say, ‘I was here, and I wasn’t just a cog in a machine.’

He looked at me, then back at his spreadsheet, then back at the beige sample. He asked me if the green paint was ‘scuff-resistant.’ I told him it was. It wasn’t, but I figured by the time someone scuffed it, I’d be long gone, and the mural would have already done its job of making someone stop and breathe for seven seconds.

We need the useless things. We need the fountain that doesn’t provide drinking water but makes the air sound like a mountain stream. We need the crown molding that hides nothing but adds a sense of finished thought to a room. We need the $777 painting in the hallway that everyone stops to look at, even if only for a moment, because it reminds them that there is a world outside of their inbox. When we strip away the unnecessary, we aren’t just being ‘efficient.’ We are being hollow. We are creating a world where everything is a tool and nothing is a treasure.

I’ve spent 37 years drawing things that have been buried in the dark. I think we’re afraid of beauty because we can’t control it. You can’t predict how a person will react to a specific shade of indigo. You can’t guarantee a return on a sculpture. So we play it safe. We choose the beige. We choose the ROI. We choose the slow death of the aesthetic spirit.

I’m not saying we should stop being practical. I still need my 0.07mm pens to work every time I click them. But I’m saying that the pen should probably be beautiful to hold. That the office where I use the pen should have a window that looks out on something more than a parking lot. That we should stop apologizing for wanting things to be lovely. Beauty isn’t a ‘nice-to-have’ after the real work is done. Beauty is the real work. It is the environment in which all other work becomes worth doing. If we don’t have something beautiful to look at, why are we working so hard to stay alive anyway? To buy more beige paint?

I ended the presentation with a slide of a 107-year-old building in the city center that was slated for demolition. It had these incredible terracotta gargoyles that looked like they were laughing at the traffic below. They served no structural purpose. They didn’t hold up the roof. They just sat there, laughing, for over a century. The developers wanted to replace it with a glass box that would be 27% more energy-efficient. I asked the room which building they’d rather walk past on their way to lunch. Even Stan didn’t choose the glass box.

And when that happens, I hope there’s still someone around who remembers how to mix the right shade of green, how to carve the useless leopard, and how to tell the man with the spreadsheet that some things are too valuable to ever be productive. You can’t do that with a beige wall. You need a little bit of beautiful, glorious, expensive waste. You need a signature. You need the mural. Why are we so afraid to just let something be beautiful?