The Ugliest Generation
It is the year 2050. There are still no hover cars, no teleportation devices, no mars colony. Cell phones appear in the palm of your hand and you take calls on a hologram screen that opens in front of your face from a small attachment placed on your temple. Aside from that things are pretty much the same. Except for people’s faces. Those have changed dramatically. Social media use peaked in the 2020s and filter addiction caused by Snapchat and Instagram sparked a massive rise in plastic surgery and specialized exercise regimes. Troves of young men and women sought to make their noses perfectly symmetrical. Their skin smooth and wrinkle-free. They demanded large full lips and arched eyebrows. Rates of face and body dysmorphia soared among young and eventually, both parents and insurance companies caved to the intense pressures to give the youth the faces they “deserved”. Many of the cosmetic procedures were done at no cost, deemed “emotionally necessary”.
Many tragedies occurred as a result of these procedures. Too small noses blocked normal respiratory function. Causing disorders of the lungs and heart. Over arched eyebrows and excessive botox caused irreversible damages to the nerves in the face leading to impaired emotional expression. Skin stretched too tight removed the ability to cry or frown, which it turns out, are extremely important for the human condition. New mental illnesses arrived as a result. Post plastic surgery depression and anxiety were common. To combat this wave of mental distress mood stabilizers, sedatives, and uppers became available without prescriptions at most stores.
While the mental illnesses and substance abuse problems were distressing to be sure. The most disturbing phenomena to occur has been the children born to individuals with filter dysmorphia. New dating apps were developed with special facial/body scanning technology. These prevented catfishing and allowed you to see what a person actually looked like in hologram form. Meaningful conversation among app users was discouraged in favor of action expression bodmojis. Intelligent conversation was reserved for the less attractive and was considered burdensome to the beautiful.
The dating apps led to many marriages between the extremely attractive. Weddings were often extravagant and the guest list was usually limited to those with verified social media accounts. Of course, getting a verified social media account was no longer difficult. You simply need to pay the annual $10,000 fee, but it still served as a useful status marker.
While marriages between the very beautiful were often unhappy and dull it was well known at the time that children get a remarkable amount of attention on social media. So babies continued to be born. At the time luxury birth was done surgically and under the influence of heavy medication. If you were wealthy enough it was recommended that you hire a less attractive surrogate. Surrogacy became an essential business and many unattractive women were recruited for the uncomfortable experience of pregnancy, paid large sums of money, and urged to endure the discomfort without any drug use.
Discomfort in nearly any form was deemed “absolute oppression” by the Social Interests for All Act. Because of this, new passive exercise technology has been developed. For several thousand dollars you can ingest a sedative and be placed in a machine several times weekly for a full bodybuilding experience. Pain relievers are provided after the experience to ensure no soreness occurs.
Early experiments in allowing the beautiful to raise their own children resulted in near paraplegic and cognitively disabled children who were confined to small spaces because their clumsiness and crying could not be tolerated. Tragically many of these children ended up abandoned or in orphanages.
Once it was settled that the beautiful needed to outsource their caregiving duties children began developing normally. For the most part. The children born to the beautiful while mostly physically and cognitively healthy were, unfortunately, grossly hideous.
This was, ironically, the result of individuals pairing solely for attractiveness. At the time most of what was viewed as attractive was created on an operating table or in a passive exercise machine. So although parents are stunning their children often arrived with their previous large noses, undersized chins, and caterpillar eyebrows. These disproportionate features, small mouths, and weak jaws caused deformities and difficulty breathing. Often rendering the children weak and sickly.
Because the children were so unsightly and most of social media popularity was built around the way people looked, many of the ugly youth rejected using it. Technology was still used and video games and avatars were hugely popular. More popular still was nature. The ugliest generation found great comfort in the asymmetries and rough surfaces of the natural world. Crooked tree branches, mangled cliff faces, the blurred rocks beneath the stream. This, they deemed, was the real beauty. These were things to be protected and revered. In fact, the ugliest generation made the greatest nature conservation efforts since Teddy Roosevelt.
Another surprising cultural shift that occurred was artistic. In the 2020s low information, sexually charged, mumble pop/rap topped the charts. Videos filled with the beautiful dancing seductively at exclusive clubs filled the discover page of every platform. Because the ugly had no interest in twerking for the entertainment of others (and others had no interest in seeing it) that music began to be replaced.
Complex neoclassical jazz, symphonic music with sounds of nature looped, poetic, and grammatically complex lyrics about love and sorrow began to appear with the accompaniment of prodigy-level instrumentalists. Of which there were many. The ugliest generation has a remarkable amount of art aficionados. Creating visual, literary, and musical art is not at all impacted by the way one looks.
In fact, it is a widely accepted truth now that physical beauty inhibits one’s artistic sensibilities.
The ugliest generation, not being able to rest on the way they look for admiration, began laying the foundation for a renaissance. A return to the real and substantive. Debates and round tables for philosophical discussion replaced weekly happy hours. Art galleries and symphonies sold-out shows. Drive through botox clinics, passive exercise machines, and sedatives sales continue to dwindle. The filter industry is at an all-time low. Youtubers and influencers are now widely mocked for their lack of meaningful contribution to society. Now culture values most creative endeavors and philanthropic causes.
All thanks to the ugliest generation to ever live.
