It is often very easy to forget the amount of beauty there is in the world, especially in its current state: the recovery from a pandemic, the destruction of the environment due to climate change, the everyday violence of shootings, war and crime as well as many other issues. Many people may not realize the amount of beauty there is in this world and how important it is to our society.

As an extremely pessimistic person myself, my thoughts often get caught in the mess that is the cruelties of the world. I do not like to consider the many good aspects of today’s society, because it seems as though the bad always outweighs the good. I do not like to hope that there is a chance to make up for all the harm that humans have caused to this planet. But hope is something that every person needs, and sometimes beauty may be the only thing that can create it.

Thinking of beauty, I realize all of the things that I do each day for the sake of it. Beauty is in the music that I play on the way to school, it is in the outfit that I diligently put together in the morning, it is in the photos that I see as I scroll through my phone. So much of a human’s life revolves around beauty. It is in the food that we carefully craft, the artfully directed movies we watch, the writing of the books that we read, the way that we style our hair, the people that we choose to love. Everything is its own masterpiece with beauty that we humans can not help but admire. 

Some people may feel that a human aspect such as this is insignificant; obviously humans like to make things look pretty, but what is so important about this aspect of human nature? The beautiful masterpieces that we subconsciously create in our everyday life could one day turn into important changes to our world. The desire to see green rainforests will lead to the replanting of trees, the need to photograph every jaw-dropping sunset in the sky will motivate the act of reducing air pollution, the thought that future generations of people may have the chance to experience a love as beautiful as the one that we have, or hope to have, will spark a need to continue humans existence on Earth. Beauty creates hope, which motivates for change. It can not be marked as something that is purely superficial.