Casey Gilfillan

Why is everywhere you go so well-lit anymore? The fluorescent lighting is to be expected at the grocery store – this is a migraine I anticipate and schedule accordingly with my food shopping – but not at the bar, the bookstore, or local restaurant. This shrill illumination upon bland and off-putting aesthetics that have been diluted out of their character, robbed of their individuality through a splattering in shades of white against off-whites, light grays, beige, neutrals.

A few weeks ago, a friend and I finally made our way to a popular bar in our town. Understanding what “popular” can mean within my small town is relative to the context of the demographic, which is primarily white, middle aged, and family-oriented. I normally venture out of state for my imbibing, but this bar is a mere seven-minute drive from my house. Easily accessible, crowd-acclaimed, liquor licence-holding, what more could one hope for in such an establishment? To be quite frank – a lot. She could hope for a lot more.

Walking in around 8pm, I quickly forgot it was evening due to the intensity of brightness inside the bar. I felt my fingers curl in defensively, an urge from my forearms to bring themselves to my face to shield my eyes from such a ghastly sore. I felt like an ancient creature of the night facing the forbidden sun after a long and cursed hibernation, those overhead lights might as well have snubbed me to ash. Who wants to drink in this environment? So starkly radiant that you can clearly see everyone else in the bar, what exactly they’re doing and what they’re wearing, how they’re sitting. You don’t miss any subtleties, you see every waiter whisk by, juxtaposed harshly in the spotlight, your eyes drawn to the quick and sudden movements on the stage before you. The bar shared titles with a common Irish surname, so forgive me if I expected nothing more than a gritty watering hole for self-loathing and excess drinking. 

Sure, you might say that I have a biased stance on this matter because I have a migraine disorder. I prefer the dim-lit, and I don’t like to be flash-banged when expecting such. But it’s not just about the lighting, it’s about the vibe, the aesthetic appeal. Perhaps not everyone feels this way, but surely the majority of people don’t want to drink in a white sterile box, beige on beige on beige on minimalist design on maximalist seating arrangement. Increasingly so it is the case that these institutions, where we pay money for social congregation and relief, rob us of the tranquility of these experiences through the imposition of the harsh, sterile, and eclectically barren. It is crowd-pleasing in the sense that it neither pleases nor displeases anyone, and thus “everyone” wins, the capitalists make the most money and the rest of us won’t linger as long for a lack of something special. They erase the character and instead of focusing on a brand, the priority becomes maximizing the occupancy. How many people can we possibly cram in here, and what is the least offensive aesthetic for the masses? Neutrality. Absence of character. Anti-humanism, but an aesthetic.

This stupid bar that I’ll never return to sold its soul – or perhaps was conceived without one – in pursuit of profit and uniform modernity. Unfortunately, this trend extends much further than the town in which I currently reside, as it is a contemporary plague born of capitalism and profiteering. I will briefly touch upon some examples that others might be more familiar with, such as the McDonald’s rebrand, which rejected the classic, retro-style that enshrined their 1950s-origin, and replaced it with bland, bright, aseptic. Consider the Barnes & Noble rebrand, which has swallowed whole the comforting, reading-nook allure of the establishment by removing the dark, endless shelves with shorter, lighter, Ikea-looking book storage. The B&N rebrand has heavily affected content too, as my dearest Philosophy section grows smaller and further intruded upon by trash literature such as The Daily Stoic and Ayn Rand’s full body of work, otherwise rendering the institution a vapid, hollow wasteland of AI-cover Tiktok books.

If the child version of myself, who occasionally indulged in fantastical depictions of futuristic society and technology, were to see the horrors of modern culture, she would be disappointed. The public places are all the same aesthetic – dull, bland, and too expensive. The obsession with minimalism and its nothingness has confounded me, always. I read an article that concluded that “minimalism is the aesthetic language of gentrification,” and I believe we should reject this erosion of cultural character via the power of the dollar, however many we may have left in our wallets.  Bring back the dim-lit, the kitchy, the ornate. Bring back the embellished, the indulgent, the risk that your chosen aesthetic might not please every single patron who enters.