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I hate chainlink fences

A friend was driving me across town the other day, and as our conversation meandered through its usual beats (bullshit banter, potential business ventures, analysis — and crucifixion — of the superficial), I couldn't help but notice something strange about our surroundings...

Street after street, we were encaged by chainlink fences. Suddenly, I felt particularly attuned to the presence of the little wire-woven monstrosities.

The chainlink fence: a cheap, lazy, spiritless creation.

There are plenty of other words I could use to describe my newfound feelings for chainlink fences, but I think this haiku I came up with using an online generator says it best:

Comfortless summer / suddenly chainlink fence trapped / whilst watching the grass

Perhaps I'm overreacting.

But ask yourself this: have chainlink fences made your life more beautiful? Have you ever felt comforted by their sight?

…

So why do we build them?

The answer, I believe, lies within the modern psyche.

You see, we don't build chainlink fences in just our parks, schools, and neighbourhoods.

We build them in our homes.

Our workplaces.

Our relationships.

We build them whenever we take the easy route — whenever we decide that good is good enough. When we bend under the weight of apathetically rhetorical questions like "won't this be hard?" or "won't this cost too much?"

I get it, really I do—the whole path of least resistance thing. We're biologically hardwired to avoid discomfort and we live in an age of convenience. The chips are stacked against us.

But taking that path comes at a great cost…

We never know beauty.

And beauty, as Dr. Jordan Peterson explained so eloquently, is a human need.

Dr. Peterson was once asked at a conference,

"I'm curious about the connection between aesthetic beauty and religious experience . . . Is it possible for something that's incredibly beautiful to evoke a religious or mystical experience?"

He answered,

"I think that's what [beauty] is for . . . If you're going to house the ultimate ideal, you build something beautiful to represent its dwelling place . . . This is something that people do not take seriously. And especially something we don't take seriously in Canada. You think about all of the hundreds of millions of dollars that were invested into beauty in Europe. I mean spectacular, excessive investment in beauty that's paid back God only knows how many multiples of times . . ."

Continuing,

"Beauty is so valuable and we're so afraid of it. And I think we're afraid of it because . . . It's like a vision of the potential future. If we just got our act together and beautified things . . . that could enoble us. That's why Jerusalem, the Heavenly City, is paved with gemstones — they're crystalline and they emit light — it's the proper dwelling place for an enlightened consciousness. Beauty is the proper dwelling place for an enlightened consciousness. And we ignore it at our spiritual and economic peril. There's almost nothing more valuable than beauty—economically and practically."

In another interview, Dr. Peterson puts it more simply:

"People have no idea how much they're starving for beauty. No matter how well fed you are, without some relationship to beauty, there is too much suffering in the world for [life] to be [bearable]. Along with truth, it's the antidote to suffering."

Breaking through to beauty

I hate chainlink fences not because they're an eyesore (although they are), but because of what they represent: the refusal to self-construct.

When we refuse to self-construct, we refuse to put in time and effort to build great things. We refuse to wrestle with our inadequacy. And we refuse to be gutpunched by failure. We refuse so many things when we refuse to self-construct that what we ultimately do is refuse to live.

When I first realized my disdain for chainlink fences and began writing this article, I was immediately reminded of German designer Dieter Rams' infamous speech at Jack Lenor Larsen's New York showroom in 1976:

"In a room where the proportions are noticed we feel better and we think differently. A neglected and uncared-for landscape will have a different effect on our lives than one that is natural and orderly. There is a lot of work to do on the topic of our physical surroundings affecting our psychological functions. This is the work we do at Vitsœ. But Vitsœ only makes furniture today. There are larger questions that we need to answer about our urban environment and how it affects us as individuals and as a society."

Rams presses on,

"What effects do electricity pylons, skyscrapers, highways, street lighting and car parks, for example, have on our psyche and relationships? We know that the residents of anonymous concrete blocks can become depressed as a result of their surroundings. But who is researching these things systematically? Who takes all of this really seriously? I imagine our current situation will cause future generations to shudder at the thoughtlessness in the way in which we today fill our homes, our cities and our landscape with a chaos of assorted junk. What a fatalistic apathy we have towards the effect of such things. What atrocities we have to tolerate. Yet we are only half aware of them."

If we continue to take the path of least resistance, then how will any of us ever know beauty? How will the generations that come after us?

As the stewards of this planet, each of us has a responsibility; a responsibility to self-construct and break through to beauty, so we can create landscapes that make us feel better and think differently—and, if we're daring enough, enlighten human consciousness.

I think that's a world worth living for, don't you?