I make the thumbnails for my columns myself, and I generate every single one with the same request. I ask for a vintage vibe and a colorful tone. Not every thumbnail lands exactly there, but I keep chasing that emotional feel tied to old film cameras. The reason is simple. I miss that old atmosphere, and I am clearly not alone. Scroll through any site built around nostalgic imagery and you will find an endless stream of photos taken with film cameras, all carrying that same warm, saturated glow. There was a stretch when ultra-high-definition clarity was the whole obsession, yet at some point those grainy old photos started pulling the spotlight back. I started wondering why I miss them so much. Part of it is plain nostalgia. But I have come to believe it is also because our modern world has genuinely lost a lot of its color diversity.
Why The World Keeps Getting Grayer
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| Scenes from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, color pushed to the absolute max |
Take movies as an example. There is an old French film from the nineteen sixties called The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The story itself is fairly unremarkable, yet film fans still bring it up constantly. The reason is the color. The clothes and props burst with vivid, saturated primary tones, and people say La La Land leaned heavily on that exact palette. Plenty of old films captured this kind of color richness.
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| Yellow raincoats against a rainy blue backdrop, Singin' in the Rain |
Singin' in the Rain is another one I love. That bright yellow raincoat glowing against a dark, rainy backdrop left a real impression on me. Lately in the US, people have been talking about how McDonald's has changed color. It used to be a dazzling space packed with bold primary colors sitting right in the middle of the neighborhood. Walk into a newly built location today and the palette has turned dull and muted. The shift does not stop there either. People keep pointing out that parking lots, fashion, and home appliances filling our daily lives are quietly turning duller compared to the past. So why is this happening?
Our Eyes Are Fading Too
One thing worth considering first is biology. Humans naturally lose some ability to perceive color as they age. The muscles around the pupils weaken over time, which lets in less light and dulls how vivid colors appear. The cells tied directly to color perception also decline in number and function. Because of this, older people often feel like the world was more colorful when they were young and has been fading ever since. But even setting aging eyes aside, the world itself really is getting duller.
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| Two hundred years of color data, all trending toward gray |
A study from the UK Science Museum Group, built on photographs of everyday objects spanning two hundred years, backs this up. Looking at the graph tracking color distribution over time, red and yellow drop off noticeably. Back in the eighteen hundreds, only around fifteen percent of everyday objects were achromatic. Today that figure has climbed past sixty percent. A handful of specific forces explain why the world has been losing its color.
How Gray Became The Standard
Start with the materials themselves. I noticed this firsthand the last time I helped a friend move out of an old wooden framed apartment into a brand new high rise, and the sheer amount of gray metal trim, steel appliances, and aluminum window frames in the new place was jarring in a way I had not expected. Wood once made up a huge share of the objects around us, and that gave everyday life a warm, yellowish cast. We have since replaced most of that wood with metal, and the heavy use of aluminum, iron, and stainless steel multiplied achromatic tones across the board. Bricks tell a similar story. Red brick construction used to be everywhere, but as concrete took over, that red faded along with it.
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| Gray and black suits became the uniform of the serious businessman |
There is also a class story behind all this gray, and it is one of my favorite rabbit holes to go down. In earlier eras, the technology for producing rich colors was limited, so the wealthiest people leaned toward bold, dazzling shades. That changed once the bourgeoisie gained real power in European society. They wanted distance from the old aristocracy, and since their wealth came from commerce rather than inherited status, they leaned into a frugal, industrious image. Instead of colorful clothing, they favored achromatic tones as a way of signaling they were nothing like the extravagant nobility. As that preference spread, wearing achromatic colors came to signal someone was a serious businessman. That is a large part of why business suits are still overwhelmingly gray, black, and navy today. Over time, the association hardened into a broader cultural idea that achromatic colors equal sophistication and maturity.
Why Sameness Started To Feel Like Progress
Cultural imperialism played a part too. Western culture held outsized global influence for two or three centuries, and its aesthetic preferences quietly became everyone else's default. As I mentioned, the West had long treated achromatic colors as sophisticated, and as minimalism took hold as a design and philosophical movement, stripping things down came to feel like the modern way to live. Modern architecture is the clearest example. It stripped away the decorative flourishes of earlier eras and, along with them, a huge share of color. As those ideas swept through architecture, art, and fashion on a global scale, many argue this pushed achromatic colors deep into countless local cultures that once had their own distinct palettes.
Then there is what sociologists call the McDonaldization of society, which I think about more than I probably should. McDonald's stands as a textbook example of a modern corporation built around efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. A lean workforce executes short, tightly scripted tasks to churn out a standardized product, and that same pattern shows up across huge parts of modern life. To cut costs and make replication easy, companies strip away unique colors and decoration. Mass production also pushes companies toward whatever colors offend the fewest people, since you need broad appeal to turn a real profit at scale.
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| Bold colors like these are exactly what tanks resale value |
The used car market makes this easy to see. Achromatic cars typically resell for more, so buyers who might personally love a pink or green car often skip it, knowing a polarizing color will be harder to sell later and will drag the price down. Once people catch on to that logic, they default to neutral colors as a hedge against future resale value. Viewed purely through the lens of maximizing profit at scale, it makes sense that so much of the world has drifted toward dull, safe colors.
Finding Color In A Digital World
We just walked through why color keeps disappearing, but one question lingers. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg came out in the nineteen sixties and overflowed with vivid color. Wasn't that modern society too? Why does everything feel so much duller now by comparison?
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| A world this gray made people crave color on screen |
My guess is that films like that emerged as a way to satisfy a hunger for color among people stuck staring at dull, industrial surroundings all day. The lead character in that film actually works at a car repair shop, constantly covered in black grease. When your daily life is filled with black and gray, you probably crave as much color as possible the moment you sit down to watch a film. That likely explains why such vividly colored movies took off. A similar logic applies to a place like McDonald's back then. Stepping inside felt less like entering a fast food chain and more like stepping into a small fantasy world, a burst of hope and joy against an otherwise gray backdrop. That contrast was almost certainly a deliberate advantage for the brand at the time.
What defines the twenty-first century, though, is that the digital world has become its own powerful realm of fantasy. We already spend our days staring at an overwhelming flood of color through our screens. Our devices can summon endless color at almost no cost, and we can drown in it without ever leaving bed. Because of that, it may not matter much that our physical surroundings have turned achromatic. I actually suspect modern buildings are deliberately painted in muted, neutral tones as a way to calm minds already worn down by nonstop digital color.
Paint Your Own Life Willingly
There is a real opportunity hiding in this trend. As physical objects keep losing their color, deliberately choosing color becomes a way to stand out. I don't know every detail, but I hear this instinct shows up constantly in fashion. Every year, the industry crowns a color of the year and floods the market with pieces built around it. When almost everyone else defaults to dull tones, leaning into color on purpose becomes an easy way to build a distinct identity.
If you are trying to figure out how to carve out your own unique space when everyone else is blindly following the same trends I highly recommend reading Stop Chasing Marketing Hacks And Start Improving Your Core Value. It explains why leaning into your own distinct identity is always the most powerful strategy you can choose in a increasingly standardized world.
More than anything, ask yourself how much physical color you actually need to feel satisfied day to day. Rather than blindly copying whatever palette everyone else has settled on, try paying attention to your own reactions. Notice which colors genuinely energize you and which ones bring you peace. Build your own judgment from that, and you end up with a daily life that actually feels like yours.
For me, it is still that warm, saturated film glow I keep chasing in my own thumbnails. What color actually moves you?
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