I thought a thought that went like this:



We should only concern ourselves with making beautiful things: by virtue of realizing beauty in the world that did not exist before, we make it more beautiful. To make things unbeautiful is to disfigure the world, or to make a disfigurement that is less beautiful than otherwise, or before.
To make the world more beautiful is noble; it is the least we can do for what we have done to her.  


So maybe there is a moral obligation to make beautiful things. This is a pretty significant leap--imposing an obligation from something that may or may not assume the valence of “good” and “bad”--but I think it might hold. 
Beauty is certainly beautiful: we don’t look at something beautiful and say that it is other than, or is an exception to, beautiful. Beauty engenders pleasant feelings reminiscent of that beauty. Beauty engenders a sense of harmony that accords. Beauty subjectively impresses us in a sense that could be rendered as utility-increasing. A beautiful thing is certainly not unbeautiful. The worst thing beauty can be guilty of is being beautiful for itself: empty beauty. But I still think this is better than otherwise. If I fail to see something beautiful at least once a day I feel worse off than had I seen at least one beautiful thing. So I have evidence that one armature of the world is better off in the presence of beauty, and that beauty is in some sense an improver, maximizer of goodness, or at least kind enough to impart it. 

Sea of Nothing is about strictly the unbeautiful: it is about destruction, isolation, political populism, enshittification, cancerous capitalism, and suffering in subtle degrees no less unworthy to feel as suffering. 

So then why do it? 

I’m not sure. I navigate it with a guilt that becomes increasingly burdensome. But to look away from the unbeautiful is to deny a series of terrible things that are really going on. 

I wish I could look at home and think of beauty. I have to look at strictly the unblemished buttes, what little is left, at the very top, where they’re made to meet the sky as though they hold it, what little really is left, and that’s all there is, that feeling.