Something happened somewhere between then and now. We got smarter, faster, more efficient — and in doing so, we made everything around us a little more ugly. A little more hollow.
Have you ever heard Layne Staley sing live? Or Kurt Cobain? Or listened to a Pink Floyd album from start to finish? There’s a rawness, a harmonic complexity, an emotional arc that no algorithm can manufacture. These bands composed. They built something. Unfortunately, nobody is really making music in those styles anymore — and I think we feel that absence even if we can’t name it. What we get instead is autotune over four chords, engineered to be catchy, not to be felt.
And then there’s Chet Baker’s My Funny Valentine, recorded in studio Japan in 1969. Yesterday, my friend said it feels like it was recorded in a bathroom — this strange, close, almost uncomfortably intimate sound. But that feeling is the whole point. It comes from the limitations of the recording equipment of the time: the microphones, the room acoustics, the tape itself. No noise reduction, no digital cleanup, no post-processing to make it sound “professional.” What you’re hearing is the actual air in that room, the actual distance between Chet and the mic, the actual imperfection of that moment in time. And somehow, that makes it devastating in a way a pristine studio recording never could be. Modern recording technology eliminated all of that. Today everything is captured in treated rooms, cleaned up with software, mastered to sound identical on every speaker and every platform. The result is technically perfect. And it feels like nothing. The imperfection wasn’t a flaw in those old recordings — it was the room breathing, the moment existing. We engineered that out and called it progress.
Which photos do you actually go back and look at? Film photography forced intention — you had 36 frames, you made them count. There’s a whole separate post I want to write on this someday. But consider the grain, the warmth, the slight imperfection of a film photo versus the sterile sharpness of a phone camera. The imperfection was never a flaw. It was the fingerprint of the moment.
Walk through the Painted Ladies in San Francisco — Victorian houses with ornate facades, layered colors, handcrafted trim. Built in the 1800s and still more beautiful than most buildings built in the last 30 years. No architect builds like that anymore. Too expensive, too slow. So we get glass rectangles instead. Every skyline looks the same. Probably nobody will fly somewhere to photograph a new condo development in a hundred years.
Open a photo of a 1964 Mustang. The curves were sculpted, not engineered by an algorithm. Leather seats, a steering wheel with weight to it, analog gauges that felt alive. Now look at a Tesla — a slab of plastic with a touchscreen. A smartphone on wheels. The designers stopped asking “how do we make something beautiful?” and started asking “how do we remove friction?” Those are very different questions.
A mechanical watch is hundreds of tiny components moving in perfect sequence, wound by your own wrist. Watchmakers spent years perfecting a single caliber. The result was something you’d wear for decades and pass to your children. Now we have smartwatches that buzz with Telegram messages and track your steps. I don’t want any of that on my wrist. A watch should do one thing beautifully. The moment it becomes another screen, it’s lost the plot entirely. And they’re not even stylish.
The thread through all of this is the same: we optimized for the destination and forgot about the journey. The film grain, the engine growl, the hand-carved trim, the wound mainspring — those weren’t flaws to fix. They were proof a human being had been there.
I’m not saying go backwards. I’m just saying remember what we gave up. And maybe, sometimes, choose the beautiful thing over the efficient one.
*The thoughts and content in this post are entirely my own. The writing was assisted by Claude Sonnet 4.6. And yes, I’m aware of the irony — a post mourning the loss of soul and craft, written with the help of AI.