On finding beauty

And musings from a few restless nights.

Friends,

My computer is full of tiny threads - ideas, rants, musings - the kinds of threads I’m typically eager to pull on and see what unravels. But for the past few weeks, each time I’ve sat down at my desk ready to write, I’ve come up empty. I’m usually pretty happy to hold up some esoteric opinions about food, drink or traveling rather strongly, but lately any scribblings I’ve done have felt trite. What has meaning when we’re inundated with notifications or news screaming of dull, pointless intolerance and hate?

Just over a month into 2025, it seems like this year the battle will be fought over which narratives hold our attention. In truth, our attention has been at stake for a while now, but this year feels like a decisive moment - we’re increasingly aware of how our attention is easily manipulated, yet the competition for it is stronger than ever.

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The last few months have been light on food and alcohol-related musings in this newsletter, but heavy on photography. Introspecting a bit, it’s because I’ve found photography to be a much-needed meditative practice to overcome a general malaise that has settled in.

I’m tired of the noise. The constant stimulus of text messages, emails, Slack notifications, and absurd breaking news alerts makes the soul grow weary and apathetic. I’ve even exhausted my tolerance of ~productive~ noise, like podcasts or audiobooks. It’s all still noise, still cluttering up space. What’s left for me when all my attention is given so freely? I’ve been craving silence and to reclaim dominion over my mind.

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During some late-night perusing, I learned of the word “kayfabe,” a term used in professional wrestling to describe:

the tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events, stories, characters, etc., are genuine

Or more generally:

the tacit agreement to behave as if something is real, sincere, or genuine when it is not

It’s an eerily poignant word for a time when everything is entertainment, everything is theater. You could argue that we’ve always been actors, tailoring our performances to various audiences - work, friends, family. But now that nearly every social interaction is mediated by a screen, we’ve crossed into kayfabe. So then what “tacit agreements” have we entered into? What narratives are we willing to accept? Or maybe the kayfabe has become indistinguishable from reality.

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For me, photography is a way of knowing the physical world, the real non-kayfabe one that is, by all accounts, so dramatically different than what’s portrayed on our tiny screens. A photo walk asks you to direct your focus, not have it directed for you. When I’m out and about with my camera, the phone is out of sight and the headphones are tucked away. And, at the very least I’m out walking, which has a therapeutic quality of its own.

To capture moments is to notice - the play of light, the dance of shapes and colors, the flow of people, the details that spark curiosity. It’s to discover small moments and serendipitous encounters. Above all else, it’s to find the beauty that delights your soul. The magic, the true superpower, is that beauty means something different to each of us. We all bring our own way of seeing, cueing in on minutiae that might seem trivial to others. And that, my friends, is beautiful.

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Not far from my house is an underpass. On the surface, it’s a rather boring place. Cars drive 60 miles an hour overhead, it’s loud, there’s trash on the sidewalk, weird smells, and it’s a little spooky at night. Alright, it’s actually pretty ugly and not exactly a good spot to hang out.

BUT! When the sun starts to set, and the light hits just right, the underpass transforms. The entire area lights up with an orange glow, contrasted by the cool winter sky. Subtle greens from ivy crawling upwards from the ground. The bare shrubbery casts interesting shadows on the cement columns. If you linger for a few minutes, the entire tonality of the scene changes. Did it suddenly become beautiful? Or was the beauty just not obvious before?

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Truthfully, my ramblings might be the symptom of some kind of reverse seasonal depression. The first six weeks of the year have been unseasonably dry and sunny here in Seattle. I think at one point we had 11 consecutive days of blue skies and dramatic sunsets. Tragic, right? Clearly, the balance in the universe was all out of sorts last month.

But maybe you're feeling that same fatigue, that same apathy. I'm not suggesting everyone needs to become a photographer (though we all are!) or that photography will fix the seemingly insurmountable problems of the world - that’s crazy of course. Plus I'm far too cynical. And I'm not suggesting ignorance either. But finding something, some way to pull us from the theatrics in an attempt to see the beauty just might be a start.

- Skylar