I’m walking down a rural road near my house at dusk, cresting a hill to see a beautiful sunset. The sky is bleeding—reds and purples melting into one another, the heavens lit like some impressionist painting. In the presence of so much fiery color, of a once-passively-blue sky turned to crimson spectacle, I melt away from myself. I suddenly feel intensely small.
Writers have long stretched language to its limits when trying to describe truly gorgeous sunsets, and I understand why—they seem to have some essence that escapes language, some magic spell that freezes us in place beyond our power to understand or explain.
After that wondrous pause, I pull out my phone to take a picture, and open Instagram to post it on my story—but I stop. "Do I really want to be one of those people?" I feel the need to qualify the picture with some sort of self-aware "not to be the person who posts sunset pictures on their story, but…" I think about it—and eventually put my phone back in my pocket. More anxious than before, I try to shrug it off and walk the rest of the way home.
It’s hard to deny the inherent beauty of a sunset—to resist its paralyzing pull into a moment of intense aesthetic contemplation. But there’s something cliché about it—a sunset, after all, is such a basic source of beauty. Even the start of this essay—the story of walking up a hill to be amazed by the setting sun—is incredibly overdone. Basking in such a common beauty feels too self-indulgent, as does commemorating it publicly. The moment of frozen wonder is over, and I’m left trying to interpret its meaning after-the-fact.
But dismissing something as cliché feels like an excuse to not be earnest. In a world that encourages and rewards a sort of jaded, semi-ironic detachment from life, hiding behind that critique is a way of distracting oneself from the intensity of reveling in beauty. Once I start contemplating whether to post that sunset to Instagram, none of my thoughts had to do with the photo itself anymore. Instead, they were all about me and how I'm perceived—the sort of anxious self-critique that social media almost explicitly encourages. There's also the obvious problem: that in the presence of such wonder, I quickly turned to my phone, breaking the spell in a vain effort to capture it digitally—the kind of thing often lamented as evidence of society's moral decay.
True beauty, though, requires a level of vulnerability. To revel in the sunset, to allow yourself to be taken out of your body and into the experience, you have to make yourself truly open to it, and that's impossible when you dismiss everything as cliché just to hide from it. In large-scale social situations like social media, acknowledging true, awe-inspiring beauty feels like an admission of guilt: “hi guys, i wanted to let you know that i saw a sunset that broke open something in me. i'm not actually the coolly unbothered person I pretend to be—i feel things genuinely and deeply.” Earnestness necessarily pulls us out of the personas we craft, and when we've gotten used to living life though those personas, that prospect is terrifying.
We can go on as we are, living in these meta-ironic, aloof shells. But we're missing something if we feel held back from sharing those moments of awe—or, even worse, stopped from experiencing them in the first place. There's a profound joy in those sublime moments—whether they're found on a rural road at dusk, a mountainside trail, in a turn of phrase, or with the people we love.
If real beauty is found in these moments of timeless awe, we need to treasure them at whatever cost—however uncomfortable they make us feel, whatever molded personalities they shatter. A life lived with permanent jaded sunglasses is one stripped of the peaks of human emotion—and one, therefore, that misses out on so many wonders of the human experience. We need to let ourselves be broken apart by those serendipitous moments of beauty—no matter how cliché, no matter how uncomfortable. Once you make yourself truly vulnerable to the sunset, you open yourself to the possibility of a life more fully lived—a life marked by, and in pursuit of, sublime moments of awe-inspired joy.